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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Monday, September 2, 2024

“Midnight Fugue” (post 1) a novel by Reginald Hill: What is a Dissociative Fugue?


Back Cover: “Gina Wolfe has come to mid-Yorkshire in search of her missing husband…Is he in [a dissociative] fugue (3) or is he in flight [run away]?” (1).


Reginald Hill was a successful English novelist (2).


Agatha Christie had a famous, real-life disappearance in 1926 (4), probably a dissociative fugue.


1. Reginald Hill. Midnight Fugue. (A Dalziel & Pascoe Mystery). New York, Harper, 2009/2021.

2. Wikipedia. Reginald Hill. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reginald_Hill

3. Wikipedia. Dissociative Fugue. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociative_fugue

4. Wikipedia. “Agatha Christie. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agatha_Christiehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agatha_Christie


Comment: In this blog, search “Flitcraft’s Fugue” for a post on the story of a dissociative fugue in The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. 

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