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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Friday, November 3, 2023

“Maeve Rising: Coming Out Trans” (post 2) by Maeve DuVally: Reasons Maeve should have been screened by an expert on multiple personality


“Sometimes when I drank too much on a weekend, I talked to myself, creating an alternative me…” (1, p. 116).


“Increasingly, there were times when heavy drinking no longer worked for me—to still the negative voices…” (1, p. 137).


“…Maeve Chevonne DuVally, a nervous transgender woman who had thought of herself as a man for the first 56 years of her life” (1, p. 121).


Comment: If Maeve created alternative selves, heard voices (of alternate personalities?), and had thought of herself as a man for the first 56 years of her life, why, beyond alcoholism, wasn’t multiple personality (a.k.a. dissociative identity disorder) the most likely diagnosis, especially since “Alcoholism appears to be a particularly common presentation for male MPD patients” (2, p. 128).


1. Maeve DuVally. Maeve Rising: Coming out Trans in Corporate America (a memoir). Sibylline Press, 2023.

2. Frank W. Putnam, MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989. 

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