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.

Wednesday, March 18, 2026

“The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts” by Kim Fu: Adult Protagonist Confesses Multiple Personality (a.k.a. Dissociative Identity”), Probably Reflecting Author


“I just wish she [my late mother] was still here, to tell me what to do. I constantly wish I could ask her advice. I feel like a child, in the worst possible way. Like I’m five years old and she abandoned me in a parking lot. Sometimes I’ll be talking to someone, a bank teller or a waiter or a canvasser on the street, and I’ll have this moment of genuine dissociation and confusion, like, why are they talking to me like this? Can’t they see I’m only a child?” (1, p. 25).


Child and infant personalities are found in virtually every MPD patient’s system of alter (alternate) personalities (2, p.107).


Comment: I suspect the author's protagonist has multple personality because the author has the creative version discussed in this blog: "multiple personality trait."


1. Kim Fu. The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts. New York, Tin House, Zando, 2026.

2. Frank W. Putnam. MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press,1989. 

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