“The Schopenhauer Cure” a novel by Irvin D. Yalom: The protagonist, an eminent, terminally ill, psychotherapist, reviews the case of a patient he had failed to help twenty years ago: Had the therapist missed the diagnosis of multiple personality?

“PAST HISTORY: Grew up in Connecticut, only child, upper middle class. Father investment banker who committed suicide when Philip was thirteen…Blanket childhood amnesia—remembers little of his first several years and nothing of his father’s funeral…” (1, p. 20).

Comment: The amnesia suggests dissociative identity disorder (a.k.a. multiple personality disorder) in which the current “host” personality cannot remember what a traumatized alternate personality had experienced.

1. Irvin D. Yalom. The Schopenhauer Cure. New York, Harper Perennial, 2005.

2. Wikipedia. “Irvin D. Yalom.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irvin_D._Yalom