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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Tuesday, September 3, 2019


“Native Son” by Richard Wright (post 3): Bigger, the protagonist, switches to a gun-shooter alternate personality

Bigger (who killed the white girl, Mary, and disposed of her body) has been interviewed by a detective. He has told lies to implicate Mary’s communist friend, Jan, in her disappearance.

Jan confronts Bigger on the street, asking why Bigger has lied about him. Bigger takes out his gun, as he switches to his gun-shooter alternate personality. But before the personality switch is complete, Jan backs off and walks away.

“Jan backed farther away, then turned and walked rapidly off…Bigger stood still, the gun in hand. He had utterly forgotten where he was…The tension in him slackened and he lowered the gun…He was coming back into possession of himself; for the past three minutes it seemed he had been under a strange spell, possessed by a force which he hated, but which he had to obey…” (1, p. 172).

Comment
The novel does not label or identify the above as having anything to do with multiple personality. I don’t know how Richard Wright thought about it, privately.

In his text, he uses the words “possession” and “possessed.” Before multiple personality was understood psychologically, it was thought of as spirit or demon possession.

1. Richard Wright. Native Son [1940]. New York, Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2005.
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