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.

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Monday, July 28, 2025

“Panopticon” (post 1) by Jenni Fagan: Protagonist’s Probable Multiple Personality Symptoms of Memory Gap, Seeing Faces and Hearing Voices


“Anais Hendricks, fifteen, can’t remember what happened, but across town a policewoman lies in a coma and Anais is covered in blood” (1, Back Cover).


“I get voices in my head and see faces no one else sees (mostly, but not always, when I’m tripping)” (1, p. 24).


Comment: A traumatic childhood in both the author and protagonist raises the possibility of multiple personality. I don’t know of any review of this book that considers this psychological possibility. But I argue in this blog that many novelists have creative "multiple personality trait.” 


1. Jenni Fagan. The Panopticon. New York, Hogarth, 2012. 

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