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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Sunday, January 24, 2016

The Philosopher’s Pupil (post 2) by Iris Murdoch (post 4): Both Kirkus Reviews and NY Times quoted “justified sinner” passage, but missed multiple personality.

Times: “But the narrator warns us early that people ‘are in fact more randomly made, more full of rough contingent rubble, than art or vulgar psychoanalysis leads us to imagine’ “ (1).

Kirkus: “George, Rozanov’s former irritating pupil, hounds Olympus for salvation as a ‘justified sinner’ " (2)

Both reviews quoted from the same passage that I did in yesterday’s post, so the passage was, evidently, noticed and memorable. But neither review understood the reference to James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner and multiple personality.

1. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, Books of the Times, The Philosopher’s Pupil, June 29, 1983: http://www.nytimes.com/1983/06/29/books/books-of-the-times-books-of-the-times.html
2. Kirkus Reviews The Philosopher’s Pupil 1983: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/iris-murdoch-2/the-philosophers-pupil/
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