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.

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Sunday, August 20, 2023

Lying: Does Trump’s “Winner” alternate personality disavow losing?

Trump’s Georgia indictment focuses on his lies and lying (1). But why would an intelligent, sane man continually make provably false statements unless some part of him actually believed what he said? My hypothesis is that there is a part of him—an alternate personality I call “The Winner”—who cannot remember and/or believe things that are inconsistent with his being a winner.


I entertain this hypothesis for two reasons. First, I believe that most people with multiple personality are undiagnosed, because they have a relatively normal version of it and are high-functioning. Second, a textbook on multiple personality disorder (MPD) says that many people with MPD get reputations for being liars (2, pp. 78-79).


There are several reasons that persons with MPD might be seen as liars. The most common reason is that one personality will deny doing what other people have seen them do, because of amnesia for what another personality did. But another possible reason is that a personality will disavow things that are inconsistent with its self-image and world view; for example, a Winning-obsessed personality might disavow losing.


1. David French. “Trump’s Georgia Indictment.” https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/15/opinion/georgia-donald-trump-indictment-case.html

2. Frank W. Putnam, MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.

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