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, May 11, 2023

“The Last Thing He Told Me” by Laura Dave: “Parts” and “Witness Protection” as Metaphors for Multiple Personality

Hannah receives a one-line, two-word note, “Protect her,” from her husband, known to her as Owen, implying he is leaving, and that his last wish is that she protect his daughter from a previous marriage: 


“Part of me still wants to hold on to this one last moment—the moment where you still get to believe this is a joke, an error, a big nothing; the moment before you know for sure that something has started that you can no longer stop (1, p. 8).


[When they had first met] “I’m not saying it was love at first sight. What I’m saying is that a part of me wanted to do something to stop him from walking away…” (1, p. 14).


“If a part of you thinks that it will change one day,” he says. That one day this will go away and Ethan [Owen] can come back to you…That’s untenable. These men [gangsters], they don’t forget. That can never happen” (1, p. 280). So the authorities have been recommending Witness Protection, which Hannah has refused.


Comment: From beginning to end of this novel, more than one character expresses the author’s apparent notion that people have “parts,” which, as I’ve discussed in past posts, is a euphemism for alternate personalities.


The recommendations by the police in this novel for “Witness Protection” has made it occur to me that it is a good metaphor for multiple personality, because alternate personalities originate to protect a person who has experienced or witnessed trauma.


1. Laura Dave. The Last Thing He Told Me. New York, Simon & Schuster, 2021.

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