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.

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Thursday, March 25, 2021

Fernando Pessoa (post 3): If Pessoa truly had multiple personality, with many alternate personalities, why aren’t any of them nameless?


At the end of post 2, I questioned whether Pessoa truly had multiple personality, because the editor/translator Richard Zenith had written that the alternate personalities were sometimes inconsistent, which would be atypical.


What else strikes me when I look at the Pessoa entry in Wikipedia is that he had so many alternate personalities and none of them is nameless: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernando_Pessoa


In many past posts, I have repeatedly said that namelessness of alternate personalities is common in multiple personality. The reason is that most alternate personalities spend most of their time inside, behind-the-scenes, with a named, host personality out front. And there are usually some who don’t need names, because they rarely come out, or they come out only when the person is alone, or they always come out incognito. And even when they do have a name, they may not like to reveal it, because they feel it gives people too much power over them. Multiple personality is designed to keep itself secret.


Either my clinical experience with multiple personality is too limited to encompass a case like Pessoa’s, or the list of his alternate personalities is incomplete, or his diagnosis of multiple personality is invalid. 

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