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.

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Sunday, August 20, 2017

Maureen Dowd, Pamela Paul, Donald Trump: Three Successful People, Two of Whom are Consistent, and One of Whom is Puzzlingly Inconsistent.

New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd is against neo-nazis and the Klu Klux Klan, and to emphasize how consistent and predictable her attitudes are, she traces them back to her admirable father. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/19/opinion/sunday/trump-neo-nazis-and-the-klan.html?mcubz=0

New York Times Book Review editor Pamela Paul accepts the necessity of upgrading to the latest technology at work, but refuses to let unnecessary gadgets intrude on her home life, which is her longstanding, consistent attitude. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/18/opinion/sunday/technology-downgrade-sanity.html?mcubz=0&_r=0

In contrast, President Donald Trump is consistently inconsistent, and has even boasted of his unpredictability.

I don’t know Maureen Dowd, Pamela Paul, or Donald Trump. So I don’t know that Dowd and Paul do not have multiple personality or that Trump does. But their comparison does highlight one of the things I look for as a clue to whether a person might have multiple personality (which is notoriously hidden and camouflaged before it is diagnosed). I look for puzzling inconsistency.

People with undiagnosed multiple personality may be puzzlingly inconsistent, because their various alternate personalities, although incognito, may differ from each other in attitude, mood, interests, knowledge, talent, memory, grooming (hair color, etc.), names (nicknames, pseudonyms), and behavior.
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