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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Tuesday, December 18, 2018


“Motherless Brooklyn” by Jonathan Lethem (post 4): Protagonist does not recognize himself in mirror and has “no control in my personal experiment of self”

In this chapter’s first paragraph, before the protagonist gets down to the day’s practical matters, he reflects on not recognizing himself in the mirror (a symptom of multiple personality; search “mirror” and “mirrors” in this blog) and the two-way communication between personalities in his head:

“There are days when I get up in the morning and…I don’t even recognize my own toothbrush in the mirror…and I don’t know whether this is a symptom of Tourette’s or not. I’ve never seen it described in the literature. Here’s the strangeness…then: no control in my personal experiment of self…Personalityness. There’s a lot of traffic in my head, and it’s two-way” (1, p. 131).

He implies that this novel is an “experiment of self” in which he is trying to understand his “personalityness” and its two-way traffic in his head. Since he does not call it multiple personality, he apparently has not thought of it in those terms.

1. Jonathan Lethem. Motherless Brooklyn. New York, Doubleday, 1999.
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