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, July 10, 2022

“The Magic Mountain” by Thomas Mann (post 4): Give the author credit for insight into his own creative process.


For those who thought that in post 3 I misread Mann’s reflections on his creative process, I recommend that you reread what I quoted (post 3) from what he published in an essay (1).


Without his putting a label on it—because he was not mentally ill, didn’t have multiple personality disorder, and the term for its normal version, “multiple personality trait,” had not yet been coined—Mann said that he had the two main features of multiple personality: 1. Memory gaps, due to, 2. Thinking, productive parts of the person’s mind, of which the person’s regular self is not always aware or in possession.


If Thomas Mann, after winning the Nobel Prize, could be modest about his understanding of his creative process, you should be, too, and give him the credit for personal insight that he deserves.


1. Thomas Mann. The Making of “The Magic Mountain.” The Atlantic, January 1953 Issue. 

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