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, July 8, 2022

“The Magic Mountain” by Thomas Mann (post 2): Self-justifying, Plural Narrator


“The story of Hans Castorp that we intend to tell here…is a story that took place long ago…in the old days…before the Great War [WWI]…But is not the pastness of a story that much more profound, more complete, more like a fairy tale…?


“We shall tell it at length [700 pages], in precise and thorough detail—for when was a story short on diversion or long on boredom simply because of the time and space required for the telling?


“And with that, we begin” (1, Foreword).


Comment: I am only up to page 233, and do not yet know whether the Foreword was promising or cautionary. Neither do I know whether the narrator’s plurality (“we”) was a self-diagnosis of multiple personality trait, rhetorical, or both.


I do know that Thomas Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.


1. Thomas Mann. The Magic Mountain [1924]. Translation from the German by John E. Woods. New York, Vintage International, 1996. 

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