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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Monday, October 17, 2022

More evidence The New York Times is Clueless Regarding Multiple Personality

Two opinion essays in today’s print edition of The New York Times (1, 2) are about Herschel Walker, the Republican candidate for the United States Senate from Georgia. Both essays neglect to mention that Walker has written and published a book about his having “dissociative identity disorder” (3), one of whose cardinal symptoms is memory gaps, but which may occur in persons who are high-functioning, such as successful fiction writers, and, perhaps, successful politicians.


1. Frank Bruni. “Why Herschel Walker May Win.” https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/16/opinion/warnock-herschel-walker-debate.html

2. Charles M. Blow. “Herschel Walker, Butcher of Language.” https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/15/opinion/walker-warnock-debate.html

3. 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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