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.

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Sunday, March 27, 2022

“It Ends with Us” (post 3) by Colleen Hoover (post 6): Lily’s husband assaults her while he has a memory gap


Lily, the protagonist, has recently opened a flower shop and married Ryle, a neurosurgeon.  She has promised herself never to become a physically abused wife like her mother.  But after the second time he assaults her, Ryle confesses that when he was six years old, he accidentally shot his brother to death and “since that happened, there are things I can’t control.  I get angry.  I black out.  I’ve been in therapy since I was six years old.  But it is not my excuse.  It is my reality…I don’t remember the moment I pushed you [down the stairs]…You are my wife.  I’m supposed to be the one who protects you from the monsters.  I’m not supposed to be one” (1, p. 241).


Search “memory gap” for past posts on this cardinal symptom of multiple personality.


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

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