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.

Thursday, March 23, 2023

“Things We Never Got Over” (post 1) by Lucy Score: Do Bestselling Romance Novelists Have Multiple Personality Trait?


When I started this blog, I read mostly literary classics. And when I found that almost all of them contained unintentional symptoms of multiple personality, I initially thought that this might be what made literary novels literary, and that “multiple personality trait” might be what distinguished serious, literary novelists from commercial, genre novelists. But I eventually realized that all kinds of fiction, and most fiction writers, share this psychology.


The premise of Things We Never Got Over by Lucy Score (1) is this: Naomi’s obnoxious, identical twin sister, Tina, has run off, leaving Naomi to care for a niece she had never met nor even known existed.


Things We Never Got Over is 552 pages long, so I hope it will have something relevant to this blog. But since identical twins are a symbol for alternate personalities—objectively, though not in their self-image and mirror images, which may differ dramatically, all personalities of a person with multiple personality have the same body—I am hopeful.


1. Lucy Score. Things We Never Got Over. Naperville Illinois, Bloom Books, 2022.

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