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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Sunday, December 27, 2015

Daniel Deronda (post 5) by George Eliot (post 8): Talking “behind your own back” — two minor characters, unknowingly, make a multiple personality joke.

“Oh me, Hans!” said Mab, impatiently, “if you must talk of yourself, let it be behind your own back” (1, p. 727).

To talk behind someone’s back is to say something about them without their knowing about it. This is easy to do when three people are involved: B and C gossip about A when A is not present.

But how can a person talk behind his own back? The only way is for that person to have multiple personality: Personality B, who is well aware of (co-conscious with) Personality A, tells another person something about A, but A does not know what B said, because A is not aware of (co-conscious with) B.

Did George Eliot have the experience of saying things behind her own back? That is, did people tell her that she had told them something about herself that she had no memory of having told them?

1. George Eliot. Daniel Deronda. London, Penguin Books, 1876/2003.
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