Moods, Roles, Multiculturalism, Multilingualism, Multiple Personality Disorder, Normal Multiple Personality, and the Magical Multiplicity of Art.

Moods: Different facets of your one and only personality are brought out by different moods.

Roles: Different facets of your one and only personality are brought out by different situations and people.

Multiculturalism: Your parents or other important people in your life are from different cultures, and/or you have lived in more than one place or culture. Different facets of your one and only personality are brought out by whichever culture is being emphasized.

Multilingualism: There is a saying attributed to Charlemagne: “To have a second language is to possess a second soul.” That is an exaggeration. Most multilingual people have only one personality. Different facets of that single personality are brought out by whichever language they are using.

In moods, roles, multiculturalism, and multilingualism, per se, you feel like one person (however variable and multifaceted that one person may be). You experience only one “I.” You have only one memory bank: When speaking one language, you remember everything you said, did, and thought when you were speaking your other language.

Multiple Personality

You can have moods, roles, multiculturalism, and multilingualism without having multiple personality, but multiple personality can include the others: Various alternate personalities may have their characteristic moods, roles, cultural interests, and even languages.

In multiple personality, you have the subjective experience of having more than one “I,” of having more than one thinker with a mind of its own. This is psychological (you are not possessed).

Some personalities are well aware of each other. But in clear-cut multiple personality, there is at least one personality—classically, the regular or “host” personality—who is not aware of an alternate personality. The host may be only vaguely aware of having had occasional memory gaps (for the periods of time that the alternate personality was in control).

Most people with multiple personality are not diagnosed, because the host personality often does not know about it, while the alternate personalities go about their business incognito. Once recognized or diagnosed—once their cover is blown, so to speak—the alternate personalities may be quite obvious and talkative, but they would have preferred to remain secret. And so, if you then ignore them, they are only too happy to resume their activities in secret and incognito.

Most multiple personality in novelists is not diagnosed for two reasons: 1. the known alternate personalities are not called alternate personalities, but instead are called narrative voices, muses, shadows, characters, etc.. and 2. the regular or host personality may have amnesia for other narrative personalities, evidence for which may be found in some novelists’ unedited journals.

Multiple personality can be either normal multiple personality or multiple personality disorder. The former is not a mental illness, and can even be an asset; for example, in writing novels. Multiple personality disorder is a mental illness in that it causes the person distress and/or dysfunction, but it is not a psychosis, has nothing to do with schizophrenia, and is treatable by psychotherapy to help the personalities integrate or cooperate with each other.

Novelists, who have normal multiple personality, have good cooperation among their alternate personalities. The writing, in giving the alternate personalities a forum to express themselves, and in fostering cooperation, is therapeutic. But exactly how all this works is unknown, even to the writer. It is the magical multiplicity of art.