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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Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Dostoevsky declares His Own Inner Duality in a Letter to a Kindred Soul

Letter LXXIII (1, pp. 247-250)
Petersburg, April 11, 1880

To Mlle. N. N.

Much-honored and gracious Lady,

Forgive my having left your beautiful kind letter unanswered for so long; do not regard it as negligence on my part. I wanted to say something very direct and cordial to you, but my life goes by, I vow, in such disorder and hurry that it is only at rare moments that I belong to myself at all…

You write to me of the phase which your mind is just now undergoing. I know that you are an artist—a painter. Permit me to give you a piece of advice which truly comes from my heart: stick to your art, and give yourself up to it even more than hitherto. I know, for I have heard (do not take this ill of me) that you are not happy…There is but one cure, one refuge, for that woe: art, creative activity…

After the letter that you have written, I must necessarily regard you as one dear to me, as a being akin to my soul, as my heart’s sister—how could I fail to feel with you? But now to what you have told me of your inward duality. That trait is indeed common to all…who are not wholly commonplace…It is precisely on this ground that I cannot but regard you as a twin soul, for your inward duality corresponds most exactly to my own. It causes at once great torment, and great delight…

Forgive the untidiness of my letter. If you only knew how I am losing the capacity to write letters, and what a difficulty I find it! But having gained such a friend as you, I don’t wish to lose her in a hurry.

Farewell. Your most devoted and heartfelt friend,

F. Dostoevsky
[1821-1881]

1. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Letters of Fyodor Michailovitch Dostoevsky to his Family and Friends. Translated by Ethel Colburn Mayne with an introduction by Avrahm Yarmolinsky. New York, Horizon Press, 1961.
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