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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— If you read only recent posts, you miss most of what this site has to offer.

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Wednesday, February 15, 2017

Allen Frances in NY Times on Trump: “grandiosity, self-absorption, lack of empathy, ignorance, incompetence, impulsivity, and pursuit of dictatorial powers…

…but this doesn’t make him mentally ill, because he does not suffer from the distress and impairment required to diagnose mental disorder” (1).

How does Dr. Frances know that President Trump does not suffer from the distress required to diagnose mental disorder? Has he interviewed Trump? And is the Trump administration going so well that Dr. Frances can be sure Trump has no impairment? In any case, a debate over whether Trump is “mentally ill” is a game of semantics.

Instead, consider these more interesting questions: What can account for Trump’s puzzling inconsistencies? Why is Trump so unpredictable?

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