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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Wednesday, December 13, 2017

Literature professor says “Harvey,” based on Mary Chase’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, is a great holiday movie, but she fails to recognize multiple personality.

Jennifer Finney Boylan in New York Times on “Harvey" https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/12/opinion/christmas-holidays-movies.html?_r=0

Search “Mary Chase” for my brief past post on this play.

Search “McConnachie” for posts related to J. M. Barrie’s real-life version of Harvey (in the sense of having a co-conscious, companionable, alternate personality), except that McConnachie is not an animal. For another literary example of an animal alternate personality, search “Kafka.”

People with multiple personality sometimes see and interact with their alternate personalities—like children do with their imaginary companions and fiction writers sometimes do with their characters—either when they look in the mirror (search “mirror” and “mirrors”) or as a free-standing visual hallucination (not psychotic, because they know very well that it is not objectively true and that other people cannot see it).

I think that professors of literature should know about these things, so that they know what they are reading.

They can still enjoy “Harvey,” just as people can still enjoy Peter Pan even if they know about J. M. Barrie’s “McConnachie.”

Indeed, knowing that “Harvey” is a case of multiple personality, and that multiple personality is not a psychosis, might even reinforce their enjoyment of “Harvey.”

And as I emphasize in this blog, if a person’s multiple personality does not cause significant distress or dysfunction, it is not a mental illness, and may even be an asset.
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