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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— If you read only recent posts, you miss most of what this site has to offer.

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Saturday, November 10, 2018

Sylvia Plath’s letters, Vol. 2, reviewed in New York Times, omits issue raised in New York Times review of Vol. 1: Sylvia Plath’s split personality

Volume 1 of Sylvia Plath’s letters was reviewed in The New York Times under the title, “Sylvia Plath’s Letters Reveal a Writer Split in Two.” This is how that review ended:

“The achievement of this avalanche of letters — 1,300 pages and counting — is that it disabuses everyone of the notion that Plath wasn’t aware of her contradictions…She referenced her two selves every time she went from blonde to brunette (‘ I’m rather sure that my brown-haired personality will win out this year,’ she wrote to a boyfriend. ‘Gone is the frivolous giddy gilded creature who careened around corners at the wheel of a yellow convertible.’) Her honors thesis was, in part, on Dostoevsky’s “The Double,” after all, in which a self splits, and one kills the other” (1).

Volume 2 of Sylvia Plath’s letters has just been reviewed. Toward the end of this review, it quotes Plath as thanking her psychiatrist for helpful advice, “The part about keeping my personal one-ness is a real help.” However, this is quoted in the context of her “struggling to imagine life without Ted Hughes,” as the review is titled (2). There is nothing in this review that refers back to the issue raised in the first review—Plath’s being split into two personalities—as the possible reason she was having a problem in “keeping my personal one-ness.”

Perhaps her psychiatrist, like the psychiatrist in The Bell Jar, failed to make the diagnosis of multiple personality. (Search my past posts on Plath and her novel.)

1. Parul Sehgal. “Sylvia Plath’s Letters Reveal a Writer Split in Two.” New York Times, Oct. 10, 2017 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/10/books/review-sylvia-plath-letters-volume-one.html
2. Katie Roiphe. “Sylvia Plath’s Last Letters Show Her Struggling to Imagine Life Without Ted Hughes.” New York Times, Nov. 8, 2018 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/08/books/review/peter-steinberg-karen-kukil-letters-of-sylvia-plath-volume-2.html
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