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, March 11, 2017

“The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism” by Jonathan Lethem: mentions “cryptomnesia,” which is a manifestation of mythopoetic, alternate personalities.

Lethem begins his essay by noting that Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) has the same basic plot as a story by Heinz von Lichberg (1916). “Did Nabokov, who remained in Berlin until 1937, adopt Lichberg’s tale consciously? Or did the earlier tale exist for Nabokov as a hidden, unacknowledged memory? The history of literature is not without examples of this phenomenon, called cryptomnesia” (1).

“Cryptomnesia” is a term coined by Théodore Flournoy, who explained it as a manifestation of multiple personality (2, 3).

In multiple personality, a person can both know and not know something, can both remember and not remember it, because one personality may know and remember what another personality does not.

And it is not just that alternate personalities may know and remember things that the host personality does not. Alternate personalities may use these things for mythopoeic or mythopoetic purposes; that is, to make up elaborate stories.

Search “mars” to bring up past post:
Mythopoetic Function of Alternate Personalities: Illustrated by Famous Medium, Helene Smith, in Théodore Flournoy’s From India to the Planet Mars

1. Jonathan Lethem. “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism.” Harper’s Magazine; Feb 2007, pp. 59-71. https://www.sunydutchess.edu/faculty/allen/lethem%20-%20ecstasy%20of%20influence.pdf
2. Wikipedia. “Cryptomnesia.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptomnesia
3. Théodore Flournoy. From India to the Planet Mars: A Case of Multiple Personality with Imaginary Languages [1899/1901]. With a Forward by C. G. Jung and Commentary by Mireille Cifali. Edited and Introduced by Sonu Shamdasani. Princeton N.J., Princeton University Press, 1994.
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