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 5, 2019


Multiple Personality in “Motherless Brooklyn”: Novel by Jonathan Lethem and New Movie by Edward Norton

Edward Norton is known for past movies featuring multiple personality; for example, “Fight Club.” Is that issue what prompted him to make a movie out of Lethem’s novel? Is anything of the novel’s multiple personality in the movie? I don’t know. The issue is not discussed in The New York Times movie review: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/31/movies/motherless-brooklyn-review.html

The New York Times review of Lethem’s novel does not discuss its major, but unlabeled, depiction of multiple personality: https://www.nytimes.com/1999/10/17/books/what-makes-him-tic.html

Search “Lethem” on this site to read about multiple personality in Motherless Brooklyn.

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