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.

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Friday, June 2, 2023

“Every Summer After” (post 2) by Carley Fortune: Narrative Time Travel, Going Back & Forth in Time, from Chapter to Chapter, as Symptom of Author’s Multiple Personality

In multiple personality, the alternate personalities are often of different ages. Thus, novels, like this one, that go back and forth in time, from chapter to chapter, are like persons who switch back and forth among their alternate personalities.


And if many novelists really did have multiple personality (the creative trait, not the clinical disorder), narrative time travel would be fashionable.


1. Carley Fortune. Every Summer After. New York, Jove, 2022.

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