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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Wednesday, April 5, 2023

“The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo” (post 5) by Taylor Jenkins Reid: Vocabulary suggests author may have thought of multiple personality


When Evelyn went to Tijuana to get an abortion, she “tried not to be mentally present” (have a memory gap) for the experience, so she would “never have to work to forget”…“I was relieved, walking back to the car after the procedure, that I had become so good at compartmentalization and disassociation” (1, p. 189).


Comment: Multiple Personality is designed to defend against traumatic experiences by dissociating or segregating the traumatic experience and its memory into an isolated compartment (an alternate personality), which is why it is classified as a “Dissociative Disorder,” is also called “Dissociative Identity Disorder,” and memory gaps are a cardinal symptom.


1. Taylor Jenkins Reid. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. New York, Washington Square/Atria, 2017/2018. 

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