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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Tuesday, August 6, 2024

“Long Island Compromise” by Taffy Brodesser-Akner: Character’s Memory Gap or “blackout,” a common symptom of multiple personality

Novel

“But that’s making this sound like the decision was logical and inevitable. It was not. For as long as he could remember, Nathan’s habit was to black out a little when Mickey berated him, his body playing possum to endure the strike. Nathan often emerged from this blackout to find that he’d agreed to whatever Mickey wanted just to make it stop" (1, p. 178).


Textbook

“Amnesia or 'time loss' is the single most common dissociative symptom in MPD [a.k.a. dissociative identity disorder] patients” (2, p. 59).


Comment: Since multiple personality, per se, is not mentioned in this novel, why is a character given one of its major symptoms? Possibly as a reflection of the author’s multiple personality trait.


1. Taffy Brodesser-Akner. Long Island Compromise. New York, Random House, 2024.

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

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