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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Wednesday, December 25, 2013

Mark Twain: In Public, a Humorous “Liar”; In Private, “Absent-Minded”; The Inconsistencies and Memory Gaps of Multiple Personality 

In the New York Herald, 16 October 1900, Twain jokes about his relationship with the truth:

“Now, I have lied so much, in a genial, good-natured way, of course, that people won’t believe me when I speak the truth. I may add that I have stopped speaking the truth...I have found that when I speak the truth, I am not believed, and that I have never told a lie so big but that some one had sublime confidence in my veracity. I have, therefore, been forced by fate to adopt fiction as a medium of truth. Most liars lie for the love of the lie; I lie for the love of truth. I disseminate my true views by means of a series of apparently humorous and mendacious stories. If any man can do that, and finds that he can disseminate facts through the medium of falsehood, he should never speak the truth and I don’t.”

Is that clear?

In his private life, as noted in the post of December 10, 2013, his daughter, Susy, and his biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, knew Twain as remarkably “absent-minded.”

In short, his humorous lying was his public cover story for his inconsistencies and memory gaps, signs of multiple personality (see posts of December 6 and 7, 2013).
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