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.

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Wednesday, May 24, 2017

“Catch-22” by Joseph Heller (post 4): Soon after two other characters had displayed symptoms of multiple personality, the protagonist is given that diagnosis.

Yossarian, the protagonist, an American WWII bombardier, is wounded by antiaircraft fire and hospitalized. He had bled profusely from the flesh wound of his upper thigh, but he is stitched up and recovering nicely.

Yossarian and another patient switch beds, so that when the psychiatrist comes around, Yossarian is in a bed that has another soldier’s name. And when Yossarian claims to be “Yossarian,” a name that does not correspond to the name on his bed, the psychiatrist jumps to the conclusion that he has “a split personality” (1, p. 299).

I don’t know if this joke about Yossarian’s having multiple personality will be followed up in any way in the rest of the novel, but with its coming so soon after the two other characters had been given symptoms of multiple personality (see previous post), it would seem that the issue was on the author’s mind.

1. Joseph Heller. Catch-22 [1961]. New York, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2011.
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