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

“Robinson Crusoe” by Daniel Defoe: Protagonist’s Mind a Multitude


I have just begun Robinson Crusoe, having previously read Defoe’s “Roxana” (search "Roxana").


At the opening, Robinson Crusoe is a young man, who, against parental advice, decides to go to sea. A ship he sails on sinks. This is how he thinks:


“…tho’ I had several times loud Calls from my Reason and my more composed Judgment to go home, yet I had not Power to do it. I know not what to call this…secret over-ruling Decree…Certainly nothing but some decreed unavoidable Misery attending, and which it is impossible for me to escape, could have push’d me forward against the calm Reasonings and Perswasions [sic] of my most retired Thoughts…” (1, p. 14).


His mind is a multitude of thoughts or voices: 1. his loud Reason, 2. his composed Judgment, 3. his powerless calm reasonings and persuasions, and 4. a maker of secret over-ruling Decrees, which it is impossible for Crusoe’s regular self to escape.


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

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