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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Tuesday, December 31, 2024

"Wicked" by Gregory Maguire: Author's reason for Wickedness is a religious explanation for multiple personality


“When goodness removes itself, the space it occupied corrodes and becomes evil, and maybe splits apart and multiplies…”


“ 'Well I wouldn’t know an evil thing if it fell on me,' said Galinda..."


" 'But they believe in evil still,' said Galinda with a yawn. 'Isn’t that funny, that the deity is passé but the attributes and implications of deity linger---' "


“ 'I am about to sleep, because this is profoundly boring to me,' Galinda said, but Elphaba was grinning from ear to ear" (1, p. 97).


1. Gregory Maguire. Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. London. Headline Review. 1995/2024. 

2. Michiko Kakutani's 1995 [Negative] New York Times Book Review of Wicked.

https://www.nytimes.com/1995/10/24/books/books-of-the-times-let-s-get-this-straight-glinda-was-the-bad-one.html

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