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.

— If you read only recent posts, you miss most of what this site has to offer.

— Share site with friends.

Thursday, October 19, 2023

Prevalence: You’ve probably known someone, or read a novel by an author, who has Multiple Personality

Since the prevalence of multiple personality disorder (a.k.a. dissociative identity disorder) is estimated by the American Psychiatric Association to be about 1.5% (1, p. 294), and the U.S.A. has about 333 million people, then about five million Americans probably have the clinical disorder, but are seen by otherwise good clinicians who don’t know how to diagnose it.


Many clinicians don’t even screen for memory gaps, which are usually not complained about, because patients have had them for years and may think everyone has them; or they sometimes have “amnesia for their amnesia.”


For some people, like the bestselling, prize-winning novelists discussed in this blog, a milder, non-clinical, mentally well version—what I call “multiple personality trait”—may become a major, creative asset.


1. American Psychiatric Association: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5). Arlington, VA, American Psychiatric Association, 2013. 

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