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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Saturday, September 19, 2020

“The Saga of Gösta Berling” by first woman Nobel novelist Selma Lagerlöf: A woman has two halves, one of which “stood and looked on with a cold sneer”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selma_Lagerl%C3%B6f

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6sta_Berling%27s_Saga


The personification of this character’s inhibitions inadvertently reveals that she had two personalities, one of which had “stood and looked on with a cold sneer.” It is an example of “gratuitous multiple personality”:


“When she loved—or whatever she did—it was as though half of her self stood and looked on with a cold sneer. She had longed for a passion to come and pull her along with it in wild recklessness. And now he had arrived, the mighty one. As she kissed Gösta Berling [a handsome defrocked minister] on the balcony, then for the first time she had forgotten herself…” (1, p. 82).


1. Selma Lagerlöf. The Saga of Gösta Berling [1891]. Translated by Paul Norlen. Introduction by George C. Schoolfield. New York, Penguin Books, 2009.

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