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.

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Tuesday, June 24, 2025

“Consider Yourself Kissed” by Jessica Stanley: The Novel’s Phrase, “a critical internal voice” Implies Unacknowledged Multiple Personality


“By midafternoon she was exhausted, famished, and overwhelmed by a critical internal voice telling her, not incorrectly, she’d wasted her entire day” (1, p. 13).


Comment: I have not read every page of this novel, which may embarrass me, since the novel has gotten rave reviews, and I was very interested in the above sentence—including “a critical internal voice telling her”—which, perhaps inadvertently, suggests the voice of an alternate personality. But neither the novel nor any of its rave reviews explicitly mentions the implicit multiple personality (a.k.a. dissociative identity) as far as I know. Search “voices” in this blog for past discussions of this symptom.


1. Jessica Stanley. Consider Yourself Kissed (a novel). New York, Riverhead Books, 2025. 

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