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.

— Each time you visit, search "name index" or "subject index," choose another name or subject, and search it.

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

— Share site with friends.

Saturday, April 8, 2017

Recently recognized, Normal Version of Multiple Personality adds to understanding of fiction writing, literary criticism, normal psychology, creative genius.

Of the thousands of people who have visited this blog from around the world, very few immediately believe its thesis that most novelists (and many others) have a normal version of multiple personality.

And why should most people want to believe it? Alternate personalities try to avoid detection by remaining incognito when they talk to you; and meanwhile, the person’s regular self usually has only a vague sense of “losing time” or having memory gaps. Thus, most people think they have never known a person who has multiple personality.

However, if you read the blog in its entirety (starting with the first post in 2013), you will slowly come to believe it, since you will discover multiple personality in the life and work of over one hundred writers, including Nobel Prize winners.

And it stands to reason that there must be more people than just writers who have multiple personality, due to the same predisposing factors that predisposed those writers: other adults in the general population who as children had traumatic experiences (which are relatively common) and had sufficient imaginative abilities to be able to use a dissociative identity-multiple personality, psychological defense, for which many children have a natural talent, as indicated by the normal occurrence of imaginary companions and imaginary identities in childhood.

Of course, individual posts vary from one to another in how convincing they are. Some writers have made their multiple personality quite clear, while others are more camouflaged. But if you read the blog in its entirety, it proves its thesis beyond a reasonable doubt.

Why write a blog that very few will immediately believe and too few will read in its entirety? First, I enjoy discovering things in literature; e.g., what I have called “gratuitous multiple personality.” Who would have thought that so many novels include signs of multiple personality that are unacknowledged, unintentional, and reflect the author’s own psychology? Second, my Multiple Identity Theory (about the normal version of multiple personality, etc.) adds to the understanding of fiction writing, literary criticism, normal psychology, and creative genius.

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