Fiction Writer’s Ghosts: voice, alter ego, muse, imaginary companion, character, narrator, pseudonym, the unconscious, alternate personality

Unlike Kafka, Dickens, Conan Doyle, and Yeats (mentioned in recent posts), most contemporary fiction writers don’t believe in ghosts (although some still do, including Nobel Prize winners).

However, like fiction writers of the past, they continue to be aware, at least vaguely or indirectly, that there is thinking going on inside them which seems to be autonomous.

The essential criteria for being an alternate personality (as opposed to being ordinary imagination) are its sense of self and its separate memory bank. Alternate personalities think and remember things that the regular self had not.

What reason is there to believe that the human brain would, or even could, create alternate personalities?

Interviews of both children and their parents have found that sixty percent of children have had imaginary companions or imaginary identities (though, years later, they don’t always remember them).

Alternate personalities are simply a more elaborate version of children’s imaginary playmates and identifications. For the human brain, they are child’s play.