Identity

The Bourne Supremacy is very much about protagonist Webb/Bourne's identity (the title of Robert Ludlum's previous novel, The Bourne Identity, about this character). Throughout The Bourne Supremacy, the complexity of this identity is developed. Webb/Bourne suffers ongoing amnesia as a result of a head wound and experiences flashes of memory from a violent past. As the novel begins, he is living as a professor of Oriental studies in a small university in Maine. His wife, Marie, and psychiatrist, Dr. Morris Panov, have been helping him cope. Marie denies her husband has ever been a killer and urges him to accept that he is not a killer, no matter what flashebacks he experiences. Panov helps him deal with whatever he perceives and to exercise vigorously whenever the partial past causes him to panic.

Webb/Bourne displays symptoms of "dissociative identity disorder" (DID), which is distinct from schizophrenia...