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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Friday, June 2, 2023

“Every Summer After” (post 3) by Carley Fortune: Novel Concludes with Voices in Protagonist’s Head

“And then they come to me—three words from yesterday, echoing in my head in tentative bursts of happiness.

I love you…I love you. I don’t think I ever stopped”  (1, p. 298).


“It’s taken a lot of work for Sam and me to fight off the persistent voice that tells me I’m not good enough, that I don’t deserve him or my happiness” (1, p. 303).


Comment: Rational voices in the head of a non-psychotic person—often italicized in novels—are voices of alternate personalities in what is usually undiagnosed multiple personality.


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

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