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, August 2, 2014

Shakespeare’s Hamlet says Multiple Personality is the Madness that Makes Sense, and a Mirror to the Writer’s Mind

In this fourth post on Hamlet, I reflect on its two main lessons for this blog.

“Madness” that Makes Sense

Prince Hamlet called him a tedious old fool, because he hadn’t heard Polonius’s perceptive comment: “Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.” Which means that If you look beyond multiple personality’s apparent craziness, it makes sense.

For example, what could seem crazier than when Hamlet’s mother realized (Act 3, Scene 4) that he was seeing and hearing someone who wasn’t there? Yet, if she had known what the voice was saying, she would have found it rational and compassionate (at least toward her).

And if Hamlet’s multiple personality was typical, it would have made even more sense to her if she had interviewed the alternate personality and traced its history back to his childhood, where it originated as a sensible way for Hamlet to cope with a traumatic situation. (I know about typical multiple personality from clinical experience with real people.)

Mirror to the Writer’s Mind

How did Shakespeare come to write a character like Hamlet who had multiple personality?

He certainly didn’t get it from reading Sybil or seeing the movie.

 I can’t think of any way other than his personal familiarity with it—he had multiple personality—especially in view of all the other great writers discussed in this blog who had it, too.
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