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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Saturday, February 3, 2024

“The Three Musketeers” (post 3) by Alexandre Dumas: The self-contradictory character from post 2 hears the voice of an alternate personality in his head


“D’Artagnan had reached the height of his desires: this time, Milady did not love him in the belief that he was someone else, but seemed to love him as himself. An inner voice told him that he was only an instrument of revenge that she was caressing before using it against her enemy. But his pride, his vanity, and his mad passion silenced that voice” (1, p. 375).


Textbook

“The patient may ‘hear’ the alternate personality speak as an inner voice within, often as one of the ‘voices’ that the patient has been hearing for years” (2, p. 94).


1. Alexandre Dumas. The Three Musketeers. Trans. Lowell Bair. New York, Bantam Classic, 1844/1984.

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

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