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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Wednesday, January 25, 2017

“Harvey” by Mary Chase: The Pulitzer Prize winning play about 47-year-old man with six-foot-tall rabbit—and the rabbit’s family—as imaginary companions.

Past posts—search “The Story of Ruth,” “Visual Hallucinations,” and “animal alters”—reminded me of the Pulitzer Prize winning play “Harvey” by Mary Chase, which is about a 47-year-old man, Elwood P. Dowd, who has a rational, talking, six-foot-tall rabbit as an imaginary companion. I must have once seen the movie, and I just read the play.

For an introduction to the play and its author, click these two links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_(play)
http://irishamerica.com/2016/10/mary-chase-the-woman-behind-harvey/

The line in the play that most caught my attention comes at the end, when Elwood says, “Doctor, for years I’ve known what my family thinks of Harvey. But I’ve often wondered what Harvey’s family thinks of me” (1, p. 71).

The line is a non sequitur. I don’t recall anything in the play that had suggested Harvey had a family. And there is no apparent reason for that fact to be suddenly revealed, in passing, without explanation, at the play’s end.

Since I interpret Harvey as representing an alternate personality, the reference to Harvey’s “family” suggests the presence of multiple personalities.

1. Mary Chase. Harvey: A Comedy in Three Acts [1944]. Snowball Publishing.
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