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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Wednesday, March 5, 2014

William James, Multiple Personality, and The Varieties of Religious Experience: Its Historical and Intellectual Context

In my post of December 26, 2013, I discussed William James’s conclusion that the psychological basis of religious experience was the same as the psychological basis for multiple personality: the mind’s capacity for multiple consciousness (in contrast to the erroneous Freudian psychoanalytic model of the conscious/unconscious).

If you want to know more about it, I recommend Ann Taves, a professor of religious studies who has a special interest in cognitive science:

Taves, Ann: “The Fragmentation of Consciousness and The Varieties of Religious Experience: William James’s Contribution to a Theory of Religion,” Chapter 3, pages 48-72, in William James and a Science of Religions: Reexperiencing The Varieties of Religious Experience, edited by Wayne Proudfoot. New York, Columbia University Press, 2004.
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