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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Thursday, December 28, 2023

“Deacon King Kong” (post 4) by James McBride: Protagonist has memory gap even when sober


At the beginning of this novel, the protagonist, when drunk, had amnesia for shooting someone. I commented in post 2 that his amnesia might have been a memory gap due to multiple personality, but said I would read on, to see if he ever had unusual forgetting when sober. He does:


“It was the only job he had that he didn’t need to take a drink for…Four months into the job and he’d never managed to remember her [his employer’s] name…” (1, p. 223).


Comment: This alone certainly does not prove that the protagonist has multiple personality. But I—and perhaps the author—want to caution people about automatically attributing memory gaps to alcohol.


1. James McBride. Deacon King Kong. NewYork Riverhead Books, 2020. 

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