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.

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Monday, May 30, 2022

“Losing the Atmosphere” by Vivian Conan (post 3): Missing memory gaps may make this memoir misleading


In post 1, Vivian spoke of having “two Mommies” in childhood, a love mommy and a hate mommy, but her mother usually seems benevolent in the rest of the memoir, so I wonder if Vivian might have done things in childhood to anger her mother, then lied about it, because she had a memory gap for doing it, which is why some people with multiple personality have had a reputation for being a liar in childhood.  Search “lying.”


Neither her mother nor anyone else who has known Vivian is ever asked if they know Vivian to have done things she didn’t remember. [Maybe her mother thought there were "two Vivians."]


While there may be exceptional cases without memory gaps, this memoir may be misleading regarding the issue.


1. Vivian Conan. Losing the Atmosphere, a Memoir: A Baffling Disorder, a Search for Help, and the Therapist Who Understood. Afterword by Jeffery Smith, MD. New York, N.Y., Greenpoint Press, 2020.


Added next day: The author says she attended a writers' workshop for many years for help in writing this memoir, and that one of her alternate personalities is a fiction writer. Her therapist, with his patient's permission, should have interviewed people who knew her. Did he?

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