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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Friday, September 10, 2021

“The Pilgrim’s Progress” by John Bunyan (post 4): Both alternate personalities and God may communicate with a person who is asleep


Post 3 quoted from a study of dreams in multiple personality: 


“As an alter [alternate personality] of another person said, ‘I show her [the host personality] images a lot, even while she’s awake, of memories and things I feel and want to do. But she sees them best if I show them to her while she’s dreaming.’ ”


In the second part of The Pilgrim’s Progress, I find a similar point about communicating with a person while the person is asleep:


“We need not, when a-Bed, lie awake to talk with God; he can visit us while we sleep, and cause us to hear his Voice. Our Heart oft times wakes when we sleep, and God can speak to that, either by Words, by Proverbs, by Signs, and Similitudes, as well as if one was awake” (1, p. 210).


1. John Bunyan. The Pilgrim’s Progress [1678/1684]. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1966/2008.

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