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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Thursday, May 12, 2022

“The Idiot” by Elif Batuman (post 1): Inadvertent allusions to multiple personality in the opening


“The year is 1995, and Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, arrives for her freshman year at Harvard…” (1, back cover). A Bulgarian freshman borrows her copy of Dostoevsky’s The Double (1, pp. 7-8).  And “It was hard to decide on a literature class. Everything the professor said seemed to be somehow beside the point. You wanted to know why Anna [Karenina] had to die, and instead they told you…the implication was that it was somehow naïve to want to talk about anything interesting, or to think that you would ever know anything important…I wanted to know what books really meant…[My mother] believed, and I did, too, that every story had a central meaning. You could get that meaning, or you could miss it completely” (1, p.16).


Search Dostoevsky, The Double, and Anna Karenina. The only association I have to Turkey is that there is an eminent Turkish psychiatrist (2) who is prominent in the study of multiple personality. But I don’t know if this novel will intentionally raise the issue of multiple personality.


1. Elif Batuman. The Idiot. Penguin Books, 2017.

2. Wikipedia. Vedat Sar, MD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vedat_%C5%9Ear 

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