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, August 1, 2024

“Being Transgender (What You Should Know)” by Thomas E. Bevan, PhD (a.k.a. Dana Jennett Bevan): Trans author asks and tries to answer:

“Do Transgender People Have “Split Personalities”?


“No. The key feature of dissociative identity disorder or “split personalities” is that people cannot remember important information about what they did in one personality when they are in another personality. Part-time transgender people do assume two alternative behavior “roles” when cross presenting and not crosspresenting…However…transgender people seem to be able to recall what happens in both their crosspresenting and not crosspresenting roles” (1, p. 223).


Comment: The author says “seem to be able to recall,” because, apparently, no expert interviewer of multiple personality disorder has studied trans persons for memory gaps. The expert interviewer knows that persons with dissociative memory gaps for many years have become quite adept at ignoring and hiding them, especially when the novice interviewer speaks only to the regular or “host” personality (2).


1. Thomas E. Bevan, PhD. Being Transgender (What You Should Know), Praeger, 2017.

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

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