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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Thursday, June 6, 2024

“Reasons to Stay Alive” a Memoir by novelist Matt Haig: His MIRROR SYMPTOM of Multiple Personality


Memoir

“I stared at myself in the mirror. I stared at my face until it was not my face” (1, p. 44)…Like my reflection showed another person” (1, p. 46)…An urge to be someone else/anyone else” (1, p. 47)…The desire to step out of myself for a while. A week, a day, an hour. Hell, just for a second” (1, p. 48).


Textbook

“MPD patients often report seeing themselves as different people when they look into a mirror” (2, p. 62).


Comment: I would attribute Matt Haig’s mirror symptom of multiple personality to many novelists’ creative asset, what I call “multiple personality trait.” He does not mention multiple personality (a.k.a. dissociative identity).


1. Matt Haig. Reasons to Stay Alive (a Memoir). New York, Penguin Life, 2015.

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

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