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, December 26, 2024

“Hero for the Holidays” by Maisey Yates: Inadvertent multiple personality


“Standing next to the horse now, he looked at ease. In his natural element. And he was showing her [Fia Sullivan], in a thousand different ways, that he was actually an amazing father.

  Maybe he would have been a good one the whole time.

Maybe the problem was you” (1, p. 214).


“He appreciated Fia in that moment on a level he hadn’t yet.

For her intuition as a mother.

She had it all along, you just didn’t appreciate it when it conflicted with what you wanted” (1, p. 237).


Problem: Italics indicate a third-person response in the character’s mind to what the character had just thought. But since there is no omniscient narrator in this novel, who makes those italicized third-person responses?


Comment: Perhaps the author has “multiple personality trait,” discussed in this blog, and it includes an alternate personality who sometimes comments on the author’s thoughts; and so, the author, inadvertently, gave that kind of alternate personality to two of her characters.


1. Maisey Yates. Hero for the Holidays. Toronto, Canary Street Press, 2024. 

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