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, August 5, 2018


“August: Osage County” by Tracy Letts (post 4): Pulitzer Prize play gets mixed reviews because its characters do not have multiple personality

This play (1) won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and it is very dramatic, but it got a negative review in The Washington Post (2) and a mixed review in The New York Times (3), because it lacks psychological depth.

The reviews don’t say what kind of psychology is missing from this play’s traumatized characters. It is multiple personality.

I did not find any symptoms of multiple personality in this play, because, contrary to what some people might think, I don’t find it when it isn’t there.

1. Tracy Letts. August: Osage County. New York, Dramatists Play Service, 2009.

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