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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Tuesday, April 18, 2023

“Dear Edward” (post 2) by Ann Napolitano: Voices vs. Thoughts


“He decided he wanted to go [to the hearing about the plane crash] months earlier, but he doesn’t want to think about it. Go, not think, some Neanderthal voice in his head repeats…” (1, p. 132.).


“…I was on the plane, he thinks. And this is the first moment that he allows himself to place himself there, in the seat, beside his brother. It’s only a flash of a thought, a fraction of a second, but it lays out the frame of the plane around him: the sky, the wing, the other passengers." (1, p. 132).


Comment

—The voice is a named (“Neanderthal”) alternate personality.  

—The thought is a traumatic memory or flashback.

—The alternate personality dissociates* the trauma from the person.

—Since the author uses italics for both the voice and the thought, the two may not be clearly distinguished in her mind.


*multiple personality, a.k.a. “dissociative identity,” is a dissociative disorder


1. Ann Napolitano. Dear Edward. New York, Dial Press, 2020/2021. 

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