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 25, 2023

“The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” (post 1) by Stieg Larsson: Lisbeth Salander may have signs of Multiple Personality

“She was twenty-four but she sometimes looked fourteen” (1, p. 41).


Comment: Why did she look fourteen only “sometimes”? Perhaps it was only when a fourteen-year-old alternate personality was predominant.


“People always have secrets. It’s just a matter of finding out what they are” (1, p. 138)


Comment: If that was just an ordinary thought, and not the voice in her head of an alternate personality, why doesn’t it simply say "she thought”? Why is it in italics instead, which many novelists use to differentiate a voice in the head from an ordinary thought.


Search “italicized voices” in this blog for relevant past posts.


1. Stieg Larsson. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo [2005]. Trans. Reg Keeland. New York, Vintage Books, 2011.

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