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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Saturday, November 12, 2022

“Parts”: How to ask people if they have alternate personalities

DO NOT ask if they have more than one “personality.” Most people will immediately know that having more than one personality means a diagnosis of multiple personality, which most people think is the craziest mental illness: After all, it means you sometimes don’t know who you are, and, because of memory gaps, you may not recall things you’ve done, which are not typical of either schizophrenia or bipolar, other diagnoses that many people mistakenly think they would prefer.


Instead, ask people if they have “parts” (1, p. 92); especially, parts that seem to have minds of their own.


1. Frank W. Putnam, MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder [a.k.a. dissociative identity disorder]. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.

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