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.

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Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Mark Twain Had Both Excellent Memory and Absent-Mindedness: A Common Combination in Multiple Personality (Dissociative Identity)

In previous posts (Dec. 1, 6, 7, 2013), I argued that Mark Twain had multiple personality. And I highlighted the issue of memory gaps, which is a key clue to multiple personality, since one personality may have amnesia for the periods of time that other personalities were out.

One way a memory gap can manifest itself is that the person does not remember something that you would expect him to remember, because that knowledge is known by a different personality than the personality who is out at the time. When this happens, if you don’t think of multiple personality, you are likely to shrug off this memory lapse as absent-mindedness.

For example, in Papa: An Intimate Biography of Mark Twain by his thirteen-year-old daughter Susy Clemens (Doubleday, 1985), she says, “He is the loveliest man I ever saw, or ever hope to see, and oh so absent minded!”

Meanwhile, Twain was also known for his excellent memory. As Ron Powers tells us in Mark Twain: A Life (New York, Free Press, 2005), Twain had powers of memory that were “legendary” and “prodigious.”

The following dramatic incident is from Albert Bigelow Paine’s Mark Twain: A Biography, Volume 2, Chapter CXXVIII. The chapter is titled:

“Mark Twain’s Absent-Mindedness”

“…By no means was Mark Twain’s absent-mindedness a development of old age. On the [occasion] following he was in the very heyday of his mental strength…One day [he] set out to invite F. G. Whitmore over for a game of billiards. Whitmore lived only a little way down the street, and Clemens had been there time and again. It was such a brief distance that he started out in his slippers and with no hat. But when he reached the corner where the house…was in plain view he stopped. He did not recognize it…He stood there uncertainly a little while, then returned [home] and got the coachman…to show him the way.”

Evidently, the personality who played billiards was not the same personality who knew the way to Whitmore’s house.
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