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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Wednesday, July 20, 2022

“Saint Joan” by Bernard Shaw [Nobel Prize winner]: Shaw’s Preface shows he didn’t realize that Joan of Arc had multiple personality

“Joan’s voices and visions have played many tricks with her reputation. They have been held to prove that she was mad, that she was a liar and impostor, that she was a sorceress (she was burned for this), and finally that she was a saint. They do not prove any of these things; but the variety of the conclusions reached shew how little our matter-of-fact historians know about other people’s minds, or even about their own. There are people in the world whose imagination is so vivid that when they have an idea it comes to them as an audible voice, sometimes uttered by a visual figure…Joan must be judged a sane woman in spite of her voices because they never gave her any advice that might not have come to her from her mother wit…”(1, Preface, pp. 11-12).


“Joan was what Francis Galton and other modern investigators of human faculty call a visualizer…and…the street is full of normally sane people who have hallucinations of all sorts which they believe to be part of the normal permanent equipment of all human beings” (1, Preface, p. 18).


Comment: If Joan had only one personality, she would have remembered imagining and visualizing her voices, and so would not have thought these were persons independent of her, with minds of their own.


Shaw’s Saint Joan—who wore men's clothing to lead soldiers in battle, etc.—was probably one of Joan of Arc's alternate personalities.


1. Bernard Shaw. Saint Joan [1924]. London, Penguin Classics, 2003.

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