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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Sunday, July 28, 2019


“The Mysteries of Pittsburgh” by Michael Chabon (post 3): Is Parallel Bisexuality (vs. Serial Bisexuality) indicative of multiple personality?

Halfway through the novel, the main issue has been the protagonist’s puzzlement and conflict regarding his sexual orientation. He had long wondered if he were homosexual, since he has long felt attracted to men as well as women. Now, during the summer following his four years of college in Pittsburgh, he is in a loving sexual relationship with a woman, but is also in love with a man.

What strikes me is that these two relationships are happening at the same time, and that these are both loving relationships. It would be just as remarkable if he were in two loving heterosexual relationships at the same time. These are love relationships, not just sexual encounters.

So I’m entertaining the hypothesis that parallel bisexuality—love relationships with both men and women at the same time—may be indicative of multiple personality, because alternate personalities can do contradictory things.

It would help to confirm this hypothesis if the heterosexual protagonist had memory gaps for the gay protagonist. No such memory gaps have been mentioned. But many things in this novel have not been mentioned; for example, all the people he must know in Pittsburgh from the last four years.
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