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.

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Thursday, May 3, 2018

James Tiptree, Jr., pseudonym of Alice B. Sheldon (post 2): She evaluated her multiple personalities to see who would write fiction and be companionable 

1950
She says: “Somewhere in the back of my mind there is a female wolf who howls, and a gross-bodied workman who moves things and sweats, and a thin rat-jawed person who is afraid and snaps, and a practical woman, and one of those monkeys with big haunted eyes gazing at an equation with love, and Miss Fix-It, and an Anglo-Saxon lady…and—my own favorite—a disastrous comedian who every so often comes roaring out of the wings and collapses the show. Now it seems clear that while one might get one or two of these characters to write for a living, most of them won’t go along…” (1, p. 160).

1955
"For a long time Alli [Alice B. Sheldon] wanted a divorce…Alli insisted she couldn’t live with anyone. 'I’ve learned my lesson, it’s not for me, and there are plenty of women who live alone and I’m one,' she wrote their marriage counselor…'I figure that I have enough sub-personalities so I can build one up to where it is quite companionable, and displays divergent views, the ability to question, argue and hold opinions' ” (1, p. 174).

1. Julie Phillips. James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon. New York, St. Martin’s Press, 2006.
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