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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Tuesday, August 27, 2024

“You Can’t Go Home Again” by Thomas Wolfe: Gratuitous Symptoms of Multiple Personality are Not Found, Suggesting Author Lacked Multiple Personality Trait

Comment: Either Thomas Wolfe did not have the creative asset of “multiple personality trait,” which past posts in this blog have found in about ninety percent of the novels I’ve discussed, or the symptoms may be present in his other works, but not in this one.


I may read more by and about Thomas Wolfe in the future, but I want to publish this negative finding now to make the point that the things I look for in this blog are not so common that they can always be found, even if the novel is about six-hundred pages like this one (1).


1. Thomas Wolfe. You Can’t Go Home Again. New York, Scribner, 1934/1990.

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