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.

— Share site with friends.

Saturday, February 1, 2014

Why Members of the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (ISSTD)—Multiple Personality Experts—Avoid This Blog

The ISSTD is the principal organization for mental health professionals who treat and study dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality disorder). Its members do not read this blog, because this blog is about normal multiple personality, which is not a psychiatric disorder. Dissociative identity disorder is in the psychiatric diagnostic manual (DSM-5); normal multiple personality is not. So this blog is beyond their scope.

If members of the ISSTD ever did see this blog, I think they would take a dim view of it. For any talk of normal multiple personality would remind them of one of the favorite attacks of skeptics. Skeptics like to derisively say that, in a sense, everyone has multiple personality: the psychiatric disorder is just a foolish, gullible, mistaken reification of normal psychology. And ISSTD members would not want to admit that anything the skeptics say is even half right.

Now, the skeptics are wrong about multiple personality disorder. This disorder is actually one of the oldest, most clearly defined, best proven disorders in the diagnostic manual. And it is certainly not true that everyone has multiple personality. Nevertheless, it is true that a substantial minority of the general public does have what I call normal multiple personality: a version of multiple personality that 1. is too common to call an illness, 2. does not cause significant distress or dysfunction, and 3. may be an asset (e.g., in writing novels).

So while most professors of literature avoid this blog—they think it’s preposterous and, anyway, beyond their expertise—most of those mental health professionals who do have expertise with multiple personality disorder avoid this blog, too. They would fear that it could inadvertently support the skeptics. And besides, most multiple personality experts have never studied literature in this regard, and so they, like the literature professors, would see this interdisciplinary blog as going beyond their scope.

Which leaves me with a very select readership.

I wouldn’t want to exaggerate how select. You are not alone. This blog is read by people from more than thirty countries. But in absolute numbers of serious readers? How many people in this whole world are as open-minded and perceptive as you?
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