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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Monday, December 28, 2015

Harold Pinter, Nobel Prize playwright, says he often does not recognize himself when he looks in the mirror: a textbook sign of multiple personality.

From the Paris Review interview in Issue 39, 1966:

INTERVIEWER: Why wasn’t there a character representing you in the play?

PINTER: I had—I have—nothing to say about myself, directly. I wouldn’t know where to begin. Particularly since I often look at myself in the mirror and say, Who the hell’s that?

INTERVIEWER: And you don’t think being represented as a character on stage would help you find out?

PINTER: No.

The interviewer probably thought that Pinter was being evasive. And he was. But why? Why didn’t Pinter like to talk about himself?

Pinter explains that he has a problem with his own sense of identity, epitomized and illustrated by the fact that he often doesn’t recognize himself when he looks in the mirror.

Unfortunately, the interviewer didn’t know that such a thing is possible. He thought Pinter was just being difficult.

But the fact is that looking in the mirror and not recognizing yourself is a textbook sign of multiple personality. It happens in two ways. First, the regular “host” personality may look in the mirror and see the image of one of the alternate personalities. Second, an alternate personality (who has his own self-image) may look in the mirror and see the host personality.

To read how the multiple personality of other writers has been reflected in mirrors, search “mirror” and “mirrors” in this blog.
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