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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Wednesday, April 19, 2023

“Dear Edward” (post 3) by Ann Napolitano: Edward’s evolving symptoms


“When they return to New Jersey [from the NTSB plane crash hearing] everything feels different…When Edward notices that the clicking in his head is gone too, he spends hours testing the new silence…He wonders if the simultaneous departure of several symptoms—any trace of a fugue state, the flat sheet inside him, the clicking—could itself be considered a symptom” ( 1, pp. 143-144).


Comment: Perhaps “the flat sheet inside him” and “the clicking” sounds will be explained in the novel subsequently; whereas, “a fugue state” (2) is a dissociative, memory-gap symptom of trauma or multiple personality.


Please search “fugue” in this blog for past posts that discuss it.


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

2. Wikipedia. “Fugue State.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugue_state 

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