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, July 7, 2018


“My Year of Rest and Relaxation” by Ottessa Moshfegh (post 3): New York Times Book Review has truthful illustration; Wall Street Journal review is pithy

As previously mentioned, there is a discrepancy between the book and its cover. The protagonist is blonde, but the woman on the cover is brunette.

The review in The New York Times, truthful to the novel, is illustrated with a blonde (but the review does not explain the cover): https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/06/books/review/ottessa-moshfegh-my-year-of-rest-and-relaxation.html

Moshfegh’s novel is the third of three reviews by Sam Sacks in today’s Wall Street Journal. The review is brief, but unknowingly highlights two key issues of multiple personality: https://www.wsj.com/articles/fiction-young-and-privileged-and-perpetually-at-sea-1530838596

The review’s first paragraph mentions the protagonist’s blackouts. Sacks accepts the novel’s presumption that they’re entirely attributable to drugs, whereas I suspect that though facilitated by drugs, they are dissociative fugues of multiple personality.

The second paragraph quotes the novel as saying that the point of all the protagonist’s sleep is to “disappear completely, then reappear in some new form,” which I interpret as seeking to switch from one personality to another.
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