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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Sunday, October 23, 2022

“Sybil” by Flora Rheta Schreiber: Did Dr. Herbert Spiegel’s hypnotic age regressions on Sybil suggest alternate personalities of various ages to her?


I have just begun to read this nearly 500-page book. The Acknowledgments section includes “Dr. Herbert Spiegel, who did age regressions on Sybil and described her as ‘a brilliant hysteric’ ” (1, p. xix).


Dr. Herbert Spiegel, a psychiatrist who specialized in hypnosis, may have used Sybil as a hypnosis demonstration subject. And when he did “age regressions on Sybil,” he may have suggested that she experience herself at various ages, which may have inadvertently suggested alternate personalities of various ages.


Thus, if “a brilliant hysteric” could easily experience alternate personalities, the distinction between Dr. Spiegel’s diagnosis and Dr. Wilber’s diagnosis (multiple personality) may be less significant than they at first appear. And Dr. Herbert Spiegel, who denied Sybil had multiple personality, may have contributed to it.


1. Flora Rheta Schreiber. Sybil. NewYork, Grand Central Publishing, 1973/2009. 

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