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, March 3, 2024

“A Little Life” (post 4) by Hanya Yanagihara: Jude has memory gaps, the foremost diagnostic symptom for multiple personality


“He will (though he won’t be able to remember how later) somehow work himself into a standing position, get himself out of the tub, take some aspirin, go to work…My life, he will think, my life. But he won’t be able to think beyond this…as he slips into that other world that he visits when he is in such pain, that world he knows is never far from his own but that he can never remember after: My life” (1, pp. 176-177).


“The…most commonly reported dissociative symptom in MPD (a.k.a. “dissociative identity disorder”) was amnesias (98%) (a.k.a. “memory gaps”)…(2, p. 59).


Comment: Since the author has not explicitly mentioned the diagnosis—“multiple personality” or “dissociative identity disorder”—I can’t credit the author with giving it to her main character knowingly. Perhaps the author has high-functioning multiple personality trait.


1. Hanya Yanagihara. A Little Life. New York, Anchor Books, 2015/2016.

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

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