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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Tuesday, December 13, 2022

“Siddhartha” by Nobel Prize novelist Hermann Hesse

Since Siddhartha (1, 2) is not as recognizably about the author’s version of multiple personality as is another novel by Hesse that I read previously—search “Steppenwolf”—I will briefly focus only on Siddhartha’s most obvious symptom of multiple personality, hearing voices, which, in non-psychotic persons, are probably the voices of alternate personalities (search “voices”).


“He would only strive after whatever the inward voice commanded him, not to tarry anywhere but where the voice advised him” (1, pp. 47-48).


“He only noticed that the bright and clear inward voice, that had once awakened him and had always guided him in his finest hours, had become silent” (1, p. 78).

“Onwards, onwards, this is your path. He had heard this voice when he had left his home and chosen the life of the Samanas, and again when he had left the Samanas and gone to the Perfect One, and also when he had left him for the unknown” (1, p. 83).


1. Hermann Hesse. Siddhartha. Trans. Hilda Rosner. New York, Bantam Books, 1922/1951.

2. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siddhartha_(novel)

3. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steppenwolf_(novel)

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