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.

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Sunday, March 4, 2018


“Freshwater” by Akwaeke Emezi (post 2): Front flap warns, “As Ada fades into the background…alters [alternate personalities]…move into control…dangerous”

Chapter One is narrated by “We,” whose speaker identifies them as spirits sent by Nigerian gods to incarnate and possess a newborn Nigerian baby girl. 

The spirit predicts and claims that the girl, whom it calls “the Ada,” “was going to go mad…She was chubby and beautiful and insane if anyone had known enough to see it” (p. 6).

So, is this is a story about a girl with multiple personality (which is not a psychosis)? Or is the psychological concept of multiple personality to be rejected in favor of Nigerian spiritual beliefs? And is the latter the reason that no psychiatrist, psychologist, or therapist is included among the backcover blurbs or identified in the author’s Acknowledgments?

Let me just mention that it is not unusual for a person with multiple personality to include, among various kinds of alters, spirit alters—alters who see themselves as spirits, angels, or demons—consistent with the person’s culture.

Akwaeke Emezi. Freshwater. New York, Grove Press, 2018.
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