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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Friday, May 19, 2023

“Wuthering Heights (post 4) by Emily Brontë: Heathcliff’s Eyebrows

“I was amazed by the transformation of Heathcliff. He had grown a tall, athletic, well-formed man…His upright carriage suggested the idea of his having been in the army. His countenance…looked intelligent…A half-civilized ferocity lurked yet in the depressed brows…(1, p. 96).


Comment: Search “eyebrows” in this blog and/or read my journal articles (2, 3) for the significance of lowered or depressed eyebrows, as specified by Emily Brontë.


1. Emily Brontë. Wuthering Heights [1847]. UK, Penguin Books 1995/2003. 

2. Nakdimen, K. A. (1978). The Two Faces of Attention: Early Formulations. Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, 42(2), 97-118.

3. Nakdimen, K. A. (1984). The Physiognomic Basis of Sexual Stereotyping. The American Journal of Psychiatry, 141(4), 499–503.

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