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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Thursday, February 2, 2023

“Two-Headed” Writers: Louisa May Alcott, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Roald Dahl


Because Roald Dahl became famous for both his very-adult short stories and his books for children, some critics thought of him as a “two-headed creature” (1, p.1), which would be the simplest form of multiple personality (but they didn’t use that term).


The reference to Dahl as “two-headed” reminds me of two other famous writers who were also self-divided. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is best known today as creator of the prototypically down-to-earth Sherlock Holmes, but during his lifetime Doyle also wrote “Gothic Tales” (search it) and was a public advocate for belief in spiritualism (fairies, etc.).


Louisa May Alcott is best known today as the author of Little Women, but she also wrote what she called her “blood and thunder” stories. Search “Alcott.”


And those are not the only writers who have had their heads in multiple genres, which entails multiple consciousness, also known as multiple personality.


1. Mark I. West. Roald Dahl. New York, Twayne Publishers, 1992.

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