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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Saturday, September 24, 2016

In today's Wall Street Journal, Blake Bailey, who is working on a biography of Philip Roth, reviews the new biography of Shirley Jackson by Ruth Franklin.

I haven’t read Shirley Jackson yet, but I have her novel, The Bird’s Nest, because the plot is explicitly about a person with multiple personality, and it was published in 1954, three years before “The Three Faces of Eve,” a 1957 nonfiction book and movie, made the subject popular.

Blake Bailey does not wonder why Shirley Jackson would come up with a multiple personality novel at a time when multiple personality was not a popular subject and no recent cases had been reported, or why she would have been motivated to study the subject by reading Morton Prince’s The Dissociation of a Personality, a nonfiction book about a case of multiple personality that had been published back in 1906.

Perhaps Mr. Bailey will think about multiple personality for his biography of Philip Roth (search Philip Roth in this blog).
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