Novelists' Multiple Personality TRAIT: Key to Creativity

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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Friday, June 24, 2022

“Psycho” by Robert Bloch (post 1): As novel begins, protagonist has at least three personalities

Norman Bates argues with “Mother,” who demeans him as a forty-year-old “Mamma’s Boy.” However, rendered in italics, another voice advises him: "She’s an old woman, and not quite right in the head. If you keep on listening to her this way, you’ll end up not quite right in the head, either. Tell her to go back to her room…And she’d better go there fast, because if she doesn’t, this time you’re going to strangle her…"(1, p. 16).

Comment: So far, the novel differs from Hitchcock's movie in two ways. In the novel, Norman has more than two personalities, as do most people with multiple personality. Also, he is "plump" (like Hitchcock), unlike the actor Hitchcock cast for the part.

1. Robert Bloch. Psycho [1959]. New York, The Overlook Press, 2021.

Novelists' Multiple Personality TRAIT: Key to Creativity

Friday, June 24, 2022

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