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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Monday, March 4, 2024

“A Little Life” (post 5) by Hanya Yanagihara: Italicized voices in Jude’s head argue with each other


"It’s all within the law, he would argue with the Harold-in-his head.

“Just because you can do it doesn’t mean you should, Harold-in-his-head would shoot back at him” (1, p. 276).


Comment: Ordinary thoughts are not italicized, but voices of alternate personalities are italicized. So the above is an argument between one of Jude’s Jude-identified alternate personalities and one of Jude’s Harold-identified alternate personalities. 


What goes on in the mind of a person with multiple personality may be quite complicated, too complicated to handle by the mind of a person who is psychotic, which is one reason that multiple personality is not classified as a psychosis.


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

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