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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Saturday, August 4, 2018


“Winnie-the-Pooh” by A. A. Milne (post 2): At the beginning of the story, the title character has three distinct names, and is prolific, if brainless, poet

His three names are Edward Bear, Winnie-the-Pooh, and Sanders. Most people dismiss “Sanders,” the name over the door of his home, as a joke that refers to either a previous resident or a printer known to the author. And there are whole stories about where “Winnie” and “Pooh” came from. But, in my view, the interesting question is this:

Why does the author have—why is the author comfortable with having—three distinct names attached to one person (as if the person had multiple personality)?

Another prominent feature of the main character is that, like the author, he a writer. Edward/Pooh/Sanders is a poet, of which the reader is continually reminded by poem after poem.

But, paradoxically, Edward/Pooh/Sanders is said to have no brain. Milne thus seems to imply that writers (like himself) have no brain (in some sense, later to be discussed).

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