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, April 5, 2025

“Sad Tiger” memoir of childhood rape by Neige Sinno concludes with euphemism for multiple personality: her “parts”

"The part of me that couldn’t hold it together has gone where she had to go, the other part, the part that wanted to stay, is me. But the split isn’t so simple, we are constantly thinking about each other. She hasn’t gone far…I hear her often, her ragged breath, the catch in her voice, I see her reflection in the mirror…She is always there, waiting, for I do not know what” (1, p. 131).


1. Neige Sinno. Sad Tiger. Trans. Natasha Lehrer. New York, Seven Stories Press, 2023.

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