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.

— If you read only recent posts, you miss most of what this site has to offer.

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Saturday, April 2, 2022

“Educated” by Tara Westover (post 4): “I was two people, a fractured mind”


At the end of this memoir, the author explains why she was finally able to break away from the malignant influence of her father.  In the past, when she would visit his home, she would look into a mirror there, but this time “I was unable to climb through the mirror and send out my sixteen-year-old self in my place.  Until that moment she had always been there…I was still her.  At best I was two people, a fractured mind.  She was inside, and emerged whenever I crossed the threshold of my father’s house.  That night I called on her and she didn’t answer…She stayed in the mirror” (1, pp. 328-329).


Persons with multiple personality may see alternate personalities when they look in the mirror.


Search “mirrors” for past posts.


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

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