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.

— Share site with friends.

Wednesday, March 2, 2016

Times Book Review essay, “Which Writer’s Journals Are Worth Reading?” quotes Proust, but should have quoted The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates.

In a New York Times Book Review essay, Pankaj Mishra quotes Proust, who said that a book “is the product of a different self from the self we manifest in our habits, in our social life, in our vices.”

Proust is acknowledging that most novelists have multiple personality, but he is not a psychiatrist, so he doesn’t put it those terms. For a discussion of how multiple personality manifests itself in his writing, search Proust in this blog.

The most candid writer’s journal I have found—in regard to multiple personality—is that of Joyce Carol Oates (1). It contains a series of entries that were written by alternate personalities. I quote those entries in my post on Oates: search Oates in this blog.

1. Joyce Carol Oates. The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates 1973-1982. Edited by Greg Johnson. New York, ecco/HarperCollins, 2007.
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