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.

Tuesday, October 18, 2022

Memoirs of High-functioning Multiple Personality in Acting and Politics

Multiple personality (also known as “dissociative identity disorder”) is a serious mental illness when it causes clinically significant distress and dysfunction (1). However, after specific psychotherapy for it, and sometimes without therapy, a person with multiple personality may be quite high-functioning (2).


As discussed in this blog, the most common examples of high-functioning multiple personality that I know of are successful—including Nobel Prize-winning—fiction writers. I don’t know how common it is in politics.


Although multiple personality is usually hidden—except when a person is in crisis; or after diagnosis, for a demonstration; even from the person’s own, regular, “host” personality—it is occasionally hinted at (3) or even announced (4) in the title of a memoir.


1. American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition [DSM-5]. Arlington, VA, American Psychiatric Association, 2013.

2. Kluft, R. P. (1986). High-functioning multiple personality patients: Three cases. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 174(12), 722–726.

3. Sally Field. In Pieces: a memoir. New York, Grand Central Publishing, 2018.

4. Herschel Walker with Gary Brozek and Charlene Maxfield. Breaking Free: My Life with Dissociative Identity Disorder.  Foreword by Dr. Jerry Mungadze. New York, Touchstone/Howard Simon & Schuster, 2009.

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