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.

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Wednesday, March 16, 2022

“Chatter: The Voice in Our Head” by Ethan Kross (post 1)


“Our verbal stream of thought is so industrious that according to one study we internally talk to ourselves at a rate equivalent to speaking four thousand words per minute out loud…Sometimes this chatter takes the form of a rambling soliloquy; sometimes it’s a dialogue we have with ourselves…Sometimes it’s an…imagining of future events.  Sometimes it’s a free-associative pinballing between negative feelings and ideas.  Sometimes it’s a fixation on one specific unpleasant feeling or notion…” (1, p xxii).


In short, Kross’s “voice in our head” is not always or necessarily an intelligible voice, per se.


1. Ethan Kross. Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It matters, and How to Harness It. New York, Crown, 2022.

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