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.

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Sunday, August 3, 2014

William Wordsworth on his “Two Consciousnesses” and “other Being”

It is natural to believe that everyone has the same sense of self that you do. If you have a single sense of self, then you may suspect that anyone who claims otherwise is joking, lying, or crazy. If you have a multiple sense of self, then you may suspect that anyone who claims otherwise is lying or in denial.

So you might find it interesting to show the following quotation to people you know and get their reactions.

It is from Wordsworth’s The Prelude or, Growth of a Poet's Mind; An Autobiographical Poem, Book Second, School-time (1850 version):

A tranquillising spirit presses now
On my corporeal frame, so wide appears
The vacancy between me and those days
Which yet have such self-presence in my mind,
That musing on them, often do I seem
Two consciousnesses, conscious of myself
And of some other Being.

Wordsworth J, Abrams MH, Gill S (Eds). William Wordsworth The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850: Authoritative Texts, Context and Reception; Recent Critical Essays. New York, WW Norton, 1979.
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