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, December 8, 2018


Susan Sontag (post 2): Is her multiple personality, acknowledged in an interview, reflected in her fiction?

I looked at her titles and found two short stories that looked promising.

One is titled “Doctor Jekyll” (1, pp. 229-273). I found that its three main characters are named Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Utterson, and Mr. Hyde, the same names as the characters in the classic “double” (multiple personality) tale by Robert Louis Stevenson.

The other story is titled “The Dummy” (1, pp. 115-126). In this story, an employed, married, family man has a duplicate of himself made to take over his life and leave his original self at leisure. His double does this successfully, but has an affair with the secretary, so the original man has a second dummy made, and everyone is happy.

1. Susan Sontag. Debriefing: Collected Stories. Edited by Benjamin Taylor. New York, Farrar Straus Giroux, 2017.
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