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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Friday, November 25, 2022

“The Sea” by John Banville: Protagonist's “problems with mirrors” is textbook multiple personality


“On the subject of observing and being observed, I must mention the long, grim gander I took at myself in the bathroom mirror this morning…There was a time when I quite liked what I saw in the looking-glass, but not any more. Now I am startled, and more than startled, by the visage that so abruptly appears there, never and not at all the one that I expect. I have been elbowed aside by a parody of myself…I have many problems with mirrors…” (1, pp. 93-94).


“MPD [multiple personality disorder] patients often report seeing themselves as different people when they look in a mirror…In some instances, these alterations of perception are so disturbing that individuals may phobically avoid mirrors” (2, p. 62).


Comment: Banville’s protagonist talks about his problems with mirrors for four pages. At times he focuses on a skin condition, and some readers will say that everyone feels this way as they get older, but his concern with mirrors is more than skin deep.


Search “mirror” and “mirrors” for past posts on this recurring subject.


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

2. Frank W. Putnam MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989. 

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