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 10, 2024

“The Talented Mr. Ripley” (post 2) by Patricia Highsmith: Tom Ripley’s fluid identity as he looks in a mirror is a textbook symptom of multiple personality

“He had a curious feeling that his brain remained calm and logical and that his body was out of control…He put on a pair of Dickie’s shoes…The suit fitted him. He re-parted his hair and put the part a little more to one side, the way Dickie wore his…“Marge, you must understand that I don’t love you,” Tom said into the mirror in Dickie’s voice, with Dickie’s higher pitch on the emphasized words, with the little growl in his throat at the end of the phrase that could be pleasant or unpleasant, intimate or cool, according to Dickie’s mood. “Marge, stop it!” Tom turned suddenly and made a grab in the air as if he were seizing Marge’s throat. He shook her, twisted her, while she sank lower and lower, until at last he left her, limp, on the floor…“You know why I had to do that,” he said, still breathlessly addressing Marge, though he watched himself in the mirror. “You were interfering between Tom and me—No, not that! But there is a bond between us!”

He turned, stepped over the imaginary body…It surprised him how much he looked like Dickie…[Dickie enters the room.]

“What’re you doing?…I wish you’d get out of my clothes,” Dickie said.

Dickie looked at Tom’s feet. “Shoes, too? Are you crazy?” (1, pp. 75-77).


Comment: Search “mirror” and “mirrors” in this blog for past posts on this textbook symptom of multiple personality.

1. Patricia Highsmith. The Talented Mr. Ripley. New York, W. W. Norton & Company, 1955.

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