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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Sunday, September 11, 2022

“Nonbinary” (post 3): Problem with Mirror, Typical of Multiple Personality

“Most days I wish I could be invisible…people aren’t used to seeing a beard and a dress together on one body, except as a joke…my brand of androgyny still isn’t commonplace…I can’t go back in the closet. I can’t live my life pretending to be a man…Yet I don’t have access to the full range of femininity either…When I look in the mirror all I can see is my six-foot-two-inch towering height, my broad muscular shoulders, my huge hands, and my masculine chin, which I’ve been hiding under a beard for ten years…


“Suddenly, I don’t recognize the face staring back at me. It is like looking through a window at someone else, as my heart tries to avoid admitting it is my own body in the mirror” (1, pp. 58-59).


Search “mirror” for past posts on this symptom, which is typical of multiple personality.


1. Micah Rajunov and Scott Duane (Editors). Nonbinary: Memoirs of Gender and Identity. New York, Columbia University Press, 2019.

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