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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Sunday, July 29, 2018


“Long Black Veil” by Jennifer Finney Boylan (post 11): Protagonist identifies with split personality Gollum and feels that the boy she was still lives inside her

“I’m a relic, though. That’s what I realize now. The world has become a safer place for trans people, for some of us anyhow…I set out to save the shire…and it has been saved. But not for me. ‘Gollum,’ I said, ‘Gollum’ ” (1, p. 230).

Her talk of saving the shire is a reference to the plot of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Her saying “Gollum, Gollum” is to quote Gollum, the multiple personality character from that novel with whom she apparently identifies, although she may not think of him in terms of diagnosis.

“But most of the time I think that the boy that I was still lives inside me, in spite of the woman’s life that came after. I hear his voice when I tell a joke, or raise my voice to sing some song…” (1, p. 287).

1. Jennifer Finney Boylan. Long Black Veil. New York, Crown, 2017.
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