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.

— If you read only recent posts, you miss most of what this site has to offer.

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Saturday, September 3, 2022

“Dangerous Charisma: The Political Psychology of Donald Trump and His Followers” by Jerrold M. Post, MD, “The CIA’s Original Psychological Profiler Makes His Case” (front cover)


I was just about to close this book on Trump’s “narcissism” and his “charismatic” relationship with his followers, having not found anything that interested me or was relevant to this blog. But one seemingly trivial quotation stuck in my mind:


“When Trump was asked which experts he consults in developing foreign policy, he responded: ‘I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things…I know what I’m doing, and I listen to a lot of people. But my primary consultant is myself. And I have a good instinct for this stuff’ ” (1, p. 69).


He phrases it as though his own thoughts were a dialog between two people, which is how it can be in multiple personality.


1. Jerrold M. Post, MD with Stephanie R. Doucette. Dangerous Charisma:The Political Psychology of Donald Trump and His Followers. New York, Pegasus Books, 2019.

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