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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Wednesday, November 28, 2018

“The Fourth Man” by Agatha Christie (post 9): Short Story explicitly on Multiple Personality

Dr. Campbell Clark, an eminent “physician and mental specialist” tells his traveling companions that he is on his way to treat “a case of dual personality.” In that context, he tells them about a famous case in France that had featured four personalities. And to explain that multiple personality may be more common than they think, he says:

“You’re the master of the house—we’ll admit that, but aren’t you ever conscious of the presence of others—soft-footed servants, hardly noticed, except for the work they do—work that you’re not conscious of having done? Or…moods that take hold of you and make you, for the time being, a ‘different man’ as the saying goes? You’re the king of the castle, right enough, but be very sure the ‘dirty rascal’ is there too.”

“ ‘My dear Clark,’ drawled the lawyer. ‘You make me positively uncomfortable. Is my mind really a battleground of conflicting personalities? Is that Science’s latest?’ ” (1).

Considering previous Christie posts, her metaphor of the house may reflect her own mind and creative process.

1. Agatha Christie. “The Fourth Man” [1925], pages 55-76 in Agatha Christie, The Witness for the Prosecution and Other Stories. New York, William Morrow/HarperCollins, 2012.
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