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.

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Wednesday, November 23, 2022

“The Sea” by John Banville: Protagonist Max Morden recalls childhood experiences by the sea, including possible sexual molestation, which he denies


The episode occurs when Max was a young boy and went to the doctor for a dog bite on his wrist. But the doctor orders him to take off all his clothes, sit on the doctor's knee, and then feels Max’s lower abdomen.


Max’s daughter asks, “Which left the more lasting mark, the dog’s teeth or the doctor’s paw?” (1, p. 36).


Max replies that the doctor was not Tiberius in Capri, by which he means it was not child abuse.


However, John Banville has, himself, published an essay denouncing hidden child abuse (2). It doesn’t prove anything about his own personal experience, but, coming in addition to this novel, it does raise the issue.


Comment: Many people with multiple personality report a history of childhood trauma, but not necessarily sexual abuse, and I have no evidence that John Banville had any childhood trauma.


1. John Banville. The Sea. New York, Vintage International, 2005.

2. John Banville. “A Century of Looking the Other Way.” The NewYork Times, May 22, 2009. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/23/opinion/23banville.html?scp=1&sq=john%20banville&st=cse 

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