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, June 26, 2019

“Transformation” vs. “Switching”: How fiction writers and psychiatrists think of changing from one personality to another personality in multiple personality

Fiction writers tend to think of the different personalities in multiple personality as being like different people. And conceptually, to go from being one person to being another person would be a transformation.

In contrast, psychiatrists think of the different personalities in multiple personality as parts of the same person. So they think of going from one personality to another personality as switching from one part to another part of the same person.

Thus, when a character in a work of fiction is spoken of, or depicted, as having undergone “transformation,” the implication, intentionally or unintentionally, may be multiple personality.
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