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.

Monday, July 3, 2017

New York Times columnist, in Don Quixote allusion, says President Trump is “madman…tilting at windmills”: So what was Don Quixote’s diagnosis?

As I’ve previously discussed (search “madness”), the words “madness” and “madman” do not refer to any specific condition.

However, the columnist’s literary allusion to Cervantes’ Don Quixote may be insightful, since, as I have also discussed in past posts (search “Don Quixote”), Don Quixote does have a diagnosis.

The character’s original name was Alonso Quixano. He changed his name to Don Quixote and tilted at windmills. But in the end, he changed his name back to Alonso Quixano and no longer had those quixotic ideas.

The only psychiatric condition that features such name and attitudinal changes is multiple personality, which, therefore, is the character’s diagnosis.

What is President Trump’s diagnosis, if any? Having never interviewed him, I don’t know. But for my past speculations, search “Trump.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/03/opinion/trump-hijacked-american-presidency.html?_r=0
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