“Marnie” by Winston Graham (post 5): Marnie’s session with psychiatrist—confusing to both him and her—is right from textbook on multiple personality

Marnie’s mother is alive. There are several scenes in which Marnie visits her mother. Indeed, providing her mother with financial support, and looking like a success to her mother, are why Marnie has secretly been a thief.

However, Marnie has told her husband that both of her parents are deceased. And she has told the same thing to the psychiatrist her husband sent her (after she attempted suicide on their honeymoon).

During one of Marnie’s sessions with the psychiatrist, he says:

“Let’s see, have you one parent alive or both?”

“What d’you mean? You know they’ve been dead seventeen years, both of them.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“You’re thinking of your next patient, not me.”

“No,” he said, “I was thinking of you” (1, p. 441).

Evidently, one of Marnie’s alternate personalities had referred to one of her parents as being alive, which puzzled the psychiatrist, since she had previously told him that both her parents were deceased. He thought he must have previously misunderstood her—maybe both her parents were living—so he asked her, “Let’s see, have you one parent alive or both?”

However, Marnie, now back in the personality who had told him that both her parents were deceased, has a memory gap for having told him otherwise, and thinks that he must be confusing her with one of his other patients.

This kind of confusion in getting a patient’s personal history is right out of the textbook on multiple personality (2, p. 72).

1. Winston Graham. The Forgotten Story [1945]. Marnie [1961]. Greek Fire [1957]. London, Chapmans, 1992.

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