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.

Monday, May 30, 2022

“Losing the Atmosphere” by Vivian Conan (post 3): Missing memory gaps may make this memoir misleading


In post 1, Vivian spoke of having “two Mommies” in childhood, a love mommy and a hate mommy, but her mother usually seems benevolent in the rest of the memoir, so I wonder if Vivian might have done things in childhood to anger her mother, then lied about it, because she had a memory gap for doing it, which is why some people with multiple personality have had a reputation for being a liar in childhood.  Search “lying.”


Neither her mother nor anyone else who has known Vivian is ever asked if they know Vivian to have done things she didn’t remember. [Maybe her mother thought there were "two Vivians."]


While there may be exceptional cases without memory gaps, this memoir may be misleading regarding the issue.


1. Vivian Conan. Losing the Atmosphere, a Memoir: A Baffling Disorder, a Search for Help, and the Therapist Who Understood. Afterword by Jeffery Smith, MD. New York, N.Y., Greenpoint Press, 2020.


Added next day: The author says she attended a writers' workshop for many years for help in writing this memoir, and that one of her alternate personalities is a fiction writer. Her therapist, with his patient's permission, should have interviewed people who knew her. Did he?

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