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.

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Sunday, April 18, 2021

“House of Seven Gables” (post 2) by Hawthorne (post 6): At the end, Clifford is quickly recalled to life, like Dr. Manette in Dickens’ “Tale of Two Cities”


Clifford’s rather sudden recovery from his puzzlingly inconsistent, childlike imbecility, tends to support my diagnosis of multiple personality. But why would Hawthorne give Clifford this condition?


Although it is possible for persons with multiple personality since childhood to commit crimes and go to prison (1), people do not get multiple personality from being imprisoned as adults.


So why do Hawthorne and Dickens make the same mistake, and imagine that Clifford and Dr. Manette could get multiple personality from being imprisoned as adults?


Because Hawthorne and Dickens were fiction writers, and multiple personality was their thing.


1. Dorothy Otnow Lewis, MD., et al. Objective Documentation of Child Abuse and Dissociation in 12 Murderers With Dissociative Identity Disorder. American J Psychiatry, Dec 1, 1997. https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/ajp.154.12.1703

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