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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Thursday, October 20, 2022

“East of Eden” (post 3) by John Steinbeck: Gratuitous Multiple Personality (author's mistaken idea of ordinary psychology, based on his own psychology)

After a minor character beats Cathy Ames almost to death, he hears the voices of two alternate personalities:

“Two complete and separate thoughts ran in his mind. One said, ‘Have to bury her, have to dig a hole and put her in it.’ And the other cried like a child, ‘I can’t stand it. I couldn’t bear to touch her’ ” (1, p. 97).


Comment: This unusual, split-personality psychological reaction is gratuitously attributed to an apparently minor character, only because, as a reflection of the author’s own psychology, the author assumed it to be ordinary psychology.


1. John Steinbeck. East of Eden. New York, Penguin Books, 1952/2016.

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