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.

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Tuesday, April 25, 2017

What does a person with multiple personality look like? If you google that question, you will probably not learn the truth (unless you get a link to this post).

If you google that question, you will be told what a person with multiple personality looks like, their signs and symptoms, after they have been diagnosed, when the alternate personalities have had their cover blown, so to speak, not what the person looked like or how they behaved before that.

Before a person with multiple personality has been diagnosed, they do have all those signs and symptoms, and have had them since childhood, but not for show. You will probably meet only the person’s host personality, not their alternate personalities, who are usually not “out.” Thus, the signs and symptoms, though present, are inconspicuous.

So what does a person with multiple personality look like? They usually look like everyone else.

 (For past posts on diagnosis, search “mental status,” “diagnostic criteria,” and “memory gaps.”)
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