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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Wednesday, February 15, 2023

“Bleak House” (post 2) by Charles Dickens: Dickens implies Mr Skimpole has multiple personality, like the murderer in The Mystery of Edwin Drood

“All this, and a great deal more, he told us, not only with the utmost brilliancy and enjoyment, but with a certain vivacious candor — speaking of himself as if he were not at all his own affair, as if Skimpole were a third person… (1, p. 90).


1. Charles Dickens. Bleak House [1853]. London, Penguin Books, 2003. 


Comment: In Dickens’s final novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Dickens planned to reveal to the reader that the murderer had multiple personality by having the murderer refer to himself in the third person. I discussed this in my first post of the blog in 2013: Search “Dickens.”

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