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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Monday, April 24, 2023

“Are you there God? It’s me, Margaret” (post 1) by Judy Blume: Conversations with God or a psychological defense?


                          “Are you there God? It’s me, Margaret.

                           We’re moving today. I’m so scared

                           God. I’ve never lived anywhere but

                           here. Suppose I hate my new school?

                           Suppose everybody there hates me?

                           Please help me God. Don’t let New

                           Jersey be too horrible. Thank you” (1, p. 1).


Since Margaret, almost twelve, has a Christian mother and a Jewish father, but has not practiced either religion, her so-called conversations with God may be a metaphor for a psychological defense against adolescent angst.


Only halfway through the book, I don’t yet know whether Margaret is having conversations with an imaginary friend (2) or a “helper” alternate personality (3, p. 109), or whether the novel will provide psychological evidence one way or the other. But I am skeptical that a non-religious person would have conversations with God.


1. Judy Blume. Are you there God? It’s me, Margaret. Richard Jackson/ Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 1970/2014.

2. Wikipedia. “Imaginary Friend.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_friend

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


April 25: I finished the novel, but have nothing to add.

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