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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Wednesday, May 25, 2022

“Losing the Atmosphere (a Memoir) by Vivian Conan (Chapter 1, “Two Mommies”): Multiple Personality May Run in Families


As a young child, the author had only one mother, but her mother apparently had a split personality. And to adapt, the author developed her own, corresponding, split personality. “It was as if I had two mommies: a love mommy and a hate mommy…When the mommy who loved me was there, I didn’t know about the mommy who hated me, and when the mommy who hated me was there, I didn’t know about the mommy who loved me” (1, p. 11).


Comment: Multiple personality disorder may run in families (2), apparently due to psychological adaptation of the younger generation to the behavior of the older generation.


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, Greenpoint Press, 2020.

2. Catherine A. Yeager MA, Dorothy Otnow Lewis MD. “The Intergenerational Transmission of Violence and Dissociation.” Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Clinics of North America, Volume 5, Issue 2, April 1996, Pages 393-430. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1056499318303730 

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