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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Saturday, June 23, 2018


“Growing Up Haunted” by Jennifer Finney Boylan: Asks why person with gender dysphoria, a condition without visual hallucinations, would see “ghosts”

Professor Boylan (1, 2) had already published a memoir about the resolution of gender dysphoria by sex reassignment surgery, so her next memoir, I’m Looking Through You, Growing Up Haunted (3), was meant to raise a separate issue: why she had seen “ghosts” (4).

“I do not believe in ghosts, although I have seen them with my own eyes…Maybe someday researchers will tell us more about what makes people see things that are not there…In the meantime, when it comes to ghosts…we’re all pretty much on our own” (3, p. 107).

Two ghosts she had seen, while he was growing up (prior to sex reassignment surgery), were a young girl standing before him, and an older woman when he looked in the mirror.

If visual hallucinations cannot be accounted for by a neurological condition, medical condition, or psychosis, then the cause may be multiple personality, especially if the person is a novelist, playwright, or poet.

Search visual hallucinations, ghost, ghosts, mirror, and mirrors.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Finney_Boylan
2. https://barnard.edu/profiles/jennifer-boylan
3. Jennifer Finney Boylan. I’m Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted (A Memoir). New York, Broadway Books, 2008.
4. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/31/opinion/31boylan.html
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