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 20, 2014

Marcel Proust’s Concept of “Involuntary Memory”: What did he mean when he said that some of his memories felt involuntary?

Proust is often credited with coining the term “involuntary memory,” although he may have gotten the idea from the doctor who treated him when he was once hospitalized:
http://www.biusante.parisdescartes.fr/chn/docpdf/walusinskimemory.pdf

The term “involuntary memory” makes me think of two senses in which memories could feel involuntary: first, the posttraumatic flashback, in which the memory feels like your own past experience, but it is intrusive and frightening, and second, a memory that does not feel like your own memory—it feels like it belongs to another self, who had had the original experience, and is now remembering it for your benefit.

Keeping in mind Proust’s concept of multiple selves (see previous post), he may have mostly meant involuntary memory of the second kind.
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