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, January 10, 2021

“Shuggie Bain” by Douglas Stuart (post 2): Seven-year-old Shuggie experiences his doll, Daphne, as having feelings of her own


Ninety percent of fiction writers experience their characters as having minds of their own (1).


In multiple personality, alternate personalities, in essence, are imaginary people who are experienced as having minds of their own.


The way Shuggie relates to his doll, Daphne, shows Shuggie’s early inclination to have that kind of experience.


I’m up to page 126 in this 430-page novel, and there has just been an episode involving Shuggie and his doll. The narrator focuses on how the doll prompts an older boy to see and use Shuggie as homosexual. But of interest here is how Shuggie relates to his doll: not as just a transitional object like a security blanket, but as a person-like being with feelings of her own.


The narrator persistently refers to the doll as “Daphne” and not, as would seem more appropriate at times, as “the doll.”  And after the doll’s head had been submerged in water, Shuggie sees “she was smiling so he knew she was OK” (2, p. 120).


1. Taylor, M., Hodges, S. D., & Kohányi, A. (2003). The illusion of independent agency: Do adult fiction writers experience their characters as having minds of their own? Imagination, Cognition and Personality, 22(4), 361-380. https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/blogs.uoregon.edu/dist/7/8783/files/2014/07/TaylorHodgesKohanyi-130mpe0.pdf

2. Douglas Stuart. Shuggie Bain. New York, Grove Press, 2020. 

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