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, June 10, 2023

“David Copperfield” (post 2) by Charles Dickens: Peggotty’s “people” may allude to Dickens’s alternate personalities


“ ‘…I don’t know how it is,’ said Peggotty…but my head never can pick and choose its people. They come and go, and they don’t come and go, just as they like…’ ” (1, p. 124).


Comment: Remember post 1, in which Dickens described David, his protagonist, as practicing how to impersonate fictional “people.”


The difference between created characters and alternate personalities is that the latter have independent agency: Like Peggotty’s “people,” they come and they go, just as they like.


1. Charles Dickens. David Copperfield [1850]. Revised Edition. New York, Penguin Books, 2004. 

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