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 13, 2024

“Night Watch” (Pulitzer Prize Novel) by Jayne Anne Phillips: Undiagnosed Multiple Personality of mother in rural, previously terrorized, mid-19th century family


Eliza, the mother of 12-year-old ConaLee, hasn’t spoken in more than a year. The father had left for the Civil War and never returned. But after having been terrorized by a stranger called "Papa,” they now reside in the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in West Virginia, where Eliza is known as Miss Janet and ConaLee pretends to be her mother’s maid.


“Miss Janet conversed now, even played the piano for musical afternoons. People thought her ‘quiet,’ but she seemed, after near nine month as Miss Janet, so sure a woman of quality that I [ConaLee] wondered if I remembered wrong…You are quiet today, ConaLee, Mama said” (1, p. 201)…


“Mama, I asked, why are you not afraid, that he [‘Papa’] is here, so near us? (1, p. 202).


“She turned, surprised. ‘ConaLee, I don’t fear him. I was only shocked…to find him here, so changed…


“But he only pretended not to know us, Mama—I saw my mother’s eyes change expression…like a child hiding in plain sight, afraid my words would set him bounding toward us…


“She embraced me, speaking low and soothing. ‘ConaLee, that man is bound in a cell stronger than any jail. Likely he pretends madness…


“Look around you, ConaLee…I am Miss Janet and you are Nurse Connolly…” (1, p. 202).


1. Jayne Anne Phillips. Night Watch. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2024. 


New York Times Review. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/25/books/review/jayne-anne-phillips-finds-anguish-and-asylum-in-civil-war-america.html

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