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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Saturday, November 10, 2018


Saul Bellow, Nobel Prize novelist: Review of new biography fails to mention that he probably had multiple personality

https://www.wsj.com/articles/watching-the-lights-go-out-1541723669

May 2, 2015
Saul Bellow: Martin Amis, Sam Tanenhaus, James Parker, Francine Prose in New York Times Book Review don’t know Bellow had multiple personality

Tomorrow’s Book Review, prompted by a new biography and a new book of collected nonfiction, has four essays about Saul Bellow. But there is no mention of Bellow’s multiple personality, discussed previously in six posts, which you can access by searching “Saul Bellow” in this blog:

Nov. 15, 2014: Bellow credits an alternate personality as his co-writer
Nov. 17, 2014: Bellow discusses Herzog and himself in regard to multiple personality
Nov. 26, 2014: In Herzog, both Madeleine and Herzog have multiple personality
Nov. 28, 2014: Bellow’s Doppelgänger Pseudonym and Paradoxical Memory
Nov. 29, 2014: Bellow writes as slave of alternate personalities
Dec. 9, 2014: “Spell” in Herzog

Bellow did not use the term “multiple personality,” but what he said about himself and wrote in Herzog amounts to the same thing.

Reading what I quote Bellow as saying, you may think, “Don’t be silly, that’s just how novelists are.” True, and that’s the point of this blog.

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