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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Tuesday, August 18, 2015

John Cheever’s Journal: Biographers say that he used multiple names, and referred to himself in the third person, in his journal. Multiple personality?

“…the journal was both a laboratory for fiction and a means of exorcising demons and fine-tuning the work-in-progress known as John Cheever” (1, p. 113).

“In his journal, Cheever often referred to himself in the third person, using alter egos such as ‘Coverly,’ ‘Bierstubbe,’ or ‘Estabrook’ “ (1, p. 220).

“He had a roster of fictional names and personalities that he wove around his family and friends and used in his journals, and more than half a dozen names for himself, or the characters that had originally been based on himself: Toby, Tom, Streeter, Bierstubbe, or Mr. Bierstubbe, to mention just a few” (2, p. 41).

1. Blake Bailey. Cheever: A Life. New York, Vintage Books, 2009.
2. Susan Cheever. Home Before Dark: A Biographical Memoir of John Cheever by His Daughter. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1984.
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