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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Friday, July 31, 2020

P. L. Travers, author of “Mary Poppins” (post 7): Brief Biographical Notes on Her Name and Sense of Identity

She was born Helen Lyndon Goff in Australia in 1899 of parents originally from England. Her father, Travers Robert Goff, died when she was seven. She later used his first name for her pseudonym.

She changed her name about 1921, when her acting career required a stage name. She thought that “Pamela Travers” was a better name for an actress than “Lyndon Goff.” Thereafter, she almost never referred to herself by her actual birth name (1).

At fifty-one, Pamela “had absorbed all the theories of the pundits on what Mary Poppins actually meant. She began to mix Gurdjieffian ideas [see below] into Poppin’s adventures and personality; the nanny was more than ever a guru, or seer, and seeker of spiritual truths. Pamela thought Mary Poppins in the Park gave ‘certain clues’ that the other books did not. It was her favorite in the Poppins series as the book carried certain ideas she loved. Among them is the nature of identity, our real selves, and other selves. Pamela was fixated on shadows, doppelgangers and duality, partly because of her own complex identity, but also because the truth about her son and his twin was locked stubbornly in her mind. Mary Poppins in the Park is peppered with references to twins, triplets and shadows, and other selves of every kind (2, pp. 236-237).

“Gurdjieff taught that most humans do not possess a unified consciousness and thus live their lives in a state of hypnotic ‘waking sleep,’ but that it is possible to awaken to a higher state of consciousness and achieve full human potential” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Gurdjieff .

1. Paul Brody. The Real Life Mary Poppins: The Life and Times of P. L. Travers. BookCaps Study Guides, 2013.
2. Valerie Lawson. Mary Poppins, She Wrote: The Life of P. L. Travers [1999]. New York, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2013.
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