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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Friday, July 29, 2016

David Brooks in New York Times says Trump (post 7) “haunted by multiple personality disorders.”  Multiple Personality disorders, or multiple  Personality Disorders?

Brooks says that Donald Trump “is a morally untethered, spiritually vacuous man who appears haunted by multiple personality disorders” (Op-Ed, July, 29, 2016).

Brooks does not read this blog. He is not a psychiatrist. And he may not distinguish between multiple personality (a dissociative disorder) and the completely separate diagnostic category of personality disorders (paranoid, schizoid, schizotypal, antisocial, borderline, histrionic, narcissistic, avoidant, dependent, obsessive-compulsive).

Ordinarily, since most people do not think of multiple personality, I would assume that Brooks means Trump has more than one Personality Disorder.

However, Brooks’ use of the word “haunted” raises the possibility that he does mean multiple personality, since, in the popular mind, multiple personality is often thought of as being possessed.
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