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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Sunday, February 4, 2024

“The Three Musketeers” (post 4) by Alexandre Dumas: Mirror Scene during Milady’s captivity suggests she has multiple manipulative personalities


“The first moments of her captivity had been terrible for her, but…She had gradually brought her feelings under control…Now she turned inward on herself… ‘It was foolish of me to let myself be carried away like that, she thought as she stood facing her reflection in a mirror…As though to convince herself that she had not lost her ability to control her face, she made it take on a series of expressions, from a ferocious scowl to a sweet seductive smile…” (1, p. 508).


Textbook

“MPD patients…may describe seeing themselves sequentially change into several different people while looking into a mirror” (2, p. 62).


Comment: Search "mirror" or "mirrors" in this blog for relevant past posts concerning other novels.


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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