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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Friday, May 28, 2021

“Tell Me Your Dreams” by Sidney Sheldon (post 4): Novel ends with a false cure and a cheap twist


Ashley has been hospitalized for several years in a psychiatric hospital, and has been treated by psychiatrists who are alleged to be experts in multiple personality.


Yet they fail to integrate Ashley with her two alternate personalities, which should be the goal of treatment, because the true person is all the personalities combined.


Ashley says she feels like she has gotten rid of her alternate personalities, which means they are not gone, but incognito, and the psychiatrists have been fooled.


Ashley is discharged, and the novel ends with her softly singing a song that has always been Toni’s favorite (1, p. 363), meaning she is Toni, the murderous alternate personality, on her way to commit another murder.


1. Sidney Sheldon. Tell Me Your Dreams [1998]. New York, Grand Central Publishing, 2005.

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