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, March 26, 2022

“It Ends with Us” (post 2) by Colleen Hoover (post 5): Dissociative (multiple personality) talk


“…too many pieces of me are invested in you now…” (1, p. 89).


“You make me want to be a different person…” (1, p. 93).


“I walked straight to the kitchen and I opened a drawer.  I grabbed the biggest knife I could find and…I don’t know how to explain it.  It was like I wasn’t even in my own body.  I could see myself walking across the kitchen with the knife in my hand…” (1, p. 154).


1. Colleen Hoover. It Ends with Us. New York, Atria, 2016.

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