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.

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Wednesday, December 19, 2018


“Motherless Brooklyn” by Jonathan Lethem (post 5): Parallel plots—detective story and Tourette’s (cover story for multiple personality)—continue

As previous discussed, this novel has two parallel plots: 1. the protagonist is a detective trying to solve a murder, and 2. he has Tourette’s, a neurological syndrome of behavioral and vocal tics, which, in this novel, is given psychological symptoms of multiple personality that are not part of real-life Tourette’s.

The protagonist’s Tourette’s is a cover story, camouflage, for the author’s discussion of multiple personality, which is referred to by euphemisms, such as “Multi-Mind”:

“…my Multi-Mind, that tangle of responses and mimicking, of interruptions of interruptions” (1, p. 195).

When the protagonist has a sexual encounter with a young woman, it is “as though she were negotiating a new understanding between my two disgruntled brains” (1, p. 220):

As the sexual encounter progresses, his nonsexual, alternate personality, “Bailey, he left town,” and the protagonist temporarily feels like he has only “One Mind” (1, p. 222).

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