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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Sunday, September 8, 2024

“Drive Your Plow Over The Bones of The Dead" (post 1) by Olga Tokarczuk: Words from an Alternate Personality

“No one was listening to me, but I went on with my speech. I couldn’t stop, because the words were coming to me from somewhere of their own accord…"(1, p. 105).


Comment: Words can seem to come to a person “of their own accord” only if there is something in their head with a mind of its own, which is the essence of an alternate personality.


1. Olga Tokarczuk. Drive Your Plow Over The Bones of The Dead. Trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones., New York, Riverhead Books, 2009/2019.

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