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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Saturday, September 16, 2023

“Disgrace” (post 1) by Nobel & Booker novelist J. M. Coetzee: Opens with flurry of markers for multiple personality


“…he finds the act pleasurable, so pleasurable that from its climax he tumbles into blank oblivion. When he comes back [from a memory gap]…The girl [a college student] is lying beneath him…” (1, p.17).


“A child! No more than a child! What am I doing? Yet his heart lurches with desire” (1, p. 18).


“An unseemly business…(unbidden the word letching comes to him)…” (1, p. 22).


Comment: Search “italics” and “memory gaps” in this blog for discussion of these markers for multiple personality.


1. J. M. Coetzee. Disgrace. New York, Penguin Books, 1999. 

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