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 18, 2021

“The Intuitionist” by Colson Whitehead (post 3): Lila Mae’s secret, angry “part” puts its hardened face on


In a peculiar passage, the protagonist, Lila Mae, is described as putting on a face: “Dressed, she’s in front of the mirror. Armed. She puts her face on. In her case, not a matter of cosmetics, but will. How to make such a sad face hard? It took practice…feeling and testing which muscles in her face pained under application of concerted tension…A caricature of strength…This register of discomfort became the standard for all the muscles in her face…Her face is on” (1 p. 57).


My interpretation of the above, that her hardened face is the face of an angry alternate personality, is based on the novel’s previous page, which speaks of Lila Mae as having a secret, angry “part”: “A secret part of her wanted…an outlet for her anger. It was rare that she felt this way, relishing violence” (1, p. 56). Persons with undiagnosed multiple personality often think of their alternate personalities as being secret “parts.”


1. Colson Whitehead. The Intuitionist. New York, Anchor Books, 2000.

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