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 3): She is aware of two alternate personalities, but has not been diagnosed by her therapist


“…after being in therapy for seven years…I was thirty-eight…I always seemed to be carrying either the eight-year-old or the twenty-eight-year-old with me, as if I was calling on them to help me.  The eight-year-old was mad for not being acknowledged and the twenty-eight-year-old was dead” (1, pp. 232-233).


In multiple personality, child-aged personalities may be frozen in time, and like Peter Pan, never grow up; although, in therapy for multiple personality, if the goal is to merge all the personalities, the child-aged personalities may be age-progressed to the person’s actual age to prepare them for merger.


Personalities thought of as “dead” may only be inactive, and may be reactivated if their special talents or memories are needed.


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

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