BASIC CONCEPTS

— When novelists claim they do not invent it, but hear voices and find stories in their head, they are neither joking nor crazy.

— When characters, narrators, or muses have minds of their own and occasionally take over, they are alternate personalities.

— Alternate personalities and memory gaps, but no significant distress or dysfunction, is a normal version of multiple personality.

— normal Multiple Personality Trait (MPT) (core of Multiple Identity Literary Theory), not clinical Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD)

— The normal version of multiple personality is an asset in fiction writing when some alternate personalities are storytellers.

— Multiple personality originates when imaginative children with normal brains have unassuaged trauma as victim or witness.

— Psychiatrists, whose standard mental status exam fails to ask about memory gaps, think they never see multiple personality.

— They need the clue of memory gaps, because alternate personalities don’t acknowledge their presence until their cover is blown.

— In novels, most multiple personality, per se, is unnoticed, unintentional, and reflects the author’s view of ordinary psychology.

— Multiple personality means one person who has more than one identity and memory bank, not psychosis or possession.

— Euphemisms for alternate personalities include parts, pseudonyms, alter egos, doubles, double consciousness, voice or voices.

— Multiple personality trait: 90% of fiction writers; possibly 30% of public.

— Each time you visit, search "name index" or "subject index," choose another name or subject, and search it.

— If you read only recent posts, you miss most of what this site has to offer.

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Sunday, December 29, 2013

Is it Credible That Charles Dickens or Mark Twain Had Multiple Personality: Is Kenneth A. Nakdimen, M.D., the Writer of This Blog, the World’s Foremost Authority on Anything?

I am certainly not the foremost authority on Dickens, Twain, or any of the other famous novelists I discuss. And if you are a Dickens or Twain scholar, or you are a professor of literature, creative writing, and literary theory, or you are a successful novelist, then you certainly know much more about these things than I do.

Nor am I the world’s foremost expert on multiple personality. In my general psychiatric practice, I have diagnosed and treated literally dozens of patients who had multiple personality. But there are some psychiatrists, who, having specialized in multiple personality, and having seen literally hundreds of such patients, know more about it than I do.

The question is: Do any of the authorities who know more than I do about either literature or multiple personality, know as much as I do about both?

Most literary experts, including those with psychoanalytical interests, have only superficial knowledge of multiple personality. And most psychiatrists—including the relatively few with expertise in multiple personality—have not studied literature or writers with regard to multiple personality.

So although I am not one of the foremost experts in either literature or multiple personality, I am one of the few people in the world who knows enough about both fields to see how one relates to the other.

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