Ulterior motive of Novelists use Normal Version of Multiple Personality. Psychiatrist meddles in literary criticism to present new view of normal psychology.

First, since childhood, I had always wanted to write a great novel, which was why I specialized in psychiatry, since I thought that understanding people would help me to write great characters. But I had never been able to understand how novelists could do what they did.

Second, although my psychiatric training had led me to expect that I would never see a case of multiple personality, and, for my first twelve years as a psychiatrist, I never did see even one case (so I thought), I eventually did learn how to recognize this camouflaged condition, and I gained clinical experience with it.

Third, once I knew about multiple personality, I eventually recognized that, when novelists, in published interviews, said that their characters had minds of their own, these novelists weren’t speaking metaphorically or joking. They were describing the essence of multiple personality as found in their own personal experience.

Fourth, since, bad jokes aside, novelists are neither freaks of nature nor mentally ill, it must be the case that a surprisingly large minority of the general public has a normal version of multiple personality, and that some of these people have found their way to an occupation like fiction writing, for which it is a major asset. I estimate that upwards of 90% of novelists have it, but that so do perhaps 30% of everyone else.

Fifth, this warrants a revised view of normal psychology. It means that imaginary companions in childhood are not just a cute phase, but a window on how many normal minds work. It means that, just as many people have some anxiety, but relatively few have an anxiety mental disorder, many people have multiple personality, but relatively few have multiple personality disorder (also known as dissociative identity disorder).

Thus, the ulterior motive behind this blog and its Multiple Identity Literary Theory—the theory that novelists have and use a normal version of multiple personality—is to present a new view of normal psychology.

Of course, the ideas that people have “multiplicity” or “subpersonalities” are not new. But those views tend to assume that everyone has multiplicity or subpersonalities, and that it is something quite distinct from the supposedly rare mental illness, multiple personality.

In contrast, I don’t think that everyone has a normal version of multiple personality. And I think that those who do have it have the same thing that people who are mentally ill have, except that they deal with it in a way that does not cause them distress or dysfunction; indeed, so that it even becomes an asset in certain ways. For example, some have used it to write novels and win the Nobel Prize.