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.

Sunday, January 31, 2021

“Faust” (post 2) by Goethe (post 4): Faust sees an alternate personality when he looks in a mirror, reflecting multiple personality trait in the author


Mirrors are a recurring subject in this blog, because it is known that persons with multiple personality may occasionally see one of their alternate personalities when they look in a mirror.


In fiction, this may be explained away by saying it is a “magic mirror.” But it would have made more sense for fiction to have had magical windows.


“FAUST. Who meanwhile has been standing in front of a mirror, going forward to peer into it from up close and then stepping back.

What do I see? What a marvelous vision

Shows itself in this magic glass!

Love, lend me your wings, your swiftest to pass

Through the air to the heaven she must dwell in!

Unless I stay firmly fixed to this spot,

If I dare to move nearer the least bit,

Mist blurs the vision and obscures her quite.

Woman unrivaled, beauty absolute!

Can such things be, a creature made perfectly?

The body so indolently stretched out there

Surely epitomizes all that is heavenly.

Can such a marvel inhabit down here?” (1, lines 2477-2490).


A magical mirror in fiction may reflect multiple personality trait in the writer. In the above example, it is not a problem that the alternate personality would be of a different sex and age than the character or writer, since alternate personalities are often of a different sex and age than the host personality.


1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Faust: A Tragedy, Parts One [1806/1829] & Two [1831], Fully Revised. Translated from the German by Martin Greenberg. New Haven, Yale University Press, 2014.

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