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, April 28, 2016

Samuel Langhorne Clemens / Mark Twain: Are his diverse signatures typical of a person with a famous pseudonym or indicative of multiple personality?

Here is a link to twenty of his handwritten letters:

He signed his name in seventeen ways:
 1. Marcus
 2. Mark
 3. Mark Twain
 4. Mark Twain / (SL. Clemens)
 5. Mark Twain / Samuel Langhorne Clemens
 6. Sam
 7. Clemens
 8. SLC
 9. S. L. Clemens
10. Saml. L. C.
11. Saml. L. Clemens
12. Saml. L. Clemens (“Mark Twain”)
13. Saml. L. Clemens (alias) Mark Twain
14. S. L. Clemens Mark Twain
15. Samuel
16. Samuel L. Clemens
17. Y

In multiple personality, handwriting and signatures might vary from one personality to another. Two personalities might use different spellings of the same name. I don’t see anything definitive in the above, but perhaps you are a graphologist or have known famous people with pseudonyms, and are in a better position to judge.

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