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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Thursday, January 19, 2023

Novelist Matt Haig publicizes his psychiatric issues

“Shortly after the publication of The Midnight Library, at the age of 46, he was diagnosed with A.D.H.D. and autism. In his nonfiction, Haig has been candid about his mental health; his memoir, Reasons to Stay Alive, grew out of depression so deep, it almost spurred him to walk off a cliff”(1). One symptom he had was that “my reflection showed another person” (2, p. 46), a symptom that may be associated with multiple personality (3, p. 62).


1. Elizabeth Egan. “Inside the List.” New York Times, 01-15-2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/05/books/review/matt-haig-the-midnight-library.html

2. Matt Haig. Reasons to Stay Alive. Edinburgh, Canongate, 2015.

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

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