Presumably the mental training that caused him to become such an innate killing machine, I guess.
If you’re happy with the Movie Bourne, do not go out and read the Book Bourne…he’s an entirely different dude. You’re better mentally thinking them entirely different people that have the same improbable name.
It’s apparantly an artifact of the behavioral conditioning received by Treadstone field operatives, along with anxiety, depression, compulsive cleaning, and other unnamed disorders that Nicky was suppossed to monitor. As it seems to be associated with emotional memory flashbacks it may have been a part of some process of emotional or impulse suppression, perhaps some form of psychopharmaceutical operant conditioning a la Project BLUEBIRD and Project MKULTRA (popularly fictionalized in The Manchurian Candidate). Additionally, the psychologist who appears in a deleted scene in The Bourne Identity (advising the Treadstone group as to Bourne’s motives) bears a significant resemblence to Margaret Singer.
Movie versus Book: It’s been a long, long time since I’ve read Ludlum’s books. (The last one I tried to read, which was called something like The Apocalypse Watch, was such utter dreck that I literally threw it in the fireplace.) However, I recall that thinking that the premise was interesting but the execution was lacking in both style and literary competence; not quite at the level of Clive Cussler, but not to far above it. (I don’t mind “non-literary” fiction–Ian Fleming, Jim Thompson, and Lawrence Block are all well represented on my bookshelf–but badly written, excessively purple prose is just tiresome.) I think the movie character is much more developed (ironically, since character development is usually the first thing pitched overboard in a movie adaptation of a novel) and somewhat more plausible, though Bourne is still clearly in superhero territory.
Stranger
Thanks UB and Stranger.
I missed the Bourne Identity book and read the Bourne Supremacy before seeing the movie. They’re entirely different stories. In the movies, Bourne is extremely competent. In the book I started, he’s legend throughout Asia.
I’ll agree to the Clive Cussler dreck. I read one after seeing a summer-popcorn-movie from one of his books. Shudder. You can almost read the fade to commercial breaks.