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.

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Tuesday, August 9, 2022

“The Comedy of Errors” (post 2) by William Shakespeare: Was Hamlet’s fear of what may come after death merely his procrastination or also cultural?


Since reading his “To be, or not to be” soliloquy (1), I have always wondered, but my question appears to be answered by the second line of The Comedy of Errors:


"EGEON

    Proceed, Solinus, to procure my fall,

    And by the doom of death end woes and all" (2)


Added comment (same day): A possible explanation for the discrepancy in attitude toward the afterlife in those two plays is that they were written by different personalities, some who very much believed in ghosts, etc., and others who didn't.


1. Wikipedia. “To be, or not to be.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_be%2C_or_not_to_be

2. William Shakespeare. The Comedy of Errors. Edited by Charles Whitworth. Oxford World Classics. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002.

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