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.

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Tuesday, November 12, 2024

“What Have We Done” by Alex Finlay: This novel is Compartmentalized like the mind of a person with “Multiple Personality Trait”


If an author who was aware of having “multiple personality trait” were to submit his new novel for publication, he might ask his agent and editor to see “what WE" — his multiple personalities — have done.


In a chapter titled “JENNA" (1, p. 113), the name of one of the main characters, it says that she had coped in her life by using “compartmentalization, denial, the stuff that got her through" (1, p. 114).


Indeed, most every chapter in this novel is compartmentalized according to the name of its main character and point in history, just as each alternate personality of a person with multiple personality has its own name and the times it has been most active in the person’s life.


Comment: Since I suspect that most novelists have “multiple personality trait” (see past posts), I speculate that more novels in the past would have had this format if publishers had permitted it, and if readers had not objected to it. And I wonder whether readers who most enjoy this format have multiple personality trait, too.


1. Alex Finlay. What Have We Done. New York, Minotaur Books, 2023. 

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