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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Monday, May 15, 2023

“Trust” (post 4) by Hernan Diaz: Page 294 recalls Page 83, which indicated Multiple Personality

“In Bonds, I suddenly remember Vanner describes the journals Helen Rask kept day and night during her breakdown, wondering if her future self would recognize her own writing” (1, p. 294).


Comment: See “Trust” (post 2), in which I discussed the passage on page 83, where what Helen said indicated multiple personality.


Note (at the end of post 2): In my email exchange with Hernan Diaz, he was surprised that what he had written on page 83 was indicative of a real psychiatric condition, since, he said, it came from his own imagination.


1. Hernan Diaz. Trust. Riverhead Books. 2022.

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