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.

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Sunday, July 1, 2018


“Dom Casmurro” by Machado de Assis: First-person narrator says he entered his room behind himself, talked to himself, and persecuted himself

“Bento Santiago, the wildly unreliable narrator of Dom Casmurro, believes…that his wife has cheated on him with his best friend and that her child is not his. Has Capitú, his love since childhood, really been unfaithful to him?…First published in 1900…a classic of Brazilian literature…a sad and darkly comic novel about love and the corrosive power of jealousy.” —quoted from the back cover. The novel is praised in blurbs by Harold Bloom, Philip Roth, Susan Sontag, and The New York Times Book Review.

Halfway through the novel, in a chapter titled “Despair,” is the following:

“I ran to my room and entered behind myself. I talked to myself, persecuted myself, threw myself on the bed, and rolled over and over with myself” (1, p. 148).

As I continue reading, I will see if there is any other description of multiple personality.

1. Machado de Assis. Dom Casmurro. Translated from the Portuguese by Helen Caldwell (1953). New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 2009.
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