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.

— Share site with friends.

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.

Sunday, September 3, 2023

“Everything / Nothing / Someone” a memoir by Alice Carrière: Highlights Mirror Symptom of Multiple Personality (a.k.a. dissociative identity disorder)

“When I was listening to audiobooks, I thought in the third person. Walking down the street to school I would think, ‘She is walking down the street. It is raining.The rain falls on her jacket.’ I turned myself into words and my life into a story. Years later, when I didn’t recognize my own face in the mirror, when my body did not feel like my own, I would again recite myself to myself, narrating myself into existence…” (1, p. 10).


1. Alice Carrière. “Everything / Nothing / Someone”  a memoir. New York, Spiegel & Grau, 2023.

2. NYTimes Book Review. “In a Memoir of Privilege and Pain,” Alice Carrière recalls her eventual slip into dissociative disorder.” https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/28/books/review/everything-nothing-someone-alice-carriere.html


Comment: Beyond multiple personality’s classic mirror symptom—search “mirror” and “mirrors" in this blog—the memoir did not have enough about multiple personality to be of further interest here.

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