Novelists' Multiple Personality TRAIT: Key to Creativity

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, September 13, 2017

“Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman (post 6): Celebrated poem calls itself “untranslatable” and says “You will hardly know who I am or what I mean”

Having just read “Song of Myself,” I tend to agree with the poem’s concluding section:

“The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering.

“I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,

I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world…

“You will hardly know who I am or what I mean…” (1).

However, since the poem is under a hundred pages, and next week I expect to have two scholarly books to explain it to me, I reserve judgment.

1. Walt Whitman. “Song of Myself.” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45477/song-of-myself-1892-version