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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Thursday, December 21, 2023

“The Color of Water” (post 2) by James McBride: At the end, author recalls “ache” as a boy, but does not know that “a boy who lived in the mirror” (see post 1) had been a textbook symptom of multiple personality


“…the little ache I had known as a boy was no longer a little ache when I reached thirty. It was…telling me, Get on with your life…There were two worlds bursting inside me trying to get out. I had to find out more about who I was…” (1, p. 266).


Comment: “MPD patients often report seeing themselves as different people when they look into a mirror” (2, p. 62).


1. James McBride. The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother (a memoir). New York, Riverhead Books, 1996/2006.

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

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