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.

— If you read only recent posts, you miss most of what this site has to offer.

— Share site with friends.

Wednesday, February 21, 2024

“I Heard Her Call My Name” (post 1) by Lucy Sante

“Who am I?…I’m a writer before I’m anything else…I had been stifling my doubts…But that very insistence was a clue to the fragility of my impulse…The process violated my innate sense of the dialectic, or perhaps I just mean my fundamentally dual personality…Lucy lives on inside me and always will…But that’s the way I’ve always been. For example. I couldn’t write—anything—if I knew in advance what was actually going to happen on the page…I’m too thorny and various and contradictory…So I’m sticking with Luc for now…I will be in daily conversation with Lucy.” The above note (from 12 March 2021) was hooey, (he says) or largely so…It contained…what he would later learn is called “internalized transphobia” (1, pp. 19-34).


Comment: Was the voice who called his name an alternate personality? Search “contradictory” in this blog for past posts on this characteristic of persons with undiagnosed multiple personality.


1. Lucy Sante. I Heard Her Call My Name (a memoir of transition). New York, Penguin Press, 2024.

Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Thank you for taking the time to comment (whether you agree or disagree) and ask questions (simple or expert). I appreciate your contribution.

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)