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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Sunday, September 3, 2023

“Everything / Nothing / Someone” a memoir by Alice Carrière: Highlights Mirror Symptom of Multiple Personality (a.k.a. dissociative identity disorder)

“When I was listening to audiobooks, I thought in the third person. Walking down the street to school I would think, ‘She is walking down the street. It is raining.The rain falls on her jacket.’ I turned myself into words and my life into a story. Years later, when I didn’t recognize my own face in the mirror, when my body did not feel like my own, I would again recite myself to myself, narrating myself into existence…” (1, p. 10).


1. Alice Carrière. “Everything / Nothing / Someone”  a memoir. New York, Spiegel & Grau, 2023.

2. NYTimes Book Review. “In a Memoir of Privilege and Pain,” Alice Carrière recalls her eventual slip into dissociative disorder.” https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/28/books/review/everything-nothing-someone-alice-carriere.html


Comment: Beyond multiple personality’s classic mirror symptom—search “mirror” and “mirrors" in this blog—the memoir did not have enough about multiple personality to be of further interest here.

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