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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Sunday, January 5, 2025

“Hooked” by Emily McIntire: James (a.k.a. “Hook”) is described as "a dichotomy" and a “Jekyll and Hyde personality,” but multiple personality, per se, is never mentioned


“He’s a dichotomy, threatening my life in one breath and being a gentleman in the next. It’s terrifying how he can do both so flawlessly, as if they’re integral parts of him…It tosses everything I’ve ever been taught about good and evil out the window until it skews and blurs in my brain" (1, p. 214).


“Ugh! I explode, anger scorching through my insides, exhausted from his hot and cold act. “You are so fucking insane!…his Jekyll and Hyde personality…” (1, pp. 231-232).


Comment: This novel is a contemporary literary example of why people think multiple personality is rare: Even a bestselling author who built a whole novel around it, doesn’t explicitly mention “multiple personality.”


1.Emily McIntire. Hooked. Bloom Books, Sourcebooks, 2021/2022. 

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