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, April 1, 2022

“Educated” by Tara Westover (post 2): At Cambridge University, Tara has a memory gap and looks like she is impersonating someone else


My professor said to me, “I have been teaching at Cambridge for thirty years…and this is one of the best essays I’ve read”…and he “must have said more about [my] essay but I heard nothing…I don’t remember leaving the clock tower, or how I passed the afternoon” (1, p. 240).  Another professor later said to me, “You act like someone who is impersonating someone else” (1, p. 242).


Comment:  In multiple personality, when an alternate personality takes over, it may look like another person who is impersonating (looks like) the regular person, because, obviously both personalities have the same body.


1. Tara Westover. Educated (a memoir). New York, Random House, 2018.

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