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, November 12, 2019


“Love and Exile” (memoirs) by Isaac Bashevis Singer (post 3): As young man in Poland, notes puzzling inconsistency, makes self-diagnosis

“In some book or magazine, I had stumbled upon a phrase, ‘split personality,’ and I applied this diagnosis to myself. This is precisely what I was—cloven, torn, perhaps a single body with many souls each pulling in a different direction…Some kind of enemy roosted within me or a dybbuk who spited me in every way and played cat-and-mouse with me…Some maniac uttered crazy words inside my brain and I could not silence him. At the same time I held myself in such check that not even Gina [his lover] knew what I was going through. Older writers at the Writers’ Club often told me that they envied my youth and I said: ‘Believe me, there is nothing to envy.’ ” (1, p. 94).

Search “puzzling inconsistency,” a clue to multiple personality, for discussions related to other writers.

1. Isaac Bashevis Singer. Love and Exile [memoirs published 1975-1981]. Garden City N.Y., Doubleday & Company, 1984.
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