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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Thursday, January 21, 2021

“Villette” (post 1) by Charlotte Brontë (post 13): Lucy Snowe, first-person narrator-protagonist, gets thought from, converses with, “solemn stranger”


I have already discussed Charlotte Brontë and Jane Eyre in a dozen past posts, but Villette is said to be her “most autobiographical novel” (1, p. xxxv). I have just started it.


Near the beginning of this 496-page novel, Lucy Snowe, 22, walking alone on a clear, frosty night, and having just seen the Aurora Borealis, converses with a thought or voice that had been inserted into her mind by an unseen “solemn stranger”:


“But this solemn stranger influenced me otherwise than through my fears. Some new power it seemed to bring. I drew energy with the keen, low breeze that blew on its path. A bold thought was sent to my mind; my mind was made strong to receive it.


“ ‘Leave this wilderness,’ it was said to me, ‘and go out hence.’

“ ‘Where?’ was the query.


“I had not very far to look: gazing from this country parish in the flat, rich middle of England—I mentally saw within reach what I had never yet beheld with my bodily eyes; I saw London” (1, pp. 43-44).


Comment

Some readers might interpret the above as a literary metaphor. Some psychiatrists might see it as thought-insertion, a “first-rank symptom” of schizophrenia. In the case of a great fiction writer like Charlotte Brontë, I am inclined to agree with the finding that first-rank symptoms are often diagnostic clues to multiple personality (2).


If her thought or voice comes from an alternate personality, what is its name? It may have no name. Many alternate personalities don’t. So they are referred to descriptively. Brontë calls this one the “solemn stranger.”


1. Charlotte Brontë. Villette [1853]. Edited by Margaret Smith and Herbert Rosengarten. Introduction and Notes by Tim Dolan. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000/2008.

2. Kluft, R. P. (1987). First-rank symptoms as a diagnostic clue to multiple personality disorder. The American Journal of Psychiatry, 144(3), 293–298 https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1987-22128-001 

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