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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Friday, November 22, 2019


NY Times theater review of “The Underlying Chris” by Will Eno: Protagonist is extremely self-transforming, but review fails to recognize multiple personality

The protagonist is described as continually changing names, gender, and body. Whereas, in multiple personality, alternate personalities often differ in names, gender, and body-image. Thus, the review describes a dramatized multiple personality scenario, but the reviewer never mentions multiple personality.


Most of the surprisingly common symptoms of multiple personality in novels and plays are unlabeled and unacknowledged, because authors seem not to have thought of what they have written in terms of multiple personality, per se. What, then, are these unlabeled symptoms of multiple personality doing there? They are a literary or dramatized reflection of authors’ own psychology.

(As discussed on this site during the past six years in over 1700 posts, most fiction writers have multiple personality trait. For them, it is a special ability, and an integral part of their creative process.)

And since fiction writers usually do not think in terms of multiple personality, per se, and so have not labeled the symptoms of multiple personality in their novels, poems, and plays, most reviewers fail to think of it, even when it is blatant, as in this case.

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