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.

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Thursday, May 15, 2025

“Love, Mom” by Iliana Xander


Mom, a famous novelist, has died. Her daughter tries to understand her mother from pages in her mother’s diary, which include: 


“My mind has been hazy lately. I did bizarre things and didn’t even remember doing them (1, p. 123). [That is a “memory gap.”]


Psychiatric Note: Memory gaps are a cardinal symptom of multiple personality disorder (a.k.a. dissociative identity disorder). (However, it is not a formal “disorder” (mental illness) unless it causes the novelist clinically significant distress and dysfunction).


Daughter's Comments: “There it is, the truth that friends and family never admit. And the truth is that Mom felt off quite often. Off in an unsettling way…Maybe she had a personality disorder. Or a multiple personalities disorder” (1, pp. 133-134).


1. Iliana Xander. Love, Mom. Vellum, 2024. 

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