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 29, 2022

“Finding Me” a memoir by actress Viola Davis (post 2): “A huge part of me, my pathology, was a big secret…I had compartmentalized me”


“…deep inside there was a demon, and another part of me that was wrestling with the ‘alive’ me.  She, the demon, kept whispering, ‘You’re not good.’  But the other part, the fighter, the survivor, screamed back a resounding, ‘No!’” (1, p. 60).


“…happy moments would soon be followed by trauma—the rage of my dad’s alcoholic binges, violence, poverty, hunger, and isolation…I wished I could elevate out of my body.  Leave it.  One time, when I was about nine years old, I succeeded…I floated up to the ceiling, looking down at myself…Then I faced myself, staring directly into—me” (1, p. 70).


“…And eventually other inappropriate [sexual] behavior occurred that had a profound effect.  I compartmentalized much of this at the time.  I stored it in a place of my psyche that felt safely hidden.  By hiding it I could actually pretend it didn’t happen.  But it did” (1, p. 76).


“…A huge part of me, my pathology, was a big secret” (1, p.130).


“When I graduated from Rhode Island College, a voice somewhere far in the recesses of my psyche, which was always true, honest, and in hindsight, beautifully cognizant, that I didn’t have the courage to always listen to, but when I did, it served me perfectly, steered me to apply to a six-week summer program at Circle in the Square Theatre in New York City.  I got accepted…” (1, p. 135).


“Juilliard forced me to understand the power of my Blackness.  I spent so much of my childhood defending it, being ridiculed for it.  Then in college proving I was good enough.  I had compartmentalized me…” (1, p. 164).


1. Viola Davis. Finding Me (a memoir). New York, HarperOne/Ebony, 2022.

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