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 2, 2018


New York Times book review of “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” by Ottessa Moshfegh describes dissociative fugues, symptom of multiple personality

“My Year of Rest and Relaxation” is about what happens when Moshfegh’s 24-year-old narrator becomes intentionally addicted to antidepressants and other meds and, more centrally, to the sleep that results…she does not want to be awake much. She begins to wonder…Why climb out of bed at all?…

“The narrator begins to sleep most of the day and sometimes to go on walkabouts while blacked out. She wakes to find that she has gone to clubs or had her pubic hair waxed or rearranged her furniture. Once she comes to on the Long Island Rail Road, a waking nightmare for sure” (1).

The review seems to assume that the medication caused blackouts in which the protagonist traveled to various places, engaged in varied and complex out-of-character behavior, and then had amnesia for it; that is, dissociative fugues. (Search “dissociative fugue” for past posts on that recurring subject.)

It is more likely that the medication put her host personality to sleep, allowing her alternate personalities to take over and do their own things.

Is the reviewer just refraining from revealing too much? Or is this yet one more novel with unintentional, unacknowledged, multiple personality?

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/02/books/review-ottessa-moshfegh-my-year-of-rest-relaxation.html
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