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, March 14, 2021

“The Portrait of a Lady” (post 7) by Henry James: Isabel’s mind has a “capacity for ignorance” and her consciousness has “different parts”


The basic mental mechanism of multiple personality is dissociation (division of consciousness). If an alternate personality knows about something, but the host (regular) personality does not know about it, that is multiple personality’s capacity for ignorance.


“With all her love of knowledge she had a natural shrinking from raising curtains and looking in unlighted corners. The love of knowledge coexisted in her mind with the finest capacity for ignorance” (1, p. 205).


In dissociation, disturbing knowledge is not repressed into “the unconscious,” but is dissociated (split off, segregated) into an alternate consciousness. In other words, consciousness has different parts. And since these different parts, these alternate personalities, seem to have minds of their own, they can lead in different directions.


“Her consciousness was so mixed that she scarcely knew where the different parts of it would lead her…” (1, p. 289).


1. Henry James. The Portrait of a Lady [1881/1908]. Editing, Introduction, Notes by Roger Luckhurst. New York, Oxford University Press, 2009.

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