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, August 4, 2014

Wordsworth footnote:

I almost did not write the last post, because the first time I read those lines from Wordsworth’s Prelude, I misread them.

At first, I thought he was making the trivial point that he had seen things differently when he was younger. But rereading, I realized that he was not making that trivial point.

Rather, he is saying that, now, as an adult, he is subjectively aware of two distinct, conscious Beings within him, one of which originated in, and relates to, his childhood; in other words, a child-aged alternate personality (the most common kind of alternate personality, because multiple personality starts in childhood).

Multiple consciousness—each with its own sense of “I”—is the essence of multiple personality. And that is what Wordsworth is describing.

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