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.

— If you read only recent posts, you miss most of what this site has to offer.

— Share site with friends.

Friday, January 31, 2020


“Hunger” by Knut Hamsun (another Nobel Prize winner): Nameless narrator, a fiction writer, has multiple personality, but not from hunger

The translator’s Introduction mentions the protagonist’s symptoms of multiple personality (without using that term):

“…Any reader of Hunger is struck by a number of truly astounding psychological facts: first…The life of the mind is depicted in Hamsun’s first novel as discontinuous. Secondly…a divided psyche: several selves may inhabit one and the same body simultaneously…While the device recalls Dostoyevsky’s treatment of the double, Hamsun uses it in a novel manner. Often, the self-division becomes the occasion for humorous playacting as the hero launches into interior dialogues between one part of his psyche and another…” (1, translator’s Introduction).

But Hunger is mostly about the effect on the mind of actual hunger and starvation. Which might raise the question in some readers’ minds at to whether multiple personality could be caused by an impaired brain.

In one episode manifesting multiple personality, the nameless narrator—search “namelessness,” “nameless narrator,” and “nameless”—says, “…my confused state was running away with me, giving me the craziest ideas, which I obeyed one after the other. No matter how much I kept telling myself that I was behaving like an idiot, it was no use; I made the stupidest faces behind the lady’s back and coughed furiously several times as I walked past her…I vaguely felt that it wasn’t I…However estranged I was from myself in that moment, so completely at the mercy of invisible influences, nothing that was taking place around me escaped my perception…” (1, pp. 12-13). The “invisible influences” were alternate personalities pulling his strings from behind the scenes.

A “confused state” in the sense of a delirium from malnutrition would have impaired his faculty of attention; whereas, at the time of the above episode, his attention was quite good (nothing around him escaped his perception) (and around that time, he was still getting inspired and writing publishable articles). Later on, when his brain was impaired from malnutrition, he had no symptoms of multiple personality.

In short, the writer in this novel shows evidence of multiple personality, but only when he is not starving and his brain is working normally, because multiple personality is an ability and mental feat that requires an intact brain with good powers of concentration and memory. It is not from hunger.

1. Knut Hamsun. Hunger [Norway, 1890]. Translated by Sverre Lyngstad. New York, Penguin Books, 1998.

Wednesday, January 29, 2020


“With Shuddering Fall” by Joyce Carol Oates: In author’s first novel, 17-year-old protagonist struggles with the question of whether she is crazy

“People thought she was queer in the head. True. Perhaps true…Tears streamed over her cheeks…She did not even know what she was crying about” (1, pp. 52-53). “She could not even understand her emotions, or understand if they were truly hers” (1, p. 189). In multiple personality, the personality who is “out” may experience, and be puzzled by, the emotions of another personality who is behind the scenes.

“…Karen felt that, deep inside, secretly inside her, she was able to think clearly and sanely” (1, p. 69). The personality who is “out” is aware of another personality behind the scenes who is high-functioning.

“Her mind went blank…and she lost her sense of time. She could not have said how long it was since she had left her home…Time had proceeded with gaps she did not try to understand” (1, pp. 82-83). Memory gaps are a cardinal symptom of multiple personality, because some personalities have no memory for the period of time that another personality was “out” and in control. Search “memory gaps,” a major recurring issue.

“Your very being is a puzzle to me, a most delightful puzzle,” another character says to Karen (1, p. 124). People with multiple personality have puzzling inconsistency (due to unrecognized influences from, and switching among, alternate personalities). But, unlike people with psychosis, people with multiple personality may be quite engaging.

“Karen could not hold together the snatches of herself that were revealed to her. She was incomplete, not quite human, a mockery of a person” (1, p. 190). Yes, in multiple personality, any one personality is incomplete. It is all of the person’s personalities, taken as a whole, that compose the complete person.

Karen is psychiatrically hospitalized near the end of the novel, but the psychiatrist, about to send her home, is impressed with the basic soundness of her mind. “So very few people we send out of here—rarely anyone like you, self-cured” (1, p. 307).

At the end, back in her home town and living with her family, Karen states the main theme of Joyce Carol Oates’ first novel: “They know something is wrong with me, that my mind is wrong, put together wrong. Am I to blame for that? Can I help my mind? It is insane to look for meaning in life, and it is insane not to; what am I to do?” (1, p. 329). Keep writing.

1. Joyce Carol Oates. “With Shuddering Fall.” New York, Ecco HarperCollins, 1964, 2018.

Joyce Carol Oates (doctoral dissertation by Mary A. Brett): In seven novels “1987-1995…Oates explores the ‘Multiple personalities [that] inhabit us all.’"


I am not the only one to see this in her writing.

Joyce Carol Oates (brief 2013 video): Esteemed fiction writer and university professor says, “I’m not sure that I really have a personality”

Oates is referring to her regular, social personality, as seen by her husband and others. She says that what they see is just a facade, a host personality, which is gone when she is not with them.

But she either does not entirely recall, or chooses not to say, exactly what or who becomes apparent when she is alone, except that it has to do with the inner world of her creative mind, which is what she most enjoys.


Search “Oates” to see many very interesting past posts.

Thursday, January 23, 2020

Letters Submitted: Reasons for Rejection or Publication

Letters submitted to this site are automatically forwarded to me, so that I may click either “rejection” or “publication.”

REJECTION OF LETTERS
Unverified Public Figures: If a letter appears to be signed by a published author or any other public figure, how do I know that the letter writer is not an imposter? Letters from public figures must either include a relatively easy way for me to verify the writer’s identity or should be resubmitted anonymously.

Therapy sought: If a letter writer seems to seek a personal diagnosis, a therapeutic response, or a professional referral, the letter must be rejected, because this is not a therapy site.

PUBLICATION OF LETTERS
Addresses issues of a post: The letter asks relevant questions, disputes facts or inferences, and/or adds relevant facts and ideas.

Teaches me something: about literature, fiction writing, and/or psychology. There is a lot I don’t know yet.

Wednesday, January 22, 2020

Name Index
Use Search Box to search them

Kobo Abe
Chinua Achebe
André Aciman
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Edward Albee
Kaveh Akbar
Laura Albert
Dolly Alderton
Louisa May Alcott
Christine Alexander
Isabel Allende
Martin Amis
Sherwood Anderson
Nancy C. Andreasen
V. C. Andrews
Maya Angelou
William Archer
John Ashbery
Isaac Asimov
Jami Attenberg
Margaret Atwood
Edward Aubyn
Ashley Audrain
Jane Austen
Paul Auster
Fredrik Backman
Mikhail Bakhtin
Gerbrand Bakker
David Baldacci
James Baldwin
Honoré de Balzac
Steve Bannon
John Banville
Pat Barker
Deirdre Barrett
J.M. Barrie
Elif Batuman
L. Frank Baum
Saul Bellow
Marie Benedict (Heather Terrell)
A. K. Benjamin
Brit Bennett
Lucinda Berry
Thomas E. Bevan
Claire Bien
Imogen Binnie
Eugene L. Bliss
Harold Bloom
Judy Blume
Jorge Luis Borges
Paul Bowles
C. J. Box
Jennifer Finney Boylan
T. C. Boyle
Ray Bradbury
Stephen E. Braude
Bertolt Brecht
Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Charlotte Brontë
Emily Brontë
Anita Brookner
David Brooks
Margaret Wise Brown
Sandra Brown
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Pearl Buck
Frank Budgen
Mikhail Bulgakov
John Bunyan
James Lee Burke
Anna Burns
Octavia Butler
Samuel Butler
Julia Cameron
Lan Cao
Truman Capote
Orson Scott Card
John le Carré
Alice Carrière
Lewis Carroll
Casanova
Vera Caspary
Willa Cather
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Michael Chabon
Raymond Chandler
Lan Samantha Chang
Mary Chase
Stephen Chbosky
John Cheever
Anton Chekhov
Lee Child
Kate Chopin
Agatha Christie
Connie Chung
Bill Clinton
Hillary Clinton
J. M. Coetzee
Gail Collins
Vivian Conan
Michael Connelly
Joseph Conrad
Frank Conroy
Patricia Cornwell
Michael Cunningham
Rachel Cusk
Roald Dahl
BJ Daniels
Kathryn Davis
Viola Davis
Osamu Dazai
Simone de Beauvoir
Daniel Defoe
J. P. Delaney
Delphine de Vigan
Hernan Diaz
James Dickey
Charles Dickens
Emily Dickinson
Joan Didion
Annie Dillard
E. L. Doctorow
Sarah Domet
Wendy Doniger
Fyodor Dostoevsky
W. E. B. Du Bois
Maureen Dowd
Alexandre Dumas
Alexandre Dumas fils
Daphne du Maurier
George du Maurier
Marguerite Duras
Maeve Duvally
Bob Dylan
Albert Einstein
Umberto Eco
Elisabeth Egan
Jennifer Egan
Maggy Van Eijk
Deborah Eisenberg
George Eliot
T. S. Eliot
Ralph Ellison
Lucy Ellmann
Ashley Elston
Akwaeke Emezi
Hualing Nieh Engle
Paul Engle
Jeffrey Eugenides
Euripides
Janet Evanovich
James Fadiman
Susan Faludi
William Faulkner
Christine Feehan
Elena Ferrante
Jeanne Fery
Sally Field
Henry Fielding
A. J. Finn
Alex Finlay
Sebastian Fitzek
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Gustave Flaubert
Ian Fleming
Théodore Flournoy
Gillian Flynn
Lucy Foley
Ford Madox Ford
Richard Ford
E. M. Forster
Carley Fortune
Jon Fosse
Samuel Fosso
John Fowles
Benjamin Franklin
Jonathan Franzen
Marilyn French
Tana French
Esther Freud
Sigmund Freud
Robert Frost
Patric Gagne PhD
Neil Gaiman
Mary Gaitskill
Lisa Gardner
Bonnie Garmus
Romain Gary
Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Robyn Gigl
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
God
Goethe
Nikolai Gogol
Goh Poh Seng
Arthur Golden
William Golding
William Goldman
Allegra Goodman
Alison Gopnik
Edward Gorey
Robert Gottlieb
Sue Grafton
Winston Graham
Nina de Gramont
Joanne Greenberg
Graham Greene
Andrew Sean Greer
Tom Grimes
Laura Griffin
John Grisham
Jordan Gruber
Guy Gunaratne
George Gurdjieff
Abdulrazak Gurnah
Ian Hacking
Tessa Hadley
Matt Haig
Lisa Halliday
Daniel Halpern
Mohsin Hamid
Charles Hamilton (aka Frank Richards)
Dashiell Hammett
Knut Hamsun
Tom Hanks
Kristin Hannah
Thomas Hardy
Jim Harrison
Joy Harjo
Kamala Harris
Paula Hawkins
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Joseph Heller
Sally Hepworth
Brian Herbert
Frank Herbert
Mick Herron
Ernest Hemingway
Emily Henry
Sarah Hepola
Hermann Hesse
Carl Hiaasen
Patricia Highsmith
Alfred Hitchcock
E.T.A. Hoffmann
James Hogg
Elizabeth Holmes
Sherlock Holmes
Homer
Gail Honeyman
Colleen Hoover
Khaled Hosseini
Ana Huang
Victor Hugo
Zora Neale Hurston
Siri Hustvedt
Aldous Huxley
Henrik Ibsen
John Irving
Kazuo Ishiguro
Jenny Jackson
Lisa Jackson
Michael R. Jackson
Shirley Jackson
Henry James
P. D. James
William James
Leslie Jamison
Pierre Janet
N. K. Jemisin
Joan of Arc
Daisy Johnson
James Joyce
Carl Gustave Jung
Franz Kafka
Frida Kahlo
Mary Karr
Susanna Kaysen
John Keats
Claire Keegan
Ken Kesey
Jonas Hassen Khemiri
Kierkegaard (Soren Kierkegaard)
Stephen King
Barbara Kingsolver
Maxine Hong Kingston
Rudyard Kipling
Adam Kirsch
Katie Kitamura
Richard P. Kluft
John Knowles

Hildur Knútsdóttir

Bessel A. van der Kolk, M.D.
Dean Koontz
Nicole Krauss
Ethan Kross
William Kent Krueger
Milan Kundera
R. O. Kwon.
Jhumpa Lahiri
Nicole Lamy
Stieg Larsson
Victor LaValle
Vicki Laveau-Harvie
John le Carré
Chang-rae Lee
Harper Lee
Legion
Ursula K. Le Guin
Ben Lerner
Betsy Lerner
Doris Lessing
Jonathan Lethem
Tracy Letts
Deborah Levy
Dorothy Otnow Lewis, M.D.
Clarice Lispector
Sue Liston
David Lodge
Selma Lagerlöf
Rebecca Loncraine
Anita Loos
Ross Macdonald
Machado de Assis
Naguib Mahfouz
Rebecca Makkai
Daniel Mallory
Thomas Mann
Hilary Mantel

Kamala Markandaya

Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Yann Martel
Daniel Mason
W. Somerset Maugham
James McBride 
Cormac McCarthy
Mary McCarthy
Alice McDermott
Ian McEwan
May-May Meijer
Herman Melville
Melania
Daphne Merkin
Stephenie Meyer
Alex Michaelides
Fern Michaels
A. A. Milne
Czeslaw Milosz
Vladimir Mirodan
Margaret Mitchell
Katia Mitova
Patrick Modiano
Toni Morrison
Elsa Morante
Ottessa Moshfegh
John Mullan
Paul Murray
Dr. Jerry Mungadze
Alice Munro
Haruki Murakami
Iris Murdoch
Elon Musk
Vladimir Nabokov
V. S. Naipaul
R. K. Narayan
Judith Newman
Celeste Ng
Viet Thanh Nguyen
Thomas Van Nortwick
Ann Oakley
Joyce Carol Oates
Odysseus
Jenny Offill
Michael Ondaatje
Eugene O’Neill
Onno van der Hart
George Orwell
Delia Owens
Helen Oyeyemi
Robert B. Oxnam
Chuck Palahniuk
Orhan Pamuk
Ann Patchett
Katherine Paterson
James Patterson
Pamela Paul
Walker Percy
Fernando Pessoa
Philoctetes
Pablo Picasso
Jodi Picoult
Harold Pinter
Luigi Pirandello
Jayne Anne Phillips
Sylvia Plath
Carole Brooks Platt
Edgar Allan Poe
Richard Powers
Morton Prince
Bill Pronzini
Francine Prose
Marcel Proust
Vladimir Putin
Frank W. Putnam, M. D.
Thomas Pynchon
Ann Radcliffe
Pauline Réage
Taylor Jenkins Reid
Erich Maria Remarque
Ruth Rendell
Stanley Renshon
Jean Rhys
Anne Rice
Samuel Richardson
Nora Roberts
Marilynne Robinson
Fred Rogers
Marius Romme
Sally Rooney
Jeneva Rose
Philip Roth
J.K. Rowling
Arundhati Roy
Benjamin Rush
Salman Rushdie
Richard Russo
Kate Elizabeth Russell
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Elyn Saks
Riley Sager
J. D. Salinger
Lucy Sante
Sophie Santos
José Saramago
Vedat Sar
Jean-Paul Sartre
George Saunders
Michel Sauret
Dorothy L. Sayers
Dorothy L. Sayers
Morton Schatzman
John Schu
Philip Schultz
Lucy Score
Sir Walter Scott
Lisa Scottoline
Marguerite Sechehaye
Anne Sexton
Shakespeare
Dani Shapiro
Gail Sheehy
Sidney Sheldon
Mary Shelley
Georges Simenon
Neil Simon
S. E. Hinton
Isaac Bashevis Singer
Karin Slaughter
Christine Smallwood
Jane Smiley
Betty Smith
Helene Smith
Rosamond Smith
Will Smith
Zadie Smith
Socrates
Anna Solomon
Susan Sontag
Sophocles
Muriel Spark
Nicholas Sparks
Herbert Spiegel
Steven Spielberg
Carolyn S. Spiro, M.D.
Danielle Steel
John Steinbeck
Stendhal
Mary Stewart
Robert Louis Stevenson
Bram Stoker
August Strindberg
Elizabeth Strout
Douglas Stuart
John Sutherland
Jonathan Swift
Amy Tan
Donna Tartt
Marjorie Taylor
Tori Telfer
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Josephine Tey
W. M. Thackeray
Paul Theroux
Brad Thor
Amy Tintera
James Tiptree, Jr.
(Alice B. Sheldon)
Olga Tokarczuk
Colm Tóibin
J.R.R. Tolkien
Leo Tolstoy
P. L. Travers (Mary Poppins)
Helen of Troy
Donald Trump
Mary L. Trump
Laura Turner
Mark Twain
Anne Tyler
Mario Vargas Llosa
Jules Verne
Voltaire
Kurt Vonnegut
Valentine Vox
Warwick Wadlington
Pamela Spiro Wagner
Phoebe Sparrow Wagner
Alice Walker
Herschel Walker
David Foster Wallace
Robert James Waller
Andrea Wang
Jesmyn Ward
Ruth Ware
Robert Penn Warren
Patricia Waugh
Mary Watkins
W. E. B. Du Bois
Fay Weldon
H. G. Wells
Eudora Welty
Tara Westover
Edith Wharton
E. B. White
Patrick White
Colson Whitehead
Walt Whitman
Oscar Wilde
John Williams
Katie Williams
Tennessee Williams
Thomas Williams
Edmund Wilson
Jacqueline Winspear
Kevin Wilson
Jeanette Winterson
Cherise Wolas
James Wood
Sue Woolfe
Virginia Woolf
William Wordsworth
Herman Wouk
Richard Wright
Rebecca Yarros
W. B. Yeats
Matthew Zapruder
Gabrielle Zevin