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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Sunday, August 8, 2021

“The Many Meanings of Meilan” by Andrea Wang: Mentally well Chinese American girl “contains multitudes,” meaning she has multiple personality trait


In this book review, the protagonist is described as containing multitudes and as “fracturing her identity into Mist, who knows how to be invisible; Basket, the carrier of her parents’ dreams; and Blue, who acknowledges her true thoughts and emotions” (1).


But it appears that neither the Times, the author, nor the reviewer saw this as having anything to do with multiple personality, possibly because the girl was not mentally ill, and they were not aware that multiple personality has a mentally well version, multiple personality trait.


1. Jean Kwok. “A Chinese American Girl Learns That Her Name Contains Multitudes.” The New York Times, August 6, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/06/books/review/andrea-wang-the-many-meanings-of-meilan.html

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