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, May 30, 2021

“Therapy” by Sebastian Fitzek: Psychological thriller may be wrong on schizophrenia, but right on writers


The protagonist, Dr. Larenz, is a psychiatrist, and the most mentioned mental illness is schizophrenia. But the novel’s concept of schizophrenia may be mistaken. For example, it says “Victor’s schizophrenia made him suggestible” (1, p. 287). But if a patient diagnosed with schizophrenia were particularly suggestible or hypnotizable, I would question the diagnosis, and consider a dissociative disorder instead.


Anna Glass says, “But I’m a writer, Dr. Larenz. It’s my curse. My characters come alive. I only have to imagine a person, and I see them, hear them, and sometimes even speak to them. I create them, and they walk into my life” (1, pp. 33-34). “On the one hand, I knew Charlotte wasn’t real…On the other, she was standing right beside me” (1, p. 56).


1. Sebastian Fitzek. Therapy [2006]. Translated from German by Sally-Ann Spencer. New York, St. Martin’s Press, 2009. 

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