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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Monday, July 27, 2020

Mirrors Containing Multitudes in “Mary Poppins” by P. L. Travers (post 2): “you begin to feel you are not yourself but a whole crowd of somebody else”

As previously discussed in past posts, persons with multiple personality may see more than one person when they look in a mirror. Persons with clinical, multiple personality disorder, may see specific alternate personalities, which may be distressing. In contrast, persons with milder, nonclinical, multiple personality trait, may find what they see in a mirror to be intriguing.

“…they knew that the thing Mary Poppins liked doing best of all was looking in shop windows. They knew, too, that while they saw toys and books and holly-boughs and plum cakes, Mary Poppins saw nothing but herself reflected there…(1, p. 163).

“…if you look long enough…you begin to feel you are not yourself but a whole crowd of somebody else. Mary Poppins sighed with pleasure…when she saw three of herself…She thought it was such a lovely sight that she wished there had been a dozen of her or even thirty. The more Mary Poppins the better” (1, p. 28).

Search “mirrors” and “containing multitudes” for previous discussions related to other writers.

1. P. L. Travers. Mary Poppins [1934]. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1997.
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