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.

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— If you read only recent posts, you miss most of what this site has to offer.

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Saturday, April 2, 2016

To cope with trauma, protagonist “throws off her very identity,” says Joyce Carol Oates in New York Times Book Review of Edna O’Brien’s Little Red Chairs.

“Initially one of [the evil] Dr. Vlad’s dupes, Fidelma evolves into O’Brien’s most resourceful heroine as she throws off her very identity to live amid the homeless in London and to remake herself by painful degrees (chambermaid, dog kennel worker) into a woman strong enough to help others. In her new awareness she hears stories told by refugees in a homeless shelter…victims of unspeakable horrors…a place that promises ‘We Help Victims Become Heroines.’ ”

One way for people to cope with traumatic experiences is to change their “very identity” by switching personalities (multiple personality). Did Oates or O’Brien, directly or indirectly, have anything like that in mind? I don’t know. But since Oates has been discussed in this blog, I had to ask.

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