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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Sunday, June 12, 2022

“James Patterson by James Patterson” (post 5): Why would he rather think of himself as “mildly schizophrenic” than as having multiple personality?


Like many people, Patterson may think of multiple personality as crazy.


But it is schizophrenia, not multiple personality, that is classified as a psychosis. And novelists, most of whom have multiple personality trait (not the clinical disorder) usually know, very well, the difference between their fiction and reality (although, while writing, their fiction may sometimes feel “more real than real,” like virtual reality).


And unlike delusional, schizophrenic voices, the voices of multiple personality (which are voices of alternate personalities) sometimes give good advice, and may even function as a writer’s muse.


1. James Patterson. James Patterson by James Patterson: The Stories of my Life. New York, Little, Brown and Company, 2022. 

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