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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Saturday, August 26, 2017

Do men and women have different brains? Do men and women differ in how frequently they get multiple personality? Sex ratio based on study of novelists.

An item in today’s newspaper about whether men and women have different brains reminds me of the usual statistics on multiple personality, which purport to show that it is much more common in women. 

The usual rebuttal to those statistics is that they come from psychiatric clinics, which biases the sample, because women with multiple personality tend to go to psychiatric clinics, while men with multiple personality tend to go to jail or substance abuse clinics.

I don’t know the latest study of the sex ratio of multiple personality, and I’m not motivated to look it up.

However, based on my study of novelists, it looks to me like men and women are equally likely to develop multiple personality.

As to whether women and men have different brains, I think the question itself is an example of sophistry, a fallacious “straw man” argument. The sexes would not have to have uniformly different brains for whatever differences there are to have practical social significance.

But the issue here is the frequency of multiple personality: I don’t see any significant difference between the sexes.
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