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, October 24, 2023

“Holly” (post 3) by Stephen King: “a colder version of Holly takes over”

Toward the end of this novel, “Holly approaches the vacant house at 91 Ridge Road…She steps briskly…and a colder version of Holly takes over. It’s the same one that threw all those loathsome china figurines into the fireplace at her mother’s house” (1, pp. 366-367).


Comment: The above talk about a different “version” of Holly is similar to the talk of her becoming “another girl,” quoted in post 1. It is multiple personality talk, since only persons with alternate personalities have alternate "versions” or other persons inside them, who can come out and take over.


Stephen King, who may have multiple personality trait (like most successful novelists), and so may have had similar subjective experiences, probably thought of Holly’s “versions” and alternate persons as ordinary psychology, not as something as allegedly rare as multiple personality. So unless he claims to have intentionally portrayed Holly as having multiple personality, I would not give him credit for it.


1. Stephen King. Holly. New York, Scribner, 2023

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