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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Saturday, April 29, 2023

Dissociative self-strangulation didn’t register in her consciousness until someone asked her why she did it

“It was a gesture that, as Christina Sharpe puts it, amounted to ‘self-strangulation.’ She was a graduate student in English when it emerged. She would start to talk and then press the thumbs of both hands to her larynx as the rest of her fingers circled the back of her neck — a movement so involuntary that it didn’t even register in her consciousness until someone asked her why she was doing it. ‘I was strangling words before they even left my throat,’ she writes in [her new book] Ordinary Notes” (2).


Comment: Apparently, a dissociated part of her mind had been doing it.

1. Wikipedia. “Christina Sharpe.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christina_Sharpe

2. Book Review. Ordinary Notes. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/19/books/review/ordinary-notes-christina-sharpe.html

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