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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Sunday, December 4, 2022

Skeptics May Fear Dissociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personality)

A few dozen multiples with multiple personality trait, not the disorder, have been Nobel Prize winners (search “Nobel Prize”). About one percent of the general public has the diagnosable disorder (1, p. 294), but they are usually harmless and inconspicuous. And multiples are only rarely murderers (2).


Nevertheless, since many characters in novels and movies who are seen as having multiple personality are weird or frightening; are rarely seen as any sort of superhero (3); and since the very idea of having a condition in which you don’t always know who you are or what you’ve done is frightening, most people are predisposed to fear multiple personality.


Therefore, I suspect that many skeptics of multiple personality, no matter how intellectual their stated reasons, are afraid of it.


1. American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition [DSM-5]. Arlington VA, American Psychiatric Association, 2013.

2. Dorothy Otnow Lewis, M.D., et al. “Objective Documentation of Child Abuse and Dissociation in 12 Murderers With Dissociative Identity Disorder.” American Journal of Psychiatry., Issue 12, December 1997, Pages 1703-1710. https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/ajp.154.12.1703 

3. Wikipedia. “Legion (Marvel Comics)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legion_(Marvel_Comics)

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