“All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost” by Lan Samantha Chang: Voices heard conversing, once considered schizophrenia, is actually multiple personality

I have just started this novel by Lan Samantha Chang, who is Professor of English at the University of Iowa and Director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

The protagonist is Roman Morris, who is attending a writing program.

In the following passage, it is mentioned in passing, as merely something one might expect of a fiction writer, that Roman hears voices conversing with each other:

“Working alone over Thanksgiving break, it seemed to Roman that he heard a man and woman speaking in his mind. Listening to them felt intimate and strange, like eavesdropping on conversation between a couple lying in the dark. He began to write down their words, to shape them. The process, haunting and deeply confusing, made him wish that he could clear out all distractions and do nothing else. If only he did not have to worry about money; if only he did not have to teach or go to seminar: perhaps he would be able to write something truly—what did he mean? Truly, truthfully?” (1, p. 29).

As recently as 1994, the diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association said that this type of hallucination was characteristic of the psychosis, Schizophrenia: “Certain types of auditory hallucinations (i.e., two or more voices conversing with one another or voices maintaining a running commentary on the person’s thoughts or behavior) have been considered to be particularly characteristic of Schizophrenia and were included among Schneider’s list of first-rank symptoms” (2, p. 275).

However, a study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, official journal of the American Psychiatric Association, found that hearing voices conversing with each other was actually more common in the nonpsychotic condition, multiple personality (3).

1. Lan Samantha Chang. All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost [2010]. New York, W. W. Norton, 2011.

2. American Psychiatric Association: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition [DSM-IV]. Washington, DC, American Psychiatric Association, 1994.

3. Kluft RP. “First-rank symptoms as a diagnostic clue to multiple personality disorder.” Am J Psychiatry, 1987 Mar;144(3):293-8. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3826426