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.

— Share site with friends.

Friday, November 4, 2016

Neither Contrived Nor Exceptional: The finding of signs and symptoms of multiple personality in the life and work of more than one hundred writers.

It is best to visit this blog on a device that is large enough for you to see the sidebar, use search, and comfortably read at length, because if you read only one or a few of the more than eight hundred posts (since the blog began in 2013), you may think that the finding of multiple personality in a particular writer is either contrived or exceptional.

This site is a blog in that I continually add posts, a few of which are timely comments on articles or news. But it is best to think of this site as a serial book, because most posts from past years are just as important as recent ones, often more important; they are just about different writers and different aspects of literature and multiple personality.

The complete understanding of recent posts often depends on having read past posts.

For example, my recent post on the interview of Elena Ferrante in The Paris Review consisted of nothing but quotations from the interview. I didn’t explain how various things in the quotations were indicative of multiple personality. I simply can’t keep explaining what readers of past posts would readily appreciate.

To read only recent posts is like skipping the earlier chapters in a book.

Much of the credibility of this blog is entailed in the large and diverse group of writers I have studied and quoted. There are now too many writers for an open-minded person to think that my findings [on any one writer] are contrived or exceptional.

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