Is there a non-traumatic, story-telling pathway to multiple personality? Or have all novelists (with their normal version of multiple personality) had childhood trauma?

Conventional wisdom is that multiple personality is a way to cope with childhood trauma, if the child happens to have been born with a sufficient ability to use the psychological defense of dissociation (an ability which is relatively common in children, as indicated by such normal phenomena as imaginary companions).

Whether a person’s multiple personality is a mental illness (i.e., it causes distress and dysfunction) or the normal version (an asset, which most novelists have) would depend on the how early and severe the trauma, whether there were supportive adults to help deal with the trauma, and whether there were other helpful things (like writing).

Since there has been trauma throughout history, it makes sense that there has always been a way to cope with it.

However, another thing that people have needed throughout history is story-telling. Before the written word, when stories were spoken, the best story-tellers would have been those who could virtually become each character as each one spoke. And the same is true for the process of writing characters.

So if things exist because they are useful, I can conceive of a nontraumatic, story-telling pathway to multiple personality. Plausibility does not make it true, but my mind is open.