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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Saturday, October 1, 2022

“First Person Plural” by Paul Bloom: The eminent academic psychologist says everyone has “multiple selves,” but the fact is that most people don’t

Here is a link to his article:

https://pdodds.w3.uvm.edu/files/papers/others/everything/bloom2008a.pdf


Professor Bloom personifies everyone’s “multiple selves” as competing with each other for the chance to take control (just as alternate personalities do in multiple personality).


And personified “selves” that continually existed would likely have names, which is the sign of personified continual existence, but Professor Bloom makes no mention of any of his “selves” having their own names.


Moreover, while many of the experts on multiple selves are psychologists, they are clinical psychologists, who have seen persons with multiple selves, and know it is not something everyone has.


Everyone certainly does have multiple facets, but not multiple "selves.”

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