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.

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Friday, July 13, 2018


“Mary Page Marlowe” by Tracy Letts (Pulitzer Prize playwright): Mary is played by six actresses, but author, reviewer, interviewer fail to recognize multiple personality

Tracy Letts is a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and Tony Award-winning actor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracy_Letts

One of his plays, “Mary Page Marlowe,” is reviewed in today’s New York Times. The print edition is titled, “Many Marys Make One Woman.”

“Mr. Letts…divides her life into 11 scenes that don’t quite align, like a jigsaw puzzle contaminated with foreign pieces. The Mary Pages we meet in these scenes are often strangers to one another, played from infancy to the age of 69 by six different actresses and a doll…

“The 36-year-old Mary Page, during an appointment with her shrink…describes her personality as a series of ‘compartments’ and considers ways to integrate her ‘different lives.’ We’ve seen those different lives in action and understand how her refusal to acknowledge them creates the moral fog she prefers to live in…she quickly disowns her therapeutic insights…” https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/12/theater/review-mary-page-marlowe-tracy-letts-tatiana-maslany.html

In a television interview, the playwright acknowledges that his play is about identity and that it may say something about himself, but he does not seem to realize that having more than one actress play a character is a metaphor for multiple personality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNING97sp2c

The playwright, reviewer, and interviewer seem to think that the different Marys are merely representative of different ages. But alternate personalities in multiple personality are often of different ages.

Although most people are different at different ages, only persons with multiple personality would think of themselves as being virtually different people at different ages.

Moreover, the character, herself, has the insight that her personality has different “compartments,” which is a euphemism for multiple personality. But after having that insight, she then rejects that insight, as people with multiple personality often do.

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