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

William James in “Varieties of Religious Experience” (post 3) on “Pilgrim’s Progress” John Bunyan (post 5)


“He [John Bunyan] was a typical case of the psychopathic temperament, sensitive of conscience to a diseased degree, beset by doubts, fears and insistent ideas and victim of verbal automatisms, both motor and sensory. These were usually texts of Scripture which, sometimes damnatory and sometimes favorable, would come in a half-hallucinatory form as if they were voices, and fasten on his mind and buffet it between them like a shuttlecock. Added to this were a fearful melancholy, self-contempt, and despair…” (1, p. 176).


“For years together he was alternately haunted with texts of Scripture, now up and now down, but at last with an ever growing relief in his salvation through the blood of Christ…” (1, p. 207).


“Bunyan became a minister of the gospel, and in spite of his neurotic constitution, and of the twelve years he lay in prison for his non-conformity, his life was turned to active use. He was a peacemaker and a doer of good, and the immortal Allegory which he wrote has brought the very spirit of religious patience home to English hearts” (1, p. 208).


Comment

William James (1842-1910) is famous as both a philosopher (Pragmatism) and psychologist. One of his psychological interests was cases of multiple personality, which led him to this conclusion: “The same brain may subserve many conscious selves, either alternate or coexisting…” (2, p. 401). But in his brief discussion of Bunyan in his book on religious experience, he does not raise that issue.


However, James’ discussion of Bunyan is notable for this combination: a person with a basically “neurotic [nonpsychotic] constitution” has “half-hallucinatory [pseudopsychotic]…voices.” It is a combination suggestive of multiple personality.


1. William James. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature [1901-1902]. New York, The Modern Library, 1994.

2. William James. The Principles of Psychology [1890]. Volume One. New York, Dover Publications, 1950. 

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