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, February 2, 2015

Mikhail Bakhtin is the closest that standard literary theory comes to addressing multiple consciousness and multiple personality

In a couple of previous posts, I cited Mikhail Bakhtin on Dostoevsky. You can tell that Bakhtin discusses issues relevant to multiple personality by just looking at the index of his book, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, where you find: “Double (split personality)” and his literary concept about how Dostoevsky was able to write about that, “multi-voicedness” or “polyphony.”

Bakhtin is proposing the theory—without knowing that he is proposing the theory—that split personality is found in literature, because novelists have multiple personality (which is Multiple Identity Literary Theory, the theory of this blog). Bakhtin talks about split personality (an informal term for multiple personality) without actually relating it to multiple personality, per se.

So, I am hereby amending my last post on twenty textbooks of literary theory. They may not discuss the theme of the double directly, but the issue is raised indirectly if they mention Mikhail Bakhtin, which they often do.

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