Novelists' Multiple Personality TRAIT: Key to Creativity

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.

— Share site with friends.

Monday, July 3, 2023

“Great Expectations” (post 1) by Charles Dickens: Pip’s “inner self”

“I [Pip] do not recall that I felt any tenderness of conscience in reference to Mrs. Joe, when the fear of being found out was lifted off me. But I loved Joe — perhaps for no better reason in those early days than because the dear fellow let me love him — and, as to him, my inner self was not so easily composed” (1, p. 41).

Comment: What does Pip (or Dickens) mean by “inner self”? Is it merely a synonym for “conscience”? Do you distinguish your self from your inner self? I have only one self (self, as opposed to role or facet). How many selves do you have? More than one self is multiple personality, which in most cases is not a mental illness.

Search “inner self” and “Dickens” in this blog for further discussion.

1. Charles Dickens. Great Expectations [1860-61]. London, Penguin Books, 1996.

Novelists' Multiple Personality TRAIT: Key to Creativity

Monday, July 3, 2023

No comments:

Post a Comment