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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Tuesday, January 10, 2023

Multiple Personality in Modern Art and Literature


Features of multiple personality became increasingly evident in the work of three major novelists and artists: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, and The Waves; Picasso’s Cubism; and Jennifer Egan, who started with The Invisible Circus, and later won a major award for A Visit From the Goon Squad.


Picasso’s Cubist figures often appeared to be a conglomeration of multiple people or personalities.


Jennifer Egan’s first novel, The Invisible Circus, had a standard novelistic format, but, as noted in a past post, its characters had unacknowledged symptoms of multiple personality. Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad started with a standard format and characterization, but broke away with multiple casts of characters and jumps in time. The latter is like what a person experiences after memory gaps (a cardinal symptom of multiple personality). 


Added 01/11/2023: An example of Jennifer Egan's relating to her characters as if they were alternate personalities is her saying, in a 2011 video interview with Google about A Visit From the Goon Squad, "I flirt with ideas and then I give them to characters [to do something with]."

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