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 1, 2023

“Elective Affinities” by Goethe: Opens with multiple personality-style naming of characters and talk of “unconscious memories” before Freud was born


The four main characters “have versions of the same name: the Captain is called Otto, Eduard was christened Otto but changed his name, and Charlotte and Ottilie share the syllable 'ott-'; and the name OTTO, composed of only two different letters, suggests a formula for the deep structure of human relationships” (1, p. 18).


Comment: It is not uncommon in multiple personality for the names of a person’s alternate personalities to be variations of one person’s name.


In the first chapter, Eduard and Charlotte discuss the advisability of having the Captain as a guest. Eduard tends to favor it. 'I am not superstitious,’ Charlotte replied, ‘and attach no importance to these vague promptings—if they were only that. But they are most often unconscious memories of fortunate and unfortunate consequences…(2, p. 8).


Comment: This novel was published fifty years before Freud was born, which underlines the fact that Freud did not discover “the unconscious” (search “Freud” and “the unconscious” for past posts).


1. Ritchie Robertson. Goethe: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford, Oxford University Press, UK, 2016.

2. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Elective Affinities [1809]. Trans. David Constantine. Oxford, Oxford University Press, UK, 1994/2008. 

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