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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Saturday, August 13, 2016

Professors of Literature who understand importance of Multiple Personality in Literary Criticism: Jeremy Hawthorn, Katia Mitova, Heike Schwarz.

We may not agree on everything, but I honor and commend their psychiatric literacy, and hope that other scholars follow their example.

Jeremy Hawthorn. Multiple Personality and the Disintegration of Literary Character: From Oliver Goldsmith to Sylvia Plath. New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1983.

Katia Mitova. “Artistic Creativity as a ‘Multiple Personality Order’: The Case of Fernando Pessoa.” https://brill.com/view/book/edcoll/9781848882034/BP000016.xml

Heike Schwarz. Beware of the Other Side(s): Multiple Personality Disorder and Dissociative Identity Disorder in American Fiction. Transcript-Verlag, 2013.

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