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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Monday, October 9, 2017

Multiple Personality in “Dracula” by Bram Stoker (post 6): Dracula and Van Helsing apply hypnosis in the battle between Mina’s alternate personalities.

The pervasiveness of multiple personality in Dracula ranges from Renfield’s mental illness (see prior post) to the climactic struggle between Mina’s regular and vampire personalities.

Stoker could have written this novel under the premise that a chemical from Dracula’s blood was transforming Mina into a vampire, but neither of Stoker’s two doctors (Seward and Van Helsing) even considers treating Mina with a medicine or chemical antidote.

Instead, they treat her with the psychological modality, hypnosis (commonly used in the treatment of multiple personality). Indeed, the novel’s concluding chapters involve a competition between Dracula and Van Helsing in their hypnosis of Mina (Dracula’s hypnosis is applied telepathically from a distance).

Dracula is psychologically more advanced than Jekyll and Hyde in that the switch between alternate personalities involves hypnosis rather than a chemical potion. But readers are so distracted by the vampire fantasy that they overlook the multiple personality.
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