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.

Friday, May 29, 2015

Sherwood Anderson’s The Man Who Became a Woman: He sees female alternate personality in mirror and becomes her for a while

Occasionally, people with multiple personality see one of their alternate personalities when they look in a mirror. On questionnaires to assess people for dissociative experiences—multiple personality, also known as dissociative identity disorder, is a dissociative disorder—one question is whether the person has ever looked in a mirror and it didn’t look like them.

In this 1923 short story, a man says that when he was young, he had had an “experience…that I am forced, by some feeling inside myself, to tell…It will be kind of like confession is…What I mean is, this story has been on my chest…even after I married…and was happy. Sometimes I even screamed out at night and so I said to myself, ‘I’ll write the dang story,’ and here goes…

“…And then I looked up and saw my own face in the old cracked looking-glass…It—I mean my own face—was white and pasty-looking, and for some reason, I can’t tell exactly why, it wasn’t my own face at all…I’ve thought about it a lot since and I can’t make it out…

“The point is that the face I saw in the looking-glass…wasn’t my own face at all but the face of a woman. It was a girl’s face, that’s what I mean. That’s what it was. It was a girl’s face, and a lonesome and scared girl too. She was just a kid at that…

“It was a puzzler! All my life, you see…I had been dreaming and thinking about women…So I had invented a kind of princess…And now I was that woman, or something like her, myself…

“I couldn’t, to save my life, scream or make any sound. Just why I couldn’t I don’t know. Could it be because at the time I was a woman, while at the same time I wasn’t a woman? It may be that I was too ashamed of having turned into a girl…I don’t know about that. It’s over my head…

“I screamed at last and the spell that was on me was broken…then I stood on my own feet again and I wasn’t a woman, or a young girl any more but a man and my own self…”

 Search "mirror" and "mirrors" in this blog for related previous posts.

Sherwood Anderson. “The Man Who Became a Woman,” from Horses and Men (1923). This short story is available online:
http://www.doczonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/enl.pdf
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