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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Thursday, September 28, 2017

“The Red and the Black” by Stendhal (post 10): At the end, Julien Sorel hears a voice that he explicitly recognizes as the voice of an alternate personality.

The protagonist, Julien Sorel, has been convicted of premeditated, attempted murder. He receives a death sentence, which he refuses to appeal. In jail, awaiting the guillotine, he speculates about what might have been, if things had gone differently. His thoughts are interrupted by a voice, which he explicitly recognizes as the voice of an alternate personality:

“…All my stupidities would have been forgiven, or more likely thought worthy. A man of high repute, enjoying high life in Vienna or London.

“ ‘Not exactly, sir: you’ll be guillotined in three days.’

“Julien laughed heartily at his own mordant wit. ‘Really, we all have two personalities,’ he thought. ‘What devil thought up that nasty joke?’

“ ‘All right! Yes, my friend, guillotined in three days,’ he replied to whoever or whatever had interrupted him” (1, p. 464).

When Julien asks “What devil thought up that nasty joke?” he seems to be implying that he has more than two personalities, and that he is not sure which of his other personalities was the devilish joker.

He says not only “whoever,” but also “whatever,” because not all alternate personalities are perceived as ordinary people; e.g., some may be perceived as devils or angels.

1. Stendhal. The Red and the Black: A Chronicle of 1830. Translated by Burton Raffel. New York, The Modern Library, 2003.

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