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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Sunday, March 26, 2023

“Things We Never Got Over “ (post 4) by Lucy Score: Two characters have “parts,” not merely ambivalence


“My [Knox Morgan’s] fingers casually typed Naomi Witt into the search bar before the sane, rational part of me could hit the brakes” (1, p. 108).


“Part of me [Naomi Witt] wanted to crack him open. The other part wanted to just go back to bed and forget everything for a few hours” (1, p. 239).


Comment: Since many people are afraid of multiple personality, experts in making the diagnosis will often avoid asking new patients if they have more than one “personality.” Instead, they may ask if the person has “parts” (2, p. 92).


If an author’s characters have “parts,” but the author is not trying to imply that the characters have multiple personality, then it probably reflects the author’s multiple personality trait.


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

2. Frank W. Putnam MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989. 

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