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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Tuesday, September 12, 2023

“FOXFIRE: Girl Gang” (post 2) by Joyce Carol Oates: Two of the girls have split-personality thoughts and italicized voices of alternate personalities in their head

“This strange girl presenting one side of herself to adults, one side of herself to her FOXFIRE sisters, but another side, or maybe it’s the innermost core, she kept to herself.

     Nobody knows me. Nobody can hurt me” (1, p. 137).


“…there’s a voice in my head thats calm almost like my own voice but grownup & saying O.K. But you’re alive. So I think My God yes—I’m alive” (1, p. 152).


Comment: Their hidden sides or parts and the voices in their head are symptoms of multiple personality. But since the author does not indicate that these symptoms are unusual features, confined to certain unusual characters, they are probably reflective of the author’s multiple personality trait and her concept of ordinary psychology. For further discussion in past posts, search “Oates” in this blog.


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

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