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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Sunday, October 8, 2017

“Dracula” by Bram Stoker (post 5): Mina says she is “unclean,” meaning New Testament’s “unclean spirit” (demon possession theory of multiple personality).

In the last post, I translated what Mina said into the equivalent psychological term (multiple personality), but her repeated reference to herself as “unclean” (1, p. 279) means that she is not thinking in psychological terms, but in New Testament, demon possession, terms, where “unclean” refers to an “unclean spirit”; as, for example, in Mark 5:8-9, where Jesus exorcizes the Gerasene demoniac, saying, “Come out of the man, you unclean spirit! And Jesus asked him, ‘What is your name?’ He replied, ‘My name is Legion; for we are many’ ” (meaning that the man had multiple personality and contained multitudes).

1. Bram Stoker. Dracula [1897]. Edited by Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal. New York, W. W. Norton, 1997.

Novelists' Multiple Personality TRAIT: Key to Creativity

Sunday, October 8, 2017

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