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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Friday, November 4, 2022

“The Maytrees” by Annie Dillard (post 5): “She wanted only to hear herself think”

“She wanted only to hear herself think…stay home to think. How else might she hear any original note, any stray subject-and-verb in the head, however faint, should one come?” (1, p. 131)


Comment: People often joke that it is so noisy, they can’t hear themself think. But do most people seriously mean by “thinking” that they listen to hear subject-and-verb voices in their head?


No, most people don’t hear voices in their head, unless they have alternate personalities who sometime speak to them.


Many fiction writers do hear voices in their head: narrators, characters, editors, and muses.


1. Annie Dillard. The Maytrees. New York, Harper Perennial, 2008.

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