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, January 21, 2022

In Multiple Personification, a proposed new name for multiple personality or dissociative identity, personification is used as in definitions 4-6 (1):


personification  1. the attribution of a personal nature or character to inanimate objects or abstract notions, esp. as a rhetorical figure.  2. the representation of a thing or abstraction in the form of a person, as in art.  3. the person or thing embodying a quality or the like; an embodiment or incarnation:  He is the personification of tact.  4. an imaginary person or creature conceived or figured to represent a thing or abstraction.  5. the act of personifying.  6. a character portrayal or representation in a dramatic or literary work.


Writers create characters with their normal version of multiple personality, multiple personality trait, as previously discussed.


1. Random House. Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, Second Edition. New York, Random House, 1986-2001.

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