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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Monday, September 4, 2017

Louisa May Alcott (post 8): Like her character, Jo, the author seems to have had two rival identities; one tried to delete evidence of the other.

“In Little Women, Alcott based her heroine ‘Jo’ on herself. But whereas Jo marries at the end of the story, Alcott remained single throughout her life. She explained her ‘spinsterhood’ in an interview with Louise Chandler Moulton, ‘I am more than half-persuaded that I am a man's soul put by some freak of nature into a woman's body...because I have fallen in love with so many pretty girls and never once the least bit with any man.’ However, Alcott's romance while in Europe with the young Polish man Ladislas ‘Laddie’ Wisniewski was detailed in her journals but then deleted by Alcott herself before her death.”

Wikipedia. “Louisa May Alcott.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisa_May_Alcott

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