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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Thursday, November 17, 2016

“Bob Dylan Says He’ll Skip Nobel Ceremony (He’s Busy)”: Post 3 on multiple personality-like inconsistency of Nobel Prize in Literature winner.

“Yesterday evening the Swedish Academy received a personal letter from Bob Dylan, in which he explained that due to pre-existing commitments, he is unable to travel to Stockholm in December and therefore will not attend the Nobel Prize Ceremony…”

However, “his official website lists no tour dates after Nov. 23” (1).

First, Dylan made himself unavailable when the Swedish Academy tried to notify him of the award. Second, he announced his pleasure at winning the award and his wish to attend the ceremony if at all possible. Third, he is unavailable to attend the ceremony for no believable reason.

Bob Dylan demonstrates the puzzling inconsistency and the subjective variability in his sense of personal identity that are seen multiple personality.

As previously quoted, Dylan has said: “I think one thing today and I think another thing tomorrow. I change during the course of a day. I wake and I’m one person, and when I go to sleep I know for certain I’m somebody else. I don’t know who I am most of the time” (2).

Bob Dylan may or may not think of this as multiple personality. I could not be absolutely sure that it is multiple personality without my (or someone else’s) having spoken to, or otherwise confirmed the presence of, one or more alternate personalities. But certainly Mr. Dylan has done and said enough to raise the possibility of his having multiple personality, putting him in the company of other winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature discussed in past posts.

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/17/books/bob-dylan-nobel-ceremony.html?_r=0
2. Jonathan Cott (Editor). Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews. New York, Wenner Books, 2006.
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