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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Sunday, March 30, 2025

Why Multiple Personality is Hidden and Overlooked


Patients tend to fear, avoid, and hide symptoms of multiple personality, because it is the oddest thing they can think of, and would seem to mean that they are crazy. But the fact is that the chapter on psychotic (“crazy”) disorders in the diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association does not even mention multiple personality disorder. It does mention Delusional Disorder (1, p. 90), Brief Psychotic Disorder,” Schizophreniform Disorder (1, p. 96), Schizophrenia (1, p 99), Schizoaffective Disorder (1, p. 105), Psychotic Disorder Due to Another Medical Condition (1, p.115), and Catatonia (1, p. 119). The manual does not mention multiple personality disorder (renamed Dissociative Identity Disorder) until its chapter on Dissociative Disorders (1, pp. 291-307).


Comment: Most persons with Dissociative Identity Disorder are not psychotic, and it is as common as schizophrenia (1, p. 294), but most psychiatrists, psychologists, and therapists have not had much training in how to diagnose and treat it. Putnam’s textbook is a good introduction (2).


1. American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5). Arlington, VA, American Psychiatric Association, 2013.

2. Frank W. Putnam, MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989. 

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