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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Wednesday, May 3, 2017

“The Catcher in the Rye” by J. D. Salinger: Holden Caulfield’s Bible favorite, after Jesus, is Legion, who is popularly seen as having multiple personality.

“If you want to know the truth, the guy I like best in the Bible, next to Jesus, was that lunatic and all, that lived in the tombs and kept cutting himself with stones” (1, p. 111).

The above may be Holden’s self-diagnosis of multiple personality.

Here is his biblical reference and its interpretation in popular culture:

Mark 5:1-13
“They came to the other side of the sea, to the country of Gerasenes. And when he had come out of the boat, there met him out of the tombs a man with an unclean spirit, who lived among the tombs…Night and day among the tombs and on the mountains he was always crying out, and bruising himself with stones. And when he saw Jesus from afar, he ran and worshipped him…And Jesus asked him, ‘What is your name?’ He replied, ‘My name is Legion; for we are many’…And the unclean spirits came out, and entered the swine; and the herd, numbering about two thousand, rushed down the steep bank into the sea, and were drowned in the sea.”

Legion in popular culture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legion_in_popular_culture  For example, in Marvel Comics: “David Charles Haller / Legion is the name of Charles Xavier’s son in X-Men. He’s a mutant suffering from Multiple Personality Disorder (now called Dissociative Identity Disorder), with each personality possessing a different power, thus being ‘one and many.’ ”

1. J. D. Salinger. The Catcher in the Rye [1951]. New York, Little Brown, 2014.

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