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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Tuesday, June 16, 2015

Lewis Carroll (post 6), Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (post 3): Illustrating three features of multiple personality—amnesia, made behavior, anonymity

Amnesia

“Who are you?” said the Caterpillar.
Alice replied, rather shyly, “I—I hardly know…I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then…I  ca’n’t explain myself, I’m afraid…because I’m not myself…and being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing…I can’t remember things as I used…” (1, p. 47-49).

Different identities have different memory banks, so that any one identity will have memory gaps (amnesia) for the time periods that other, non-coconscious identities were in control.

Made Behavior

“Alice [who was invisible to the tiny King] looked on with great interest as the King…began writing. A sudden thought struck her, and she took hold of the end of the pencil, which came some way over his shoulder, and began writing for him. The poor King looked puzzled and unhappy… ‘My dear! [he said to the Queen]…[the pencil] writes all manner of things I don’t intend…” (1, p. 147).

In multiple personality, it is sometimes possible for one identity, who is behind the scenes, to pull the strings, so to speak, of the identity who is out. This is not only an example of made behavior, but of one-way co-consciousness. The identity behind the scenes is co-conscious with the identity who is out and writing, but the latter is not co-conscious with the former.

Anonymity

“This must be the wood,” [Alice] said thoughtfully to herself, “where things have no names…She was rambling on in this way when she reached the wood…“Then it really has happened, after all! And now, who am I?” (1, pp. 176-177).

In multiple personality, it is common to find that some identities have no name. So, as a practical matter, you and the identity may agree on a name to call them; e.g., if they have an outstanding trait—a characteristic emotion, attitude, interest, talent, etc.—you may use that trait as their nickname.

As was discussed in one of the past posts on Edgar Allan Poe, he had a real-life alternate personality whose name was “No Name.” It sometimes happens that an alternate identity will call itself “Nobody” so that when you inquire as to who was responsible for some particular behavior, the person will reply, “Nobody.”

1. Lewis Carroll. The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition. Introduction and Notes by Martin Gardner. New York, W.W. Norton & Company, 2000.
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