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, November 13, 2020

Daniel Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe” (post 2): Crusoe’s “voice of conscience” is a quotable voice that has a mind of its own, a moral alternate personality


In post 1, I quoted a passage from the beginning of the novel in which Crusoe described his mind having multiple, independent points of view, which suggested to me that he may have heard voices. But at that point, he didn’t admit it, because he didn’t have a socially acceptable way of doing so.


One-third into the novel, Crusoe does have a socially acceptable way. As he becomes religious, he says that he hears the voice of conscience. And he actually quotes the voice at length (1, pp. 79-80).


Calling it his conscience allows him to say that he hears voices, but if anyone were to call him crazy, it would allow him to say he was speaking metaphorically.


Most people have a conscience, but only a minority of people hear it as a quotable voice in their head. And any rational, quotable voice that has a mind of its own is the voice of an alternate personality; which, in this case, is an alternate personality that upholds religion and morality.


1. Daniel Defoe. Robinson Crusoe [1719]. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008. 

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