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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Monday, September 11, 2023

“FOXFIRE: Confessions of a Girl Gang” (post 1) by Joyce Carol Oates: Alternate personalities look identical, because they share the same body


“Because different as we were—how different Maddy Wirtz felt herself from Goldie Siegfried, from Rita O’Hagan, from Lana Maguire!—how special, how superior she’d needed to be!—we were like family members proud of their distinctions while always always confused with one another by outside, neutral observers" (1, p. 9).


Comment: Above is the typical perspective of alternate personalities, who see themselves as unique, and quite different from each other, but look the same to other people, because they share the same body. I don’t know if this novel will have anything else suggestive of multiple personality.


1. Joyce Carol Oates. FOXFIRE: Confessions of a Girl Gang. Plume/Penguin, 1994. 

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