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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Sunday, May 6, 2018


James Tiptree Jr., Raccoona Sheldon, & Alex are alternate personalities of Alice B. Sheldon (post 5), who dies in murder-suicide: But who is the killer?

Alternate personalities—e.g., James Tiptree Jr. and Raccoona Sheldon—are not puppets. Alternate personalities, by definition, and in practice, have minds of their own.

Another male alternate personality, Alex, is mentioned in Allie’s journal (1, p. 344), but since most people with multiple personality have more than three alters, there were, almost certainly, more alters behind the scenes.

For example, “Part of her whispered that suicide was the only logical response to her condition. Another part shouted, ‘Something inside me is trying to kill me. Help!’ ” (1, p. 342).

These “parts” were two additional alternate personalities, and one of them may have committed the double murder, the apparent murder-suicide, of Allie and her husband.

 Whether such parts are seen as metaphors or alternate personalities may be a matter of life and death.

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