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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Monday, October 8, 2018

“The Piano Tuner” by Daniel Mason (post 2): Piano tuner, when tuning, dissociates into alternate personality, leaving memory gap of multiple personality

Two-thirds through the novel, when Edgar, the piano tuner, is in Burma, he recalls what his wife, back in England, had once asked him:

“Edgar…I am asking how you work, I am being serious, Do you see anything while you work?…It just seems that you disappear, into a different place…Edgar laughed…But in truth, he did understand what she was trying to ask. He worked with his eyes open, but when he finished, when he thought back on the day, he could never remember a single visible image…” (1, p. 214).

That is, his regular personality had a memory gap for the period of time that his piano-tuning, alternate personality had taken over. Search “memory gaps” for past discussions of this cardinal symptom of multiple personality.

1. Daniel Mason. The Piano Tuner. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.
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