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 4, 2023

“The Hunger Games" (post 1) by Suzanne Collins: Gratuitous Mirror Symptom of Multiple Personality

“I can hardly recognize myself in the cracked mirror that leans against the wall” (1, p. 15).


Comment: It is a textbook symptom of persons with Multiple Personality (a.k.a. dissociative identity disorder) that they sometimes may not recognize themselves when they look in a mirror, depending on which of their personalities is looking in the mirror.


The character may have said this merely to emphasize how nice she looked, all dressed up, but the author might not have phrased it this way, unless the author, like most novelists, had multiple personality trait.


1. Suzanne Collins. The Hunger Games. New York, Scholastic, 2008.

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