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.

Tuesday, August 18, 2026

 “THE BROKEN KING,” a memoir by Michael Thomas, who says he has been “dissociative”

“I’d been trying for the last three years to get sober, but every time I went for more than a week without a drink, I’d enter what a psychologist would later call a fugue state…I’d come to in a different city…walking down a street and snap back into consciousness… When I wasn’t drunk, I was dissociative…When I wasn’t psychologically removed, I was suicidal. When I wasn’t despairing, I was enraged” (1. p. 10-12).

Comment: The writer with the most famous fugue state was Agatha Christie, who wandered off and couldn’t be located for eleven days in 1926.


Wandering off with a change of identity is suggestive of dissociative identity, previously called multiple personality, which was probably not considered in this memoir, except that the title’s word “broken” suggests the idea of broken into parts, a common euphemism for alternate personalities.


1. Michael Thomas. The Broken King (a memoir). New York, Grove Press, 2025.
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