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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Monday, July 7, 2014

Conversations With Eugene O’Neill: His Best Friends are Puzzled

“Interviewing Eugene O’Neill is like extracting testimony from a reluctant witness” (p. xi).

“Even his interviews thus confirm the repeated marks of dual personality observed in O’Neill in other contexts by his later critics and biographers, those irreconcilable character conflicts expressed in such key works as The Great God Brown (a play he consistently tells interviewers is a personal favorite)…” (p. xiv).

O’Neill says, “People do recognize…that every one wears a mask—I don’t mean only one, but thousands of them…I don’t think The Great God Brown had a long run merely because it was a novelty” (p. 112).

George Jean Nathan says, “The way to lose O’Neill’s friendship is to ask him for oral expressions of opinion on anything (if he feels like expressing an opinion, he will write a letter, and a satisfactorily long one)…” (p. 124).
[Is he afraid of what one of the people behind one of the masks might say?]

“My plays are about life as I’ve known it,” says O’Neill (p. 160).

Because his plays include “murder, disease, suicide, insanity, and incest…O’Neill…has gained the reputation of being privately a rather morose fellow. His best friends are not so sure he is. They are not sure he isn’t, however. Nor are they sure that the truth lies somewhere in between. He merely puzzles them.” A friend who has known him for twenty-five years says, “His face is a mask. I don’t know what goes on behind it, and I don’t think anyone else does.” Another friend says, “We’ll be talking, and he’ll go into one of those long, staring silences of his” (p. 224).

Mark W. Estrin (Ed.). Conversations with Eugene O’Neill. University Press of Mississippi, 1990.

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