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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Wednesday, July 24, 2024

"Nevada" by Imogen Binnie: Maria, trans protagonist, is puzzled by tendency to “dissociate” Also see study added July 26 (3)

“Maria kind of wishes she could videotape what Steph is saying and take it in later…pausing it whenever she starts to dissociate…


“She’s so far gone into her own head, she only barely catches Steph asking: Are you even here now?


“I am, Maria says. Kind of. There’s a lot going on in my head, and I can’t process the whole thing at once” (1, p. 76).


“On top of which, sex has always been super problematic for you. Even before you knew you were trans, it stressed you the fuck out…And further, you didn’t even know you were dissociating during sex until you’d been doing it for about a decade, and you’d heard about dissociating a lot of times, and then you finally put together that, actually, that’s what it was when you had to stop paying attention to the person you were fucking so that you could fantasize about a number of situations that didn’t have anything to do with having a penis and fucking somebody with it. So you have no idea what it’s like to have a loving relationship with fun sex in it, which you assume everybody else has, although really how are you gonna know?” (1, p. 109).


Comment: She’d “heard about dissociating a lot,” which may mean dissociation is well-known in the trans community. The word catches my attention, because multiple personality, a.k.a. “dissociative identity disorder,” is classified by The American Psychiatric Association as one of the “Dissociative Disorders” (2, pp. 291-307).


Added July 26 There has been a study (3).

Closing July 27: I got nothing from the rest of the book.


1. Imogen Binnie. Nevada. New York, MCD x FSG Originals, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2013/2022.

2. American Psychiatric Association: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition [DSM-5]. Arlington, VA. American Psychiatric Association, 2013.

3. Erika Sigurdsson MA and Etzel Cardeña Ph.D Dissociative Experiences Among Transgender Women.

 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1080/15299732.2024.2372563?needAccess=true

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