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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Thursday, June 27, 2024

“The Comfort of Ghosts: A Maisie Dobbs Novel” by Jacqueline Winspear: Page One Describes Man With Textbook Mirror-Symptom of Multiple Personality

Prologue, London, October 1945

“The man caught a glimpse of his reflection…At first he did not recognize his face…He had avoided mirrors during the long journey home (1, p. 1).


Multiple Personality Textbook


“MPD patients often report seeing themselves as different people when they look into a mirror…In some instances these alterations of perception of self are so disturbing that the individuals may phobically avoid mirrors (2, p. 62).


1. Jacqueline Winspear. The Comfort of Ghosts: A Maisie Dobbs Novel. New York, Soho Crime, 2024.  

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


Added June 30: I will have nothing further to say on this book, in which I lost interest.

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