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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Tuesday, November 29, 2022

A Case of Pathological Lying: Is It Multiple Personality?

An interesting article in the science section of today’s New York Times discusses a theater producer who can’t stop lying (1).


Nothing in the article makes me think of multiple personality except the issue of lying itself, since adults with multiple personality may have gotten a reputation as liars since childhood, because they denied doing what other people had seen them do. They denied it, because they had a memory gap for doing it.


Memory gaps are a cardinal symptom of multiple personality, but people with multiple personality usually don’t mention their memory gaps unless you specifically ask them about it. And since memory gaps are not mentioned in the article (1), I don’t know if the theater producer had undiagnosed multiple personality.


Fiction writers, many of whom have what I call “multiple personality trait,” are, according to the old joke, “professional liars,” but they usually don’t “lie” unless they are going to get paid for it.


Search “lying” for previous discussions.


1. Ellen Barry. “Can This Man Stop Lying?” New York Times, Nov. 29, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/29/health/lying-mental-illness.html

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