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.

Monday, May 19, 2014

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “Dialogue with the Mirror”: A Multiple Personality Story

The connection between mirrors and multiple personality is well known.

In literature, there is Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson.”

In psychiatry, the connection is so well known that it has been used as the title of a book about multiple personality: The Stranger in the Mirror by Marlene Steinberg MD and Maxine Schnall (Harper, 2000).

The reason for the connection between mirrors and multiple personality is that each of the various personalities has a different self-image. So if the personality who happens to be looking in a mirror has a self-image that is different from the person’s actual appearance, he won’t recognize himself. He will see a stranger in the mirror.

That is the situation in Marquez’s short story. The man who has been shaving sees blood on the face in the mirror, but not on his own face. “There were no wounds on his skin, but there in the mirror the other one was bleeding slightly.”

That is not Magical Realism. It is multiple personality.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Collected Stories. New York, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 1999.

Added March 16, 2021: In addition to what I said above, the host (regular) personality of a person with multiple personality may see, in a mirror, alternate personalities that look nothing like the regular personality. Search "mirror" and "mirrors" to see various posts on this subject.

Also search "magical realism," which is often not a literary technique, but a description of the fiction writer's actual experiences, because one or another of the writer's alternate personalities has a fanciful view of reality (which may be useful for writing fiction). But since the host personality, and most alternate personalities have an objective view of reality, multiple personality is not a psychosis.
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