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, November 7, 2023

“The Girl Who Survived” (post 2) by Lisa Jackson: During police interview, Kara switches between her adult and her child-aged personalities


“Neither [of the two police detectives] had interrupted her as she’d gotten lost in thought, the interview room melting away as she was once again a child of seven, witnessing the horror of the night that had altered the course of her life forever. Memories washed over her, some crystal clear…but all so real that…she felt goose bumps rise on the back of her arms…Shivering, she stared straight ahead, blinking to bring herself back to the present” (1, p. 362).


Comment: The above may be understood as either Kara’s psychological age-regression from her current adult age back to age 7; or her switch from her current adult personality to her seven-year-old, child-aged alternate personality, who is psychologically frozen in the time of her childhood trauma.


In multiple personality (a.k.a. dissociative identity disorder), which usually has its onset in childhood, child-aged personalities are the most common kind of alternate personality (2, p. 107-108). Had the author studied or experienced these aspects of multiple personality?


Added Nov. 8: The author never notes that any of her characters had symptoms of multiple personality. Her police call her plot’s resolution “Beyond weird” (1, p. 498).


1. Lisa Jackson. The Girl Who Survived. New York, Zebra Books, 2022.

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

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