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.

— Share site with friends.

Friday, December 25, 2020

Sylvia Plath: Biography Mentions Multiple Personality


(Search “Plath” and “The Bell Jar” to see my past posts.)


After reading a review (1), I looked at the biography on Amazon, where only a limited number of pages can be seen. This is all I could find relevant to multiple personality:


“Years before her Smith College thesis on ‘the double,’ she was already interested in dualities” (2, p. 92).


“She had written in her journal of a similar ‘double’—a voice that wrecked and ridiculed her fragile self-confidence, ‘screaming, Traitor, sinner, imposter’…Plath wrote, in her thesis…the inner duality becomes a duel to the death’…(2, p. 352).


“Sylvia’s physical and mental health continued to deteriorate. She feared an impending breakdown that January as she read Shirley Jackson’s 1954 novel The Bird’s Nest, about a young woman with multiple personalities” (2, p. 394).


(Search "bird's nest" to see past posts.)


1. Daphne Merkin. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/27/books/review/red-comet-heather-clark-sylvia-plath.html

2. Heather Clark. Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath. New York, Knopf, 2020. 

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