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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Sunday, September 12, 2021

“The Neon Rain” by James Lee Burke (post 2): Detective Robisheaux's self-destructive, alcoholic, "cunning" alternate personality


This is the first of the author’s most successful series of novels, featuring New Orleans police department detective Lieutenant Dave Robicheaux.


Detective Robicheaux says he used to have a serious drinking problem that involved binges ending in delirium tremens (1, p. 27). Looking back on those years, he makes this interesting comment:


“My years of drinking had taught me not to trust my unconscious, because it planned things for me in a cunning fashion that was usually a disaster for me, or for the people around me, or for all of us” (1, p. 81).


A part of a person’s mind that, out of the person’s awareness, plans things in a cunning fashion, against the interests of the person, is a persecutor alternate personality.


“At least half or more of MPD [multiple personality disorder] patients have alter personalities who see themselves in diametric conflict with the host personality. This group of alter personalities, sometimes referred to as ‘internal persecutors,’ will sabotage the patient’s life…” (2, p. 108).


1. James Lee Burke. The Neon Rain [1987]. London, Orion Books, 2013.

2. Frank W. Putnam, MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.

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