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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Saturday, September 11, 2021

New York Times’ featured review of Sally Rooney’s “Beautiful World, Where Are You” has discordant illustrations and insufficient psychological curiosity 


The shadowless illustrations accompanying this featured New York Times book review contradict the review’s first sentence: “Sally Rooney’s new novel, ‘Beautiful World, Where Are You,’ has the arid, intense melancholy of a Hopper painting.” Did the illustrator and editor disagree with the reviewer?


”https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/07/books/review/beautiful-world-where-are-you-sally-rooney.html


The remainder of the review’s first paragraph says that one of the two main characters is recovering from a mental breakdown, and that the other main character has a childlike delusion. But the rest of the review minimizes these opening-paragraph-important psychological issues.


The lack of a question mark at the end of the novel’s title is not a typographical error of this post, is not mentioned in the review, and may represent another unexplored psychological issue.


Novels are often essentially about the psychology of their characters. Book reviewers do not have to be psychologists, but they should have more psychological curiosity.

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