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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Sunday, October 23, 2022

“Sybil”: What had a textbook on multiple personality said about it, and what has happened to the diagnosis?

I may go ahead and reread Sybil for its historical interest, but looking back in this blog, I see that I have already addressed its debunkers’ lack of credibility. And I have just done what they should have done, see what an authoritative textbook on multiple personality had said about it:


Sybil (1974) “is both detailed and accurate enough to serve as mandatory clinical reading for students of MPD” (1, p. 35).


Moreover, nearly fifty years later, the American Psychiatric Association’s official diagnostic manual, DSM-5, stands behind the diagnosis (renamed “dissociative identity disorder”) without reservation. The debunkers have been debunked.


1. Frank W. Putnam, MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.

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