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, November 21, 2022

“I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou: Both author and readers have been clueless

Now that we know, as discussed in a post earlier today, that the protagonist’s history of selective mutism implicates multiple personality, it becomes clear that both author and readers had failed to understand major clues.


On page one, the protagonist notes her “well-known forgetfulness” (1, p. 1). And two hundred pages later, she says: “The intensity with which young people live demands that they ‘blank out’ as often as possible” (1, p. 201). She apparently refers to her cardinal symptom of multiple personality, memory gaps.


1. Maya Angelou. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Foreword by Oprah Winfrey. New York, Ballantine Books, 1969/2015.

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