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, May 20, 2023

“The Women’s Room” (post 1) by Marilyn French: Front cover of this feminist classic says “TWENTY-ONE MILLION COPIES SOLD”


“My head is full of voices…I feel as if I were a medium and a whole host of departed spirits has descended on me clamoring to be let out…I am going to try to let the voices out” (1, pp. 8-9)


“…she was approaching her twentieth birthday: look, her other self said, what Keats had done by twenty. And finally her whole self would rise up and wipe it all out. Oh don’t bother me with it! I do the best I can! Part of her knew that she was simply surviving in the only way she could” (1, p. 36).

    

Comment: The protagonist says she hears “voices” of “spirits,” and also has an “other self,” and “parts,” which are terms for how she experiences the alternate personalities of her undiagnosed multiple personality trait, which she got from the author.


1. Marilyn French. The Women’s Room (a novel). New York, Penguin Books, 1977/2009. 

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