“Trust” (post 1) by Hernan Diaz: a character’s “part” wonders if her father had a dissociative fugue, a symptom seen in multiple personality

“During the war [WWI], Helen had been unable to reach her father at Dr. Bally’s clinic in Switzerland.” Now she learns that he had wandered off and his whereabouts are unknown…There was a “portion of her unaffected by grief…This same part of her also experienced a clear sense of relief from knowing that her father, with his…madness, was gone. But gone where?…Or he could he have recovered somehow and started a new family, dismissing the confused memory of his daughter as one of the hallucinations that had haunted him during his illness…” (1, p. 61).

Comment: Once again, an author assumes that his characters have “parts,” which is a common way for persons with undiagnosed multiple personality to refer to their alternate personalities.

In addition, the scenario of a person’s forgetting who he is, wandering off to where nobody knows him, adopting a new identity, and starting a new family, is a dissociative fugue, which, to a much less dramatic extent, may be seen in fifty-five percent (2, p. 59) of persons with multiple personality disorder (a.k.a. dissociative identity disorder).

But why is there anything at all related to multiple personality in this novel? Perhaps the author has multiple personality trait.

1. Hernan Diaz. Trust. Riverhead Books. 2022.

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