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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Saturday, November 26, 2016

“The Host” (post 3) by Stephenie Meyer (post 4): Belief in Spirit Possession as a possible reason for not seeing Two Personalities as Multiple Personality.

I am half way through this 600-page novel. The protagonist still has her two personalities, Wanda and Melanie. Other characters have come to recognize that she has these two personalities. Yet nobody has called it “multiple personality” or even commented in passing that it is like multiple personality. Why?

My guess is that the author’s religious background inclines her to interpret alternate personalities as spirit possession. After all, what are muses and characters that talk to you in your head but advisory and storytelling spirits? And what is the process of writing at its most intense but a creative form of spirit possession?

Multiple personality is a psychological interpretation of what, through most of history, has been thought of as spirit (good) or demon (bad) possession.

Here is a case from the sixteenth century:
http://www.astraeasweb.net/plural/jeanne_fery.pdf 
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