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, December 11, 2017

“The Odyssey” by Homer (post 4): Either Athena impersonates Telemachus to arrange for a ship or Telemachus has a multiple personality memory gap.

In Book 2, it is alleged that Athena, in the guise of Mentor (an old friend of Odysseus), urges Telemachus to take a ship in search of news of Odysseus, his father, who has been missing for twenty years (the ten years of the Trojan War and ten years thereafter). Then, in the guise of Telemachus, himself, Athena goes around and actually arranges for the ship.

Why does Telemachus accept Mentor’s claim to have arranged for the ship? Evidently because Telemachus has no memory of doing it himself. But Mentor is an old man and would not have been able to do it. So the most likely explanation is that Telemachus, himself, arranged for the ship, but has a memory gap for doing it, implying that Telemachus has multiple personality. (Search “memory gaps” to see many past posts that discuss this cardinal symptom of multiple personality.)

Did Homer and his original audience accept the story of Athena’s intervention at face value or did they have some concept of multiple personality? I don’t know.
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