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.

— If you read only recent posts, you miss most of what this site has to offer.

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Monday, June 20, 2022

Alfred Hitchcock: With films like “Psycho,” “Rebecca,” and “Strangers on a Train,” his biography’s index should have included “multiple personality”

Even Wikipedia knows that Norman Bates in Psycho has multiple personality (1). My past posts on the authors of novels Rebecca and Strangers on a Train explain why I think they involve multiple personality, too. So I’m surprised to see that the index of a recent biography on Hitchcock has no entry for split personality or multiple personality (2).


Hitchcock’s making multiple movies based on novels involving multiple personality doesn’t necessarily mean that he, personally, had multiple personality, but it should have been enough to arouse a biographer’s interest and the interest of reviewers of that biography.


Search “Patricia Highsmith” (Strangers on a Train), “Daphne du Maurier” (Rebecca) and “Rebecca.”  [a related novelist, George du Maurier, wrote the multiple personality novel, Trilby, introducing the famous character, Svengali]


1. Wikipedia. "Psycho (novel)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psycho_(novel)

2. Edward White. The Twelve Lives of Alfred Hitchcock: An Anatomy of the Master of Suspense. New York, W. W. Norton, 2021.

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