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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Tuesday, July 30, 2019


Writer’s Voice: a study of the voices heard by many fiction writers

I previously mentioned this study when Dr. Fernyhough’s book, The Voices Within, came out in 2016 (see my post below), but I just came across their website and podcast, which are interesting:

1. https://writersinnervoices.com/about/ 
2. Podcast. https://hearingthevoice.org/2019/01/15/new-podcast-writers-inner-voices-literary-voices-and-the-edinburgh-international-book-festival/ 
3. Introduction to Writer’s Inner Voices https://writersinnervoices.com/
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edinburgh_International_Book_Festival

October 21, 2016
Not Clinical: “What’s Up With Those Voices in Your Head?” by Casey Schwartz in New York Times reviews Charles Fernyhough’s “The Voices Within”

The conventional view is that hearing voices is a symptom of psychoses like schizophrenia. However, as Dr. Fernyhough says, “the idea of hearing voices as…the archetypal symptom of schizophrenia seems problematic. Around three-quarters of people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia” hear voices, “but so do a similar proportion of individuals with dissociative identity disorder [multiple personality]” (1, p. 122).

Dr. Fernyhough is a professor of psychology (2), but he is not a clinical psychologist. As he, himself, acknowledges, he has no experience working with patients (1, p. 125), either those with schizophrenic voices or those with multiple personality voices. So he doesn’t know that the voices described by writers (Dr. Fernyhough is also a novelist) are like the voices heard in multiple personality.

1. Charles Fernyhough. The Voices Within: The History and Science of How We Talk to Ourselves. New York, Basic Books, 2016.
2. Casey Schwartz. “What’s Up With Those Voices in Your Head?” The New York Times, October 20, 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/23/books/review/voices-within-charles-fernyhough.html
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