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.

— Share site with friends.

Saturday, March 18, 2023

“Mad Honey” (post 1) by Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan: Transgender Character has Dialogue with italicized Voice of an Alternate Personality 


“It’s inconceivable, if you think about it, the complex ways people have come up with for being horrible to one another.”


“Inconceivable. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means” (1, p. 217).


Comment: The above is an example of the use of italics to indicate that words are spoken by a voice in the person’s head.


Since the authors probably feel that any association of multiple personality with being transgender is an example of being horrible, I assume that the implication of their quoted dialogue was inadvertent.


I, myself, do not think that transgender persons have multiple personality.


1. Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan. Mad Honey. New York, Ballantine Books, 2022. 

Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Thank you for taking the time to comment (whether you agree or disagree) and ask questions (simple or expert). I appreciate your contribution.

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)