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.

Saturday, July 18, 2026

“HITLER: Ascent 1889-1939” by Volker Ullrich: Hitler’s “internal contradictions”


“The main reason it is so difficult to decipher ‘the riddle of Hitler’ is the fact that his personality contained so many astonishing contrasts and contradictions. As early as 1936, Konrad Heiden described Hitler’s ‘dual nature.’ Like a medium, Heiden argued, the human being Adolf Hitler channelled and created, through a monstrous act of will, the phenomenon Adolph Hitler: ‘In moments of repose, the latter lies curled up and hidden within the former, only to emerge in moments of intensity to conceal the former behind its larger-than-life puppets mask.’ For Heiden, this split personality is what made it so difficult to reach reliable conclusions about Hitler.


“More than one of Hitler’s acquaintances confirmed this impression. Otto Dietrich pointed to Hitler’s ‘uncanny dual nature,’ arguing that the Führer’s internal contradictions were so intense that they became ‘the dominant characteristic of his entire being.’ On the one hand, Dietrich asserted, Hitler possessed extraordinary capabilities and gifts. On the other, and partially in conjunction with his fanatical anti-Semitism, he could be intellectually primitive and boorish. In Hitler’s breast, Dietrich wrote, ‘respectable sensibilities and ice-cold heartlessness, love and horrific cruelty lived side by side.’ ” (1, p.381)


Comment: Hitler may have had a form of dissociative identity disorder.


1.Volker Ullrich. Hitler: Ascent 1889-1939. Trans. From the German by Jefferson Chase. New York, Vintage Books, 2016. 

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