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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Tuesday, October 18, 2022

Memoirs of High-functioning Multiple Personality in Acting and Politics

Multiple personality (also known as “dissociative identity disorder”) is a serious mental illness when it causes clinically significant distress and dysfunction (1). However, after specific psychotherapy for it, and sometimes without therapy, a person with multiple personality may be quite high-functioning (2).


As discussed in this blog, the most common examples of high-functioning multiple personality that I know of are successful—including Nobel Prize-winning—fiction writers. I don’t know how common it is in politics.


Although multiple personality is usually hidden—except when a person is in crisis; or after diagnosis, for a demonstration; even from the person’s own, regular, “host” personality—it is occasionally hinted at (3) or even announced (4) in the title of a memoir.


1. American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition [DSM-5]. Arlington, VA, American Psychiatric Association, 2013.

2. Kluft, R. P. (1986). High-functioning multiple personality patients: Three cases. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 174(12), 722–726.

3. Sally Field. In Pieces: a memoir. New York, Grand Central Publishing, 2018.

4. Herschel Walker with Gary Brozek and Charlene Maxfield. Breaking Free: My Life with Dissociative Identity Disorder.  Foreword by Dr. Jerry Mungadze. New York, Touchstone/Howard Simon & Schuster, 2009.

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