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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Tuesday, December 3, 2024

“The Secrets of Midwives” by Sally Hepworth: Features of Multiple Personality (a.k.a. “dissociative identity")


— Memory Gaps related to alcohol (1, p. 274) or getting pregnant


— Metaphors of psychological self-dividedness; a character’s “parts”


— Compartmentalized Chapters and no omniscient point-of-view


Comment: Most people do not have prominent memory gaps, even with alcohol. They have facets, not “parts” (a euphemism for alternate personalities); and their regular personality has an omniscient point-of-view for its own stories.


1. Sally Hepworth. The Secrets of Midwives. New York, St. Martin’s Griffin, 2015. 

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