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.

— If you read only recent posts, you miss most of what this site has to offer.

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Wednesday, December 7, 2022

“The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts” by Maxine Hong Kingston: “No Name Woman” [Part 1]

“You must not tell anyone, my mother said, what I am about to tell you. In China your father had a sister who killed herself…We say that your father has all brothers because it is as if she had never been born” (1, beginning).


The author’s aunt was shunned, because she got pregnant by someone other than her husband. Refusing to address her by name was part of it. I don’t know why the author never uses the words “shun” or “shunning” (2).


The author highlights her aunt’s namelessness, which is a recurring issue in this blog, because multiple personality is the only realm I know where namelessness is relatively common; that is, it is not rare to meet alternate personalities that have no name. Search “nameless,” “namelessness,” and “nameless narrators” for past discussions.


1. Maxine Hong Kingston. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. New York, Vintage International, 1976/1989.

2. Wikipedia. “Shunning.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shunning

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