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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Tuesday, February 27, 2024

“Splinters” (post 3) a memoir by Leslie Jamison: “Losing time” (memory gaps), added to her multiple selves (post 1), confirms multiple personality


—Quote from “Splinters”

“To lose time, to lose myself, to lose the tight orbit of my own looping thoughts, just for an afternoon—these were the things I‘d once wanted from booze. But it was always writing that offered the purest form of this surrender” (1, p. 158).


—Quote from Textbook

“Amnesia or time loss is the single most common dissociative symptom in MPD patients" (2, p, 59). It happens when the regular personality can’t remember the period of time that an alternate personality had taken control.   If amnesia is explained away as an alcohol blackout, ask patients if it ever happens when they have not been drinking.


1. Leslie Jamison. Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story. New York, Little, Brown and Company, 2024.

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

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