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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Monday, January 12, 2015

Either What I Say Can’t Be True—about Novelists, Creative Writing, Psychiatry, and Multiple Personality—Or It Has Been Known Since Plato and Euripides

The foremost experts in multiple personality—those psychiatrists and psychologists who have specialized in the study and treatment of multiple personality, and have published books about it—do not recognize what I call “normal multiple personality” in novelists or anyone else. And if what I say is true, how could they have missed it?

Many of the novelists and novels discussed in this blog have been studied by groups and networks of eminent scholars. Indeed, much of this blog consists of quotations from their essays and books. So how can I come along and say that multiple personality is involved, if they don’t agree and are not convinced?

But suppose my ideas were to catch on and become popular. I would get credit for only a few minutes. Then everyone would remember all the psychologists, psychiatrists, philosophers, and fiction writers who have been saying the same things—or at least things consistent with what I've been saying—since antiquity (search “Plato and Euripides,” for my post of June 28, 2014).
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