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, August 3, 2024

Alanis Morisette, singer, has “No Bad Parts”

 

In an interview with Morisette in today's print edition of The New York Times (1), she reports having written the foreword to Richard Schwartz’s "No Bad Parts,” a popular psychotherapy book:


4 “I wrote the foreword to Richard Schwartz’s “No Bad Parts,” she says, and I love that book because it gives us a mechanism to interact with the various parts of ourselves as opposed to just being subject to their vicissitudes. Instead of having this angry part of me act out and ruin all my relationships, the theory is that I can dialogue with it rather than just losing it on people” (1).


Comment: As readers of this blog know, persons with undiagnosed multiple personality (a.k.a. “dissociative identity disorder”) often think of their alternate personalities as “parts,” a euphemism often used early in therapy (2. p. 92). Creative, high-functioning persons with multiple personality have the “trait,” not the disorder, and are not mentally ill.


1. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/27/arts/music/alanis-morissette-favorites.html

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

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