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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Saturday, December 7, 2024

“The Real Wizard of Oz: The Life and Times of L. Frank Baum by Rebecca Loncraine: Biography Suggests Baum had Multiple-Personality Trait


“Sky Island was a follow-up to The Sea Fairies that came out in 1912. Trot and Cap’n Bill fly by magic umbrella to an island in the clouds. The island is more vaporous and less concrete than Baum’s other worlds, and the characters that inhabit it…aren’t particularly compelling. But the island enforces a dreadful form of punishment that is the most vivid thing about the story. Those who break the laws of Sky Island are butchered in half: “they stand you under a big knife, which drops and slices you in two…then they match half of you to another person who has likewise been sliced.” You have been “patched.” “It’s a terrible punishment"; the patched body doesn’t know which half is their original self and which isn’t. They are left divided, incoherent, working one half against the other. Baum’s storytelling mind had been splintered into numerous voices, which often wrote tales against one another—the gung-ho, chauvinistic fortune-hunting stories for boys were morally at odds with the Oz books, for instance. Perhaps Baum was aware of his divided, inconsistent nature” (1, p. 247). 


1. Rebecca Loncraine. The Real Wizard of Oz. New York, Gotham Books, 2009. 

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