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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Monday, February 24, 2014

Definition of Multiple Personality (aka Dissociative Identity or Multiple Identity) for Nonpsychiatric Purposes

1. A person has more than one sense of identity or personhood; that is, they have more than one “I”: Ia and Ib (the alternate personality). What gives Ia and Ib their separate senses of identity?

2. Ia and Ib think and act independently and differently. Sometimes Ia is in control. Sometime Ib is in control. For example, they can have a conversation. Sometimes Ia speaks and Ib listens. Sometimes the reverse. They may have different opinions, attitudes, moods, and self-images (as to age, height, sex, etc.).

3. They have separate memory banks. At least one of them will have known and remembered things that the other one hadn't. For example, Ib may tell Ia a story of events that Ia hadn’t known about or remembered. That is, Ia had had amnesia, a memory gap, for the events (real or imagined) that Ib had remembered or imagined.

All the above may be fulfilled when a novelist has a character or another narrator with a mind of its own.

Does Ib, the alternate personality, have to come out and interact with other people? No. It doesn’t have to. Or it may do so rarely. And even if it does so frequently, other people usually don’t realize it, because alternate personalities generally prefer to remain incognito as far as outsiders (people other than Ia) are concerned.

The essential difference between normal multiple personality (which many novelists have) and multiple personality disorder (the mental illness) is that the latter causes the person a significant amount of distress and/or dysfunction. In contrast, some people with normal multiple personality can be very high-functioning, even winning the Nobel Prize.
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