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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Sunday, February 1, 2015

Twenty Textbooks on Literary Theory Fail to Discuss The Theme of the Double as the Literary Metaphor for Multiple Personality

In an online survey of twenty textbooks on literary theory, I searched their texts for any mention of “theme of the double.”

Only one book out of twenty even mentioned the theme of the double. And that book did not connect the theme with multiple personality.

In its section on psychoanalytic literary theory, it discussed Freud’s essay, “The Uncanny,” which certainly does mention the theme of the double. But, in Freudian theory and Freud’s essay, the obvious connection between the theme of the double and multiple personality is completely overlooked. As I have repeatedly pointed out in this blog, Freud’s model of the mind, which posits a single consciousness, cannot account for the existence of even one case of multiple personality, which involves multiple consciousness. And Freud, himself, acknowledged the existence of such cases.

Thus, nineteen out of twenty textbooks on literary theory made no mention whatsoever of the theme of the double. The twentieth textbook did mention it, but not its connection to multiple personality.

Evidently, none of the standard literary theories understands the theme of the double, Dostoevsky’s The Double, and other works with these issues.
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