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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Thursday, December 3, 2015

Lee Child postscript: Jack Reacher hears the rational, autonomous voices of his alternate personalities, an example of unintended “gratuitous multiple personality”

Most readers pay no attention to Reacher’s voices, and rightly so, because they are unnecessary to both plot and character development in these Lee Child novels.

There is no indication the author even knows that rational, autonomous voices imply the existence of alternate personalities.

I have had to invent a term for this situation—gratuitous multiple personality—because so many of the novels discussed in this blog have had it, and have had it for no apparent reason other than that it probably reflects the author’s own subjective experience.

For previous discussions, search gratuitous multiple personality in this blog, for a discussion of the issue in only a small fraction of the novels in which I found it to occur.

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