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, October 30, 2020

“Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years 1865-1871” by Joseph Frank: Raskolnikov’s split personality was caused by radical ideology


Volume four of this five-volume biography acknowledges that the protagonist of Crime and Punishment appeared to have a split personality, “But Razumikhan’s description, it should be noted, is carefully limited only to ‘the last year and a half,’ that is, exactly the period when Raskolnikov had fallen under the influence of radical ideas” (1, p. 123).


However, this detailed biography does describe a number of Raskolnikov’s remarkable, unexplained, memory gaps, which are a cardinal symptom of multiple personality, and could not have been caused by radical ideas.


I will read Crime and Punishment.


1. Joseph Frank. Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years 1865-1871. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1995. 

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