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, August 18, 2020

“Persuasion” (post 2) by Jane Austen (post 5): Austen describes her protagonist as having double consciousness, each part with its own opinion

“Captain Wentworth must be out of sight. She left her seat, she would go, one half of her should not be always so much wiser than the other half, or always suspecting the other of being worse than it was…He was more obviously struck and confused by the sight of her, than she had ever observed before; he looked quite red…Still, however, she had enough to feel! It was agitation, pain, pleasure, a something between delight and misery (Vol. II, Ch. VII, 1., p. 332).

Two halves with opinions of each other and contrasting feelings suggest double consciousness (multiple personality) (each alternate personality seeming to have a sense of itself, with a mind and opinion of its own).

Am I taking the author’s words too literally? No, I am respecting the author’s ability to have chosen her words and said what she meant.

1. Jane Austen. Persuasion [1818]. Annotated by David M. Shapard. New York, Anchor Books, 2010.
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