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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Saturday, February 22, 2014

When novelists such as Dickens and Faulkner talk about their writing process, most professors don’t take them seriously.

Charles Dickens and William Faulkner said that they didn’t invent most of what they wrote. Once their characters came to life, subjectively, they wrote what their characters told them.

But most professors would insist that Dickens and Faulkner were speaking metaphorically or simply joking. After all, they reason, novelists might have their artistic peculiarities, but they are not crazy.

In contrast, when I read Dickens and Faulkner, and they discuss something as important to them as their writing process, I do take them seriously. There are just too many other novelists, for too many years, who have said similar things.

And in my psychiatric opinion, it doesn’t mean that they are crazy. It means that they have a normal, creative, literary type of multiple personality.
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