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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Friday, December 19, 2014

Can you tell a book by its title? Does the title of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time say what it is about? Is it about “losing time”: Amnesia?

“In Search of Lost Time” is a very peculiar title, because people usually refer to things that they don’t remember as things that they have forgotten.

“Losing time” is something else entirely.

People speak of “losing time” when their lack of memory goes beyond normal, ordinary forgetting. It is a way of saying that they have amnesia, because there is something that they should be able to remember, but they don’t.

Is “In Search of Lost Time” about someone who is trying to overcome amnesia? And if so, what is the medical or psychiatric cause of his amnesia?

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