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, May 25, 2025

“Multiple Motives” (post 2) by Kassandra Lamb: Creatively, Subjectively Honest, Author’s Notes

I did keep reading this book, until I peeked at the back, and found a section of “Author’s Notes” (1, pp. 275-277), which included the following:

“Also, apologies to the Baltimore County Police Department for the fictional Detective Philips. I tried very hard to make him a more balanced human being, with some good as well as bad in him. But characters sometimes have a will of their own, and no matter what I did, he refused to be anything but obnoxious” (1, p. 277).


Comment: Psychologically, characters that have a will of their own are alternate personalities. And it was after reading many author interviews in which authors had made this same kind of “joke” that I finally realized, in a very real sense, subjectively, they were not joking—this was their creative experience. And as the old saying goes: “Truth is often spoken in jest.”


1. Kassandra Lamb. Multiple Motives. misterio press, 2011.

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