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.

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Friday, December 29, 2023

“Deacon King Kong” (post 5) by James McBride: Protagonist’s Dialogue with Deceased Wife has been Observed and Described as “Two-Headed”

The kind of dialogue between the protagonist and his deceased wife that was quoted in post 3 is subsequently observed by another character, who says to the protagonist, “You can’t lay around and talk to yourself like you is two-headed for the rest of your life. Never seen a man lay on a couch and go back and forth like you done” (1, pp. 288-289).


Comment: The protagonist apparently alternates between his wife’s part and his own part, just like a person with multiple personality who is switching back and forth between two co-conscious personalities.


“Co-consciousness is a state of awareness in which one personality is able to directly experience the thoughts, feelings, and actions of another alternate personality (2, p. 234).


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

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

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