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.

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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, November 12, 2019


“Love and Exile” (memoirs) by Isaac Bashevis Singer (post 3): As young man in Poland, notes puzzling inconsistency, makes self-diagnosis

“In some book or magazine, I had stumbled upon a phrase, ‘split personality,’ and I applied this diagnosis to myself. This is precisely what I was—cloven, torn, perhaps a single body with many souls each pulling in a different direction…Some kind of enemy roosted within me or a dybbuk who spited me in every way and played cat-and-mouse with me…Some maniac uttered crazy words inside my brain and I could not silence him. At the same time I held myself in such check that not even Gina [his lover] knew what I was going through. Older writers at the Writers’ Club often told me that they envied my youth and I said: ‘Believe me, there is nothing to envy.’ ” (1, p. 94).

Search “puzzling inconsistency,” a clue to multiple personality, for discussions related to other writers.

1. Isaac Bashevis Singer. Love and Exile [memoirs published 1975-1981]. Garden City N.Y., Doubleday & Company, 1984.
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