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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Friday, January 15, 2016

New York Times review of Maria Konnikova’s Confidence Game fails to mention Herman Melville’s Confidence-Man and Thomas Mann’s Confidence Man

Today’s book review by Jennifer Senior fails to mention those two novels. This reflects a deficiency in the book under review, which cites Melville’s novel only in passing and does not even mention Mann’s Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, both of which are discussed in this blog.

The aspect of the confidence game that these novels highlight is the confidence that the con man must have in his game: When the identity of the con man is a prime issue in the con, nothing can make the con man more convincing than his having an alternate personality who honestly believes that the false identity is true.

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