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.

Tuesday, November 22, 2022

John Banville, Booker Prize-winning novelist, often has memory gap for writing as himself, but not writing as his pseudonym


“Frequently, the next day I go back to read over what I wrote the day before; I don’t recognize it. I can’t remember writing it” (1, p 106).


“If I’m writing and it’s three o’clock in the afternoon, I am so deep in the work that I don’t know who I am. I don’t know where I am. I will use a word that I don’t know the meaning of. When I’ve finished writing, I’ll have to look it up, and I’ll discover it was the right word…” (1, p. 125).


Interviewer: “A lot of your characters…are somehow bifurcated…”

John Banville: “Of course Stevenson got it perfectly in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. There is somebody else inside that has to be kept in; otherwise, there would be anarchy” (1, p. 60).


Comment: Above suggests Banville has multiple personality trait.


1. Earl G. Ingersoll and John Cusatis (Editors). Conversations with John Banville [1995-2018]. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 2020. 

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