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, October 30, 2020

“Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years 1865-1871” by Joseph Frank: Raskolnikov’s split personality was caused by radical ideology


Volume four of this five-volume biography acknowledges that the protagonist of Crime and Punishment appeared to have a split personality, “But Razumikhan’s description, it should be noted, is carefully limited only to ‘the last year and a half,’ that is, exactly the period when Raskolnikov had fallen under the influence of radical ideas” (1, p. 123).


However, this detailed biography does describe a number of Raskolnikov’s remarkable, unexplained, memory gaps, which are a cardinal symptom of multiple personality, and could not have been caused by radical ideas.


I will read Crime and Punishment.


1. Joseph Frank. Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years 1865-1871. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1995. 

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