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.

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Sunday, October 4, 2020

Donald Trump’s Hypnosis and Self-Hypnosis


As a psychiatrist who has written occasional posts here on President Trump, I was curious to see what thirty-seven mental health professionals had to say about him (1).


Most of the essays are about Trump, himself, but the editor excuses their inconclusiveness by saying that her aim was to shift “public discourse from diagnosis to dangerousness” (1, p. 11). They can’t agree on a specific diagnosis, but they do agree that he’s dangerous.


I was disappointed to find that none of the essays recognizes that Trump’s use of pseudonyms and his puzzling inconsistency could be clues to multiple personality.


However, my interest did perk up with the essay by Jerrold M. Post, M.D., “The Charismatic Leader-Follower Relationship and Trump’s Base.” He says, “The relationship between Trump and his hard-line followers represents a charismatic leader-follower relationship, whereby aspects of the leader’s psychology unlock, like a key, aspects of his follower’s psychology” (1, p. 387).


Dr. Post does not say that Trump is evil like Hitler, but does make a comparison in regard to their inadvertent use of hypnosis: “Observers of the mesmerizing effect of Hitler on his followers at the mass rallies have likened him to a hypnotist who placed his entire audience into a trance…And most striking of all, it is also autohypnosis, as Hitler himself apparently entered a trance state, mesmerized by the enraptured responses of his mesmerized followers” (1, p. 393).


1. Bandy X. Lee, M.D., M.Div. (Editor): The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump. Updated and Expanded Second Edition. New York, Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2017/2019.


So I googled Trump and hypnosis, and found this recent article in Fortune Magazine: “Donald Trump, master of hypnotism, used it on America, then himself”: https://fortune.com/2020/09/27/donald-trump-self-hypnotism-politics/ 

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