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, December 6, 2014

Glossary of Types of Persons: Singles, Individuals, Dividuals, Dissociatives, and Multiples

[Note: Search "host personality" to see a more useful glossary.]

Singles: In the multiple personality literature, persons who have one, and only one, “I” (personality, identity, self). This one “I” plays all the person’s various roles in life and experiences all the person’s various moods. People without multiple personality are referred to as “singles” or “singletons.”

Individuals: In common usage, an individual is a single person (as opposed to a group of people), or a person who is undivided.

Dividuals: A dividual—in anthropological or religious literature—is a person who has a divided sense of personhood. Most dictionaries omit the word or label it as being archaic and not in general use.

Dissociatives: An occasionally used, informal term for persons with one of the psychiatric dissociative disorders; for example, dissociative identity disorder (the official DSM-5 diagnostic manual term for what was formerly called multiple personality disorder).

Multiples: The most common term for persons with multiple personality. A person with multiple personality is “a multiple.”

 NOTE: This blog distinguishes between multiple personality disorder (a mental illness affecting about 1.5% of the general population) and normal multiple personality (the kind of multiple personality that is estimated to be present in 90% of novelists and 30% of the general population).
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