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 25, 2023

“Things We Never Got Over” (post 2) by Lucy Score: Protagonist’s Eye-rolling may correlate with susceptibility to multiple personality


Naomi Witt, the author’s protagonist, has a tendency to roll her eyes (1, pp. 163, 173), which she uses as a “passive-aggressive response to an undesirable situation or person. The gesture is used to disagree or dismiss or express contempt for the targeted person without physical contact” (2).


Coincidentally, a marked ability to do the eye-roll has been associated with increased susceptibility to hypnosis in the “Hypnotic Induction Profile” (3).


And since self-hypnosis or autohypnosis has been suspected for over 100 years to be the mental mechanism by which people create the alternate personalities of multiple personality (4, p. 233), Naomi’s tendency to do eye-rolls might reflect the author’s multiple personality trait.


1. Lucy Score. Things We Never Got Over. Naperville Illinois, Bloom Books, 2022.

2. Wikipedia. “Eye-rolling.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye-rolling

3.Wikipedia. “Hypnotic susceptibility.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnotic_susceptibility

4. Frank W. Putnam MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. NewYork, The Guilford Press, 1989. 

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)