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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Thursday, August 24, 2023

“The Left Hand of Darkness” by Ursula K. Le Guin: Author’s most celebrated novel confirms her previously stated interest in multiple personality (2), but extensive literary analysis of the novel (3) ignores the issue


The protagonist says he was trying to distract himself in order to “shut up the interior voice that kept telling me, It has all gone wrong. When it would not be shut up I argued with it…” (1, p. 28).


Comment: A voice in your head that has sufficient independent agency—a mind of its own—to argue with you, is an alternate personality.


1. Ursula K. Le Guin. The Left Hand of Darkness [1969]. New York, Ace, 2019

2. Ursula K. Le Guin. The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination. Boston, Shambhala, 2004.

3. Wikipedia. “The Left Hand of Darkness.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Left_Hand_of_Darkness 

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