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.

— Share site with friends.

Thursday, April 26, 2018


Jonathan Franzen (post 4): In video, says he has “twelve different personality modules,” including both sexes, and talks to some of them every day

In this interview on his novel, Purity, he does not relate the above description of multiple personality to multiple personality. He thinks it is ordinary psychology.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGOEVdpbQrQ

This contrasts with the earlier interview cited in my first Franzen post, in which he said that everyone has "multiple personalities" to one extent or another.

 I am not quite finished reading Purity, but so far, it does not use the terms "multiple personality" or "split personality," even in a whole section of the novel devoted to the description of a character with multiple personality.
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