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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— 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 Normal Multiple Personality, and How Alternate Personalities Can Come Forth With “Lost” Memories

“Marcel spoke about 'the different persons of whom I am composed.' Proust had already begun developing his concept of multiple selves” (1, pp. 73-74).

“At the beginning of the twentieth century, literature began giving subtler descriptions of the many facets of human personality, of their interplay, and the polypsychic structure of the human mind, as seen in the works of Pirandello, Joyce, Italo Svevo, Lenormand, Virginia Woolf, and above all in those of Marcel Proust…In a well-known description, the narrator told how, after being informed of the death of a woman, Albertine, the news was being understood successively by various parts of the personality…certain past egos may suddenly reappear, bringing forth a revival of the past. It is then one of our past egos that is in the foreground, living for us” (2, p. 167).

1. William C. Carter. Marcel Proust: A Life. New Haven, Yale University Press, 2000.
2. Henri F. Ellenberger. The Discovery of the Unconscious. New York, Basic Books, 1970.
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