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.

Friday, May 26, 2023

“The Women’s Room” (post 7) by Marilyn French: Narrator ends the novel as she began it, asking the reader to decide her sanity

Beginning

“Well, I said I was going to try to avoid fairy-tale fantasies, but I seem to be incorrigible…I leave it to you to decide on Mira’s sanity” (1, p. 5).


Conclusion

“So, you see, the story has no ending…

“And that’s all, I guess, except for Mira…”(1, p. 462).

“Some days I feel dead, I feel like a robot, treading out time. Some days I feel alive, terribly alive…Other times I think I have gone over the line…An elderly man stopped me the other day as I walked along the beach, a white-haired man with a nasty face, but he smiled and said, ‘Nice day, isn’t it?’ And I glared and snapped at him, ‘Of course you have to say that, it’s the only day you have!’

“He considered that, nodded, and moved on.

“Maybe I need a keeper…

“I have opened all the doors in my head…” (1, pp. 464-465).


Comment: “Multiple Personality Trait” (see past posts) is sane.


1. Marilyn French. The Women’s Room (a novel). New York, Penguin Books, 1977/2009.

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