4th Anniversary of Literary-Psychological blog, whose essays provide evidence that most novelists, many others, have normal version of multiple personality.

This blog has nearly a thousand posts (really, brief essays) on 1) more than a hundred novelists, and 2) multiple personality. These essays help explain how fiction writers write, and how you can recognize multiple personality in people and novels, in spite of the fact that it is usually not labelled as such.

I estimate that about ninety percent of fiction writers and thirty percent of the general public have a normal version of multiple personality.

Old View

For hundreds if not thousands of years, there has been a common view that normal people often have more than one self—e.g., a good self and a bad self—with one or the other self in control at any given time, depending on various factors. It has also been a common view that certain abnormal people have been possessed by demons or controlled by alternate personalities. 

The selves of normal people and the alternate personalities of mentally ill people have usually been thought of as unrelated.

My View

In my view, only a minority of normal people (no more than thirty percent) have more than one self in any meaningful sense, but these selves are essentially the same as alternate personalities. It is just that normal people don’t have sufficient distress and dysfunction to warrant exorcism or a diagnosis. Indeed, without the distress and dysfunction, multiple personality may be an asset; for example, in writing novels.

State of the Blog

The blog continues to be visited from around the world, but since no one submits comments, I do not know what anyone thinks.