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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Monday, July 23, 2018


“Mary Page Marlowe” by Tracy Letts (post 2): Presented by Steppenwolf Theatre Company, named for Hesse’s “Steppenwolf,” about multiple personality

I am reading Letts’s play, in which the title character is played by six actresses at different ages. Since another character, Roberta Marlowe, appears in the play at ages nineteen and thirty-two, but is played by only one actress, it is clear that the six actresses playing Mary Page Marlowe are meant to dramatize different personalities, not just different ages.

Mary Page Marlowe was first presented by the Steppenwolf Theatre Company of Chicago in 2016. The theater company, founded in 1974, was named after the 1927 novel by Hermann Hesse.

However, when I google brief video interviews of the author and others associated with this play, none mentions the Hesse novel or its thesis, that many people have unrecognized multiple personality.

Search “Hesse” and “Steppenwolf.”
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