Evan Treborn Movie Analysis

From a young age, Evan Treborn suffered from blackouts and he couldn’t recall what happened during those moments. His grade school teachers raised his mother’s attention to this issue after he drew a horrific picture of himself standing over dead bodies. His mother hoped that Evan didn’t have the same illness as his father, who was living in an institution. Evan Treborn begins to blackout many traumatic experiences and when he “wakes up”, he can’t remember what had happened, or where he is. His mother takes him to an institution and the physician recommends having him write down everything that goes on that day in an attempt to jog his memory when he has his blackouts. When something bad happens to his friend, Lenny, he is taken to the institution, again, and is hypnotized in an attempt to pick up the missing pieces, which are blacked out; when too much stress is put on him to remember, his nose starts to bleed. The movie skips to Evan in college and he goes out to celebrate seven years without any blackouts. After reading the journals he’s kept since he was seven, he begins to remember bits and pieces of the memories he had blacked out. Evan then begins to read his journals and tries to fix past traumatic experiences in order to get the life he could’ve had if these experiences didn’t occur (Rhulen & Bress). These symptoms closely resemble the symptoms of dissociative amnesia.
Dissociative amnesia is a dissociative disorder where …show more content…
In conclusion, there is really no doubt that Evan was supposed to exhibit symptoms of selective amnesia and after comparing his symptoms to diagnostic criteria in the DSM-V, there is no doubt that he definitely meets the requirements for this