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, October 25, 2022

“Dissociation” by Herbert Spiegel M.D., a strangely unavailable book, is a loose end in the story of “Sybil”


In “Sybil Exposed” by Debbie Nathan, Dr. Herbert Spiegel was one person who had seen Sybil and supposedly testified that he had evidence the case was fake. So for many years, I have occasionally tried to get the doctor’s book “Dissociation” to see what it had to say. At one point, it was offered for sale as a used book for $600.00, but I didn’t buy it. Since then it has been “out of print” and “unavailable.”


I consider it to be a strangely untold story as to how Dr. Herbert Spiegel could be against the legitimacy of multiple personality, while his son, Dr. David Spiegel, was the head of the group that wrote the section on multiple personality, and renamed it “dissociative identity disorder,” in the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual, the DSM.


“Dissociation” by Herbert Spiegel MD might have had nothing interesting to say about multiple personality and “Sybil,” but it is a loose end.

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