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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Tuesday, December 24, 2013

One of Mark Twain’s Other Identities is Interviewed a Month Later

Yesterday’s post was about an interview of Mark Twain in August 1895. In that interview, he spoke as one who was intimately familiar with the writing and subject matter of his books.

The following month, in “A Chat with Mark Twain” in the Sunday Times of Sydney, Australia on 22 September 1895, it says that the interview inevitably turned to the question of whether Twain had any favorite among his books. Twain replied:

“No, I don’t think that I have, because I haven’t read them—that is, I mean, most of them were written so long ago that I have now only a vague notion of what is in them.”

After a pause he added: “I think I prefer Huckleberry Finn, but I believe the family prefer The Prince and the Pauper.”

 Of course, I know that many readers will insist that Twain was simply joking. However, I have experience interviewing people who have multiple personality. They are experts at covering up for their inability to recall things that they should recall but don't (because that information is known to another personality). They change the subject or make a joke of it so that you are distracted or feel foolish for pursuing the issue.
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