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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Saturday, December 16, 2017

Sylvia Plath (post 7): Her letters reveal “a split, almost bifurcated personality…‘my brown-haired personality’ and ‘the frivolous giddy gilded creature’ ”

“One slowly gets a sense of a split, almost bifurcated personality, all rhapsodic enthusiasm on the one side and all dark apprehensions on the other…

“Plath herself appears to be aware of this uneasy duality, which she refers to under the rubrics of ‘my brown-haired personality’ and ‘the frivolous giddy gilded creature who careened around corners at the wheel of a yellow convertible.’ It was probably no accident that she wrote her senior thesis at Smith on the idea of ‘the Double’ in two of Dostoevsky’s novels.” (1).

1. “Review: Who Is Sylvia Plath? Daphne Merkin reviews an unabridged, annotated collection of the budding poet’s candid letters” December 15, 2017, Wall Street Journal.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/review-who-is-sylvia-plath-1513371988
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