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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Wednesday, September 27, 2023

“The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” (post 2) by Stieg Larsson: Lisbeth Salander thinks her namesake’s passive obedience is unlike her true self

"Passively she obeyed. Lisbeth Salander is never passive, she thought” (1, p. 360).

Comment: Lisbeth Salander has passively obeyed a suggestion by Mikael Blomkvist, whom she has just met. But she thinks that “Lisbeth Salander” is “never passive,” as though the one now thinking and the one who had obeyed were two different persons. Her thought is rendered in italics, possibly because what this personality says or thinks is heard as a voice in the head of the personality who had passively obeyed.


Search “self-contradictory” in this blog for past posts on this clue to multiple personality.


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

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