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, October 30, 2023

“Hidden” (post 2) by Fern Michaels: A second character hears a voice in her head, and a third character makes a multiple personality joke


“But then a little voice in her head reminded her that if they didn’t rectify the predicament they were in, she might be shopping at these stores for the rest of her life. That is, if they didn’t go to prison” (1, p. 202).


“How are you going to explain your presence in a showroom after hours? You had a blackout and don’t know how you got here?” (1, p. 297).


Comment: Memory gaps (blackouts) are a cardinal symptom of multiple personality (a.k.a. "dissociative identity disorder"): when one personality has amnesia for where another personality went and/or what they did.


But this novel is not intentionally about multiple personality. So why are these things in the novel?


The presence of gratuitous symptoms (voices of alternate personalities) and jokes about multiple personality probably reflects the novelist's own psychology, what I call the novelist's multiple personality trait.


1. Fern Michaels. Hidden. New York, Zebra Books, 2021. 

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