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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Monday, October 24, 2016

Case of apparent blindness proves multiple personality is not cultural or therapeutic artifact or metaphor: Alternate personalities are neurological.

“We present the case of a patient having dissociative identity disorder [multiple personality] who — after 15 years of misdiagnosed cortical blindness — step by step regained sight during psychotherapeutic treatment…

“In addition to its implications for the brain’s ability to control the inflow of visual information, the present case bears on discussions of the ontology of dissociative identity disorders [multiple personality]. In the literature on consciousness and the nature of the self, dissociative identity disorder has been taken as important evidence for the formulation of a scientific theory of the self. However, questions regarding the validity of the phenomenon have complicated the picture. From the onset, nosological description of dissociative identity disorders has been accompanied by an ongoing controversy about whether this disorder might be a cultural and therapeutic artifact. Recent psychobiological evidence has shown that different personality states are correlated with differing cortical activation patterns and has demonstrated neural correlates of switching between personality states. Yet that would still be compatible with a skeptical view that personality states are just metaphors reflecting differences in higher-level cognitive processing, or viewpoints that personality states result from therapeutic suggestions or elaborate forms of role playing. The case of BT contributes to this controversy by demonstrating that differences between personality states are not limited to higher level processing but can differ with respect to the fundamental processing of early sensory information and corresponding perceptual change. It therefore provides compelling evidence for the existence of the dissociated identities in a more biological sense” (1).

 1. Hans Strasburger, Bruno Waldvogel. “Sight and blindness in the same person.” PsyCh Journal 4 (2015): 178–185. http://hans-strasburger.userweb.mwn.de/reprints/strasburger_waldvogel_2015_preprint.pdf
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