Voltar

He sat in the chapel for hours picking his way through fugues. A dozen notes, hardly music. But then those few notes spoke to each other, subject and answer, by repetition, by diminution, by augmentation, even looping backwards on themselves in a course like the retrograde motion of Mars. He listened as if he had as many ears as fingertips, and, like a blind man, could feel textures that were barely there. At the end of two or three pages of music he would hear all the voices twining together in a construction of such dizzying power that the walls of the chapel could barely contain it.

Kate Grenville , em The Lieutenant
music organ fugue

In this chapter I restrict myself to exploring the nature of the amnesia which is reported between personality states in most people who are diagnosed with DID. Note that this is not an explicit diagnostic criterion, although such amnesia features strongly in the public view of DID, particularly in the form of the fugue-like conditions depicted in films of the condition, such as The Three Faces of Eve (1957). Typically, when one personality state, or ‘alter’, takes over from another, they have no idea what happened just before. They report having lost time, and often will have no idea where they are or how they got there. However, this is not a universal feature of DID. It happens that with certain individuals with DID, one personality state can retrieve what happened when another was in control. In other cases we have what is described as ‘co-consciousness’ where one personality state can apparently monitor what is happening when another personality state is in control and, in certain circumstances, can take over the conversation.

John Morton , em Trauma, Dissociation and Multiplicity: Working on Identity and Selves
memory stereotypes prejudice mental-illness consciousness amnesia diagnosis dissociation forgetfulness misunderstanding multiplicity exception-to-the-rule amnesiac stigma memory-loss alter-personalities multiple-personalities did multiple-personality-disorder misdiagnosis fugue dissociative-identity-disorder mpd dissociative-disorder dsm dissociative-amnesia alters diagnosing diagnostic-criteria dsm5 fugue-state personality-switch personality-system states-of-consciousness switching

Amnesia, which is a loss of memory, is a symptom of many different trauma and/or dissociative disorders, including PTSD, Dissociative Fugue, Dissociative Disorder Not Otherwise Specified and Dissociative Identity Disorder. Amnesia can affect both implicit and explicit memory.

Ruth A. Lanius , em The Impact of Early Life Trauma on Health and Disease: The Hidden Epidemic
abuse memory child-abuse victim trauma survivors amnesia dissociation memory-loss multiple-personality-disorder fugue traumatic dissociative-identity-disorder dissociative-disorders ddnos dissociative-amnesia fugue-state postraumatic-stress-disorder trauma-survivor

Theirs was the eternal youth of an alternating self, a youth with the constant although unfulfilled promise of growing up

Flora Rheta Schreiber , em Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities
healing abuse psychotherapy recovery mental-health psychiatry amnesia dissociation sexual-abuse multiplicity multiple-personalities fugue dissociative-identity-disorder mpd dissociative-amnesia

It all made sense — terrible sense. The panic she had experienced in the warehouse district because of not knowing what had happened had been superseded at the newsstand by the even greater panic of partial knowledge. And now the torment of partly knowing had yielded to the infinitely greater terror of knowing precisely

Flora Rheta Schreiber , em Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities
lost recovery panic mental-health psychiatry amnesia dissociation dissociative multiple-personalities multiple-personality-disorder fugue dissociative-identity-disorder mpd dissociative-amnesia multiplicty pscyhotherapy