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, March 14, 2023

“Pineapple Street” (post 1) by Jenny Jackson: Why Italics?


“They were standing so close she could have kissed him if she lurched fast enough. Oh my God, why would I lurch-kiss this person? She briefly hated her own brain” (1, p. 22).


Comment: Did she briefly hate her own brain, because her brain had had a socially inappropriate impulse to lurch-kiss a man? Or did she hate a voice in her head that had stopped her from doing it? If the latter, then the voice may have been the voice of a more inhibited and proper, alternate personality, and not just a metaphorical voice of reason or conscience.


I have seen many writers use italics to indicate a voice in the head (which, in a nonpsychotic person, may be the voice of an alternate personality). But I will need more evidence in this novel to support the idea that this particular author has multiple personality trait.


My position is that about 90% of novelists do have multiple personality trait, but about 10% of novelists may not. So I will keep reading.


1. Jenny Jackson. Pineapple Street. Pamela Dorman Books/Viking, 2023. 

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