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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Wednesday, July 5, 2023

“Great Expectations” (post 2) by Charles Dickens: Pip’s mind is “scattered”


“And now, because my mind was not confused enough before, I complicated its confusion fifty thousand-fold, by having states and seasons when I was clear that Biddy was immeasurably better than Estella…Scattered wits take a long time picking up; and often, before I had got them well together, they would be dispersed in all directions by one stray thought, that perhaps Miss Havisham was going to make my fortune…” (1, pp. 132-133).


Comment: The first time I noted Dickens’s use of “scattered” was when he used it for the mind of John Jasper in The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870), as a way to foreshadow the later discovery that Jasper had multiple personality.


I suspect that Dickens experienced his own mind as variably “scattered,” as probably do most novelists, for whom a benign form of multiple personality is an asset.


Search “Dickens” in this blog for further discussion.


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

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