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.

— Share site with friends.

MPD Textbooks: — Frank W. Putnam, MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) (a.k.a. Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), New York, The Guilford Press, 1989. —James G. Friesen, PhD. Uncovering the Mystery of MPD, (includes discussion of demonic possession) Eugene, Oregon, Wipf and Stock Publishers,1997.

Tuesday, September 9, 2025

“Fox” (post 1) a novel by Joyce Carol Oates: Engaging Vocabulary


Front Flap (1):

“beguiles”

“hypnotic”

“magnetically diabolical”

“multiple points of view”


Pages 8-12 (1)

“Yes yes I will do anything you ask.”

“Under the command of her human”

“she is obliged to obey”

“hypnotized”

“For this, I was born”


Comment: If the title character will be a hypnotic villain, the above may be seen as just setting the stage. But is it inadvertently, mildly, hypnotizing avid readers?  Having learned the basics of hypnosis from my past decades as a psychiatrist, I know that the above is probably sufficient to mildly hypnotize highly hypnotizable people, which may include avid readers in their avid reading frame-of-mind. Indeed, “multiple points of view” may be particularly engaging of readers with a mild degree of multiple personality, which is more common than most people think.


Of course, all successful novelists know ways to engage their readers. It’s their job.

1. Joyce Carol Oates. Fox. New York, Hogarth, 2025. 

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