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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Monday, May 31, 2021

“The Twin” by Gerbrand Bakker (post 1): Do authors and readers know that an identical twin character raises the issue of multiple personality?


A person’s alternate personalities may or may not look different to each other, but since, objectively, they share the same body, then, to other people, they all look identical, like identical twins.


The relation between twins and multiple personality is almost appreciated in mythology, since “Twins in mythology are often cast as two halves of the same whole…They can represent another aspect of the self, a doppelgänger…” (Wikipedia).


And literary tropes like the evil twin and the double come close to appreciating multiple personality, but usually don’t do so explicitly.


I have just started Gerbrand Bakker’s The Twin (1), an award-winning novel in which the protagonist is an identical twin.


But my preliminary search finds that neither the author’s video (2) nor Wikipedia (3) nor reviews (4) see any connection between making this protagonist an identical twin and multiple personality.


1. Gerbrand Bakker. The Twin [2006]. Translated from the Dutch by David 

Colmer. Brooklyn NY, Archipelago Books, 2009.

2. Gerbrand Bakker video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZkSaUBlWCw

3. Wikipedia. The Twin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twin_(novel)

4. Complete-review. The Twin. https://www.complete-review.com/reviews/niederld/bakkerg.htm#ours 

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