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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Sunday, January 28, 2024

Trump’s Bright Blue Necktie Today: Why Not His Usual Bright Red Necktie?


On TV today, I saw Trump giving a speech. He looked the same as usual, except that I am so used to seeing him in his bright red necktie that I was taken aback by seeing him in a bright blue necktie. 


For years, I’ve been puzzled by changes in Trump’s hair color. But do changes in a person’s grooming and/or clothes mean anything? According to a textbook on multiple personality, such changes may reflect the different tastes of a person’s various alternate personalities (1, p. 75).


But for all I know, Trump has other people to do his hair and choose his clothes, so that any changes in his hair or clothes may reflect their changing preferences, not Trump’s. Or maybe, today, he was trying to get Democrats to vote for him, too. Without interviewing him, I cannot know.


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

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