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.

— If you read only recent posts, you miss most of what this site has to offer.

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Saturday, April 20, 2024

“Sociopath” (post 2) by Patric Gagne, PhD: Author says her “dark side” is merely a part of herself, and so is not really an “alternate personality”


“I felt the sensation of pressure as it began its familiar rise. You can do anything you want, said the voice in my head.


“It was true. In the dark with everyone sleeping, I was completely at liberty. I could get Grace’s bike from the garage and take a midnight cruise around the community. I could spy on the neighbors. Without any adults to deal with or my sister to guard, there was nothing to stop me from doing something outrageous. Only I don’t want to do something outrageous, I thought angrily…


“You love it, said the voice in my head.”


“It was true. I did love it. The voice in my head was not coming from some alternate personality. It was my voice—my dark side” (1, p. 41).


Comment: In the obsolete view of multiple personality as “possession,” an alternate personality was thought of as a spirit or demon; i.e., some sort of invasive outsider. But in the modern, psychological view, an alternate personality is merely a psychological component of the person, often referred to by persons with undiagnosed multiple personality as an opinionated or pushy ‘part,’ sometimes heard as a voice in their head.


1. Patric Gagne, PhD. Sociopath (a memoir). New York, Simon & Schuster, 2024. 


Added same day: Coincidentally, both psychopathy and multiple personality were brought to the public’s attention by the same American psychiatrist, Hervey M. Cleckley: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hervey_M._Cleckley

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