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, April 2, 2019


“Milkman” by Anna Burns (post 6): First-person narrator thought mad due to “memory lapses, mental separations, and splittings-off from consciousness”

“You’re a mad person.”
Once more this was me talking to myself” (1, p. 138).

“In my memory-lapse moments…” (1, p. 166).

“…she [her trusted friend] interrupted. ‘God. I can’t believe this. Your head! Your memory! All those mental separations and splittings-off from consciousness’…I’d experience illusions of never having been stopped previously by the state security forces when it was obvious I was stopped by them, she maintained, all the time…She ended this talk on surveillance and my disappearance into other dimensions…Given I was now a beyond-the-pale, reputed to read-while-walking as if sitting down; prone, according to the community, to back-to-front reading, starting on the last page and working back to the front page in order to pre-empt narrative surprises…[and she told me that I’d] pretend to give directions to invisible people — all while reading-while-walking…” (1, pp. 207-208).

1. Anna Burns. Milkman. Minneapolis Minnesota, Graywolf Press, 2018.
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