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, June 24, 2018

Absent-mindedness in “Growing Up Haunted” by Jennifer Finney Boylan (post 2): Author works as bank teller and misplaces ten thousand dollars

As I continue to read this memoir, I’m on the alert for multiple personality types of memory problems: memory gaps, dissociative fugues, or striking examples of absent-mindedness.

One possible example of the latter is when the author works as a bank teller and misplaces $10,000 by the coffeemaker (1, p. 162). This is the climax of repeated incidents of carelessness in money handling, told as an amusing anecdote of absent-mindedness, possibly due to the author’s preoccupation with writing a poem between customers.

Absent-mindedness is usually nothing more than being preoccupied, but please search “absent-minded” for examples of its relation to multiple personality.

1. Jennifer Finney Boylan. I’m Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted (A Memoir). New York, Broadway Books, 2008.
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