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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Saturday, September 13, 2014

Anne Rice, Rene Descartes, The Essence of Personhood, a Novelist’s Characters, and Multiple Personality

If you went to a wax museum, where they have statues that look like famous people, you wouldn’t confuse those statues with the real people, because the essence of people is not their physical appearance, but their thoughts, feelings, and memories.

Or think of stories and movies based on the fantasy of two people who exchange bodies. We consider the person to be where their personality is, not where their usual body is.

As Rene Descartes famously said, “I think, therefore I am.” Not, I have a body, therefore I am.

My point has to do with the last post in which the novelist Anne Rice explained how she used pseudonyms only as long as she had more than one personality who wanted to publish.

She stopped using her two pseudonyms, she explained, because her thinking, memory, etc., was no longer split into three personalities. Now her Anne Rice self knew things that had previously been known only by her two other selves.

Thus, multiple personality, even though there is only one body, is not just some abstract metaphor. It deals with the practical essence of personhood. The different personalities differ from each other, and from the person’s regular self, in the essence of what makes a person a person: their autonomous and unique thoughts, feelings, and memories.

That is why I have previously said that when novelists experience the autonomy (in thought, feeling, memory) of their characters—that their characters have minds of their own—it is the essence of multiple personality.
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