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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Sunday, December 13, 2020

John le Carré: New York Times obituary notes his most autobiographical novel, whose protagonist’s multiple personality has been discussed here


“He was a best seller many times over, and at least a half dozen of his novels — including 'A Perfect Spy' (1986), which Philip Roth pronounced ‘the best English novel since the war’ — can be considered classics…


“ ‘A Perfect Spy’ (1986), Mr. le Carré’s most autobiographical work, tells the story of…a double agent with a con man father modeled after le Carré’s own, and how the two deceive and are deceived by each other in an intricate skein of lies…” (1).


Please see my two 2016 posts on John le Carré and “A Perfect Spy.” Search “carré” (include the accent mark over the é).


1. Sarah Lyall. Obituary of John le Carré. New York Times. December 13, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/13/books/john-le-carre-dead.html

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