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, March 4, 2014

The Hoax about when Dostoevsky met Dickens: Why did people believe it?

For some years, serious people believed the hoax that Dostoevsky and Dickens had had a chance encounter in which, Dostoevsky was said to have later reported, Dickens had confided that “There were two people in him, he told me: one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite. From the one who feels the opposite I make my evil characters, from the one who feels as a man ought to feel I try to live my life. ‘Only two people?’ I [Dostoevsky] asked.” (For a discussion of the hoax, per se, see Eric Naiman’s “When Dickens met Dostoevsky” in The Times Literary Supplement of 10 April 2013.)

Dostoevsky’s alleged punch line—“Only two people?“—is funny, because, in response to Dickens’s confession of having multiple personality, Dostoevsky, rather than expressing surprise, implies that writers like they are would certainly have more than just two personalities.

People believed the hoax, because they agree with this blog, at least subconsciously.
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