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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Monday, April 25, 2022

“The Limits of ‘Lived Experience’ ” by Pamela Paul: Limited Perspective


Pamela Paul, known until today as editor of The New York Times Book Review, is now a columnist for The Times, but she has not changed her perspective on multiple personality: she ignores it (1).


Persons with “multiple personality trait” (2) — probably 90% of fiction writers and up to 30% of the general public — imaginatively experience the world from the various perspectives (different genders, etc.) of their alternate personalities. Their virtual-reality experience may sometimes be, in the words of some fiction writers, “more real than real.”


1. Pamela Paul. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/24/opinion/lived-experience-empathy-culture.html

2. Kenneth A. Nakdimen, MD. https://multiplewriters.blogspot.com/

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