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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Wednesday, July 28, 2021

“Invisible Guests” by Mary Watkins: Falsely says good, normal “imaginal dialogue” is not multiple personality (misunderstood as “sequential monologue”)


Note: Search "Mary Watkins" for a good past post from 2016. Other than her multiple personality misunderstanding (which many people have), her book is worthy of attention.


Misunderstood Multiple Personality

“Whereas psychoanalytic and developmental theories advocate a developmental unification of the various imaginal personae over time, a perspective which valued dramatic thought would struggle to maintain a multiplicity. Contrary to fearful expectation, this multiplicity of characters in an individual’s experience would not resemble a pathological state of ‘multiple personality.’ In the latter there is no imaginal dialogue, only sequential monologue. The person identifies with or is taken over by various characters in a sequential fashion. The ego is most often unaware of the other voices. It is paradoxical that the illness multiple personality is problematic precisely because of its singleness of voice at any one moment, not because of its multiplicity” (1, pp. 104-105).


Actual Multiple Personality

While it is true that therapy of multiple personality aims to increase dialogue between the host personality (which is least in the know) and the alternate personalities, there is already dialogue before treatment. The host personality may hear voices of, and get into arguments with, alternate personalities. And alternate personalities are often in dialogue with each other. It is the job of protector personalities to be aware of what is going on with the personality that it is protecting. And since persons with multiple personality rarely have only two personalities, often have a dozen, and sometimes many more, there is a lot of co-consciousness and interaction going on, though most of it is behind-the-scenes. Personalities alternate only in regard to which one is most overt. Multiple personality should be understood as involving multiple simultaneous consciousness.


1. Mary Watkins. Invisible Guests: The Development of Imaginal Dialogues. Hillsdale New Jersey, The Analytic Press/Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1986.

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