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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Monday, January 2, 2017

A different kind of imagination: The writer’s muse, daemon, or voice is an alternate personality by virtue of its compelling illusion of independent agency.

A writer’s muse, daemon, voice, character, narrator, etc., are aspects or products of imagination, but they are not aspects or products of what is usually meant by imagination. Here are definitions of what is usually meant by imagination, from the American Psychological Association’s Dictionary of Psychology (2007):

imagination n. the faculty that produces ideas and images in the absence of direct sensory data, often by combining fragments of previous sensory experiences into new syntheses. See also CREATIVE IMAGINATION.

creative imagination the faculty by which new, uncommon ideas are produced, especially when this does not seem explicable by the mere combination of existing ideas. The operations of the creative imagination are sometimes explained by the interaction of dormant or unconscious elements with active, conscious thoughts.

As you can see, ordinary imagination does not involve any additional thinkers with a sense of their own identity. It does not involve a compelling illusion of the presence of another being or self with a mind of its own (“the illusion of independent agency,” in the words of Marjorie Taylor):

Such an illusion is what is meant by multiple personality.

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