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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Friday, August 31, 2018

New York Times book review says Myers-Briggs personality test was based on ideas of Dr. Carl Jung, but fails to mention Jung had multiple personality

The New York Times book review of The Personality Brokers (1), which is about the creation of the Myers-Briggs personality test, agrees with Wikipedia that the test (2) was based on ideas of Swiss psychiatrist Dr. Carl Jung (3). 


However, neither The New York Times nor Wikipedia mentions that Dr. Carl Jung had multiple personality. He described it in his autobiography, which I discussed as follows:

December 6, 2015
C. G. Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections: A psychiatrist who had multiple personality and who built a psychological theory partially based on it.

Carl Gustave Jung (1875 -1961) is of interest here for three reasons:
First, Jungian therapists have a tradition of treating creative artists.
Second, Jung described himself as having a normal version of multiple personality, and some of his psychological theory is based on his own psychology.
Third, I like to give examples of successful people, and not just novelists, who have had multiple personality.

In his autobiography, Jung explicitly describes himself as having more than one personality since childhood:

“Then, to my intense confusion, it occurred to me that I was actually two different persons. One of them was the schoolboy who could not grasp algebra and was far from sure of himself, the other was important, a high authority, a man not to be trifled with…This ‘other’ was an old man who lived in the eighteenth century…I began pondering these isolated impressions, and they coalesced into a coherent picture: of myself living in two ages simultaneously, and being two different persons” (1, pp. 33-35).

Since he continues to function well, he infers that he does not have a medical illness, multiple personality disorder, but rather a normal psychological phenomenon. He is right, except when he assumes that everyone has normal multiple personality (most people don’t):

“The play and counterplay between personalities No. 1 and No. 2, which has run through my whole life, has nothing to do with a ‘split’ or dissociation in the ordinary medical sense. On the contrary, it is played out in every individual. In my life No. 2 has been of prime importance, and I have always tried to make room for anything that wanted to come from within. He is a typical figure, but he is perceived only by the very few” (1, p. 45).

It is true that many people with multiple personality don’t realize it, but it is going too far to say that everyone has it (most people don’t).

“…I once asked myself, ‘What am I really doing? Certainly this has nothing to do with science. But then what is it?’ Whereupon a voice within me said, ‘It is art.’ I was astonished. It had never entered my head that what I was writing has any connection with art. Then I thought, ‘Perhaps my unconscious is forming a personality that is not me, but which is insisting on coming through to expression…I said very emphatically to this voice that my fantasies had nothing to do with art, and I felt a great inner resistance…Then came the…same assertion: 'That is art.’ This time I caught her and said, ‘No, it is not art!'…and prepared myself for an argument…She came through with a long statement…Later…I called her the ‘anima’…I felt a little awed by her. It was like the feeling of an invisible presence in the room…” (1, pp. 185-186).

1. C. G. Jung. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Recorded and Edited by Aniela JaffĂ©. Translated by Richard and Clara Winston. Revised Edition. New York, Vintage Books/Random House, 1961/1973.

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