Novelists' Multiple Personality TRAIT: Key to Creativity

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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Saturday, July 26, 2014

The Madness of Art (1): Normal Child’s Mind, Normal Novelist’s Mind, and Normal Multiple Personality

To summarize prior posts:

The Child’s Mind (2)

—imaginary companions

—imaginary identities

—paracosm

The Novelist’s Mind

—interaction with autonomous characters

—becoming or impersonating characters

—creation of imaginary worlds

Normal Multiple Personality

—autonomous personalities interact

—switching to another personality

—the complex inner world where personalities live when they are not “out.”

What we accept as normal in a child—because children often don’t hide it—may, superficially, look like madness in an adult.

1. famous phrase of the novelist, Henry James

2. Marjorie Taylor. Imaginary Companions and the Children Who Create Them. New York, Oxford University Press, 1999.