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.

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Wednesday, August 17, 2016

One more study finds that multiple personality is rooted in traumatic experiences in childhood, not suggestibility or proneness to fantasy.


What are the implications of multiple personality’s roots in childhood?

One thing it explains is why most adults with multiple personality have child-aged alternate personalities (in addition to their adult-aged alternate personalities).

In my recent posts on James Patterson’s Along Came a Spider, which features an adult villain suspected of having multiple personality, I noted evidence of the author’s inadequate research on multiple personality: His characters call it a psychosis, when minimal research would have informed Patterson that multiple personality is not a psychosis.

However, Patterson’s portrayal of the villain as having, at times, a childlike, evil-boy persona, and as somehow being related to a twelve-year-old criminal from the past, demonstrated the author’s insight that multiple personality has its roots in childhood. But since Patterson had done poor research on multiple personality, how did he come to have that insight? Personal knowledge?

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