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.

Monday, February 26, 2018


“Independence Day” by Richard Ford (post 2): Frank Bascombe thinks 15-year-old son is having emotional problems due to conflict between “two selves”

Richard Ford’s Independence Day won the Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner, becoming the first novel ever to win both awards in a single year.

In Chapter One, the first-person narrator, Frank Bascombe, who is divorced, is concerned that his son, Paul, who lives with his remarried mother, is having serious problems: shoplifting and assault. Frank plans to spend father-son time with Paul on the Independence Day, 4th of July, holiday.

Frank’s formulation of the psychological basis for his son’s problems includes the following:

“…one little outer character tries to make friends with or exert control over another, submerged, one, but can’t” (1, p. 14).

“My fatherly job…to coax by some middleman’s charm his [son’s] two foreign selves, his present and his childish past, into a better, more robust and outward-tending relationship—like separate, angry nations seeking one government—and to sponsor self-tolerance as a theme for the future” (1, p. 15).

This would be a sound, therapeutic approach to stabilize multiple personality. Is Frank basing his formulation and solution of his son’s problems on his own personal experience? Are these issues a reflection of the author’s?

1. Richard Ford. Independence Day. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.

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