[info] if you believe, gentlemen, that you are the sole holder of truth...
THE FACTS:
There is no such person as Edward Daniels. Teddy is Andrew Laeddis, the man he's been hunting for the past two years, the man he thinks lit the fire that killed his wife. He doesn't remember. There are a lot of things Teddy doesn't remember.
He married Dolores in the fall of 1945. They had three kids right off the bat: Edward, Daniel, and Rachel. It was the family Teddy had always wanted, but it didn't make him happy. Nothing did. He'd come back from the war damaged, depressed and shell-shocked. He buried himself in his work and in the bottle, pulling away from his family with every passing year.
Dolores was manic-depressive. As Teddy pulled away from her, she lost her stable center and her mental condition began to deteriorate. She started getting paranoid, clingy, afraid of everything from another war to their next-door neighbors. Teddy didn't understand it, so instead of dealing with it, he pulled away further.
In 1951 she set fire to their apartment on Buttonwood, trying to rid it of ghosts. Today, Teddy thinks Andrew Laeddis set that fire, and that it killed Dolores. In truth, no one was hurt, but it was the first glaringly obvious sign that Dolores was not well. Unfortunately for everyone, Teddy couldn't come to terms with that fact. He bought Dolores a lake house just outside Boston that they'd rented a few summers past and took her and the kids there to live, trying to move on.
Dolores attempted suicide later that year. During her hospitalization, doctor after doctor warned Teddy that she was a danger to herself and the children, but Teddy wouldn't accept it. He didn't understand that insanity is not a choice; he stubbornly believed she would just get better if they tried hard enough. When she didn't, Teddy kept ignoring the signs. He loved her too desperately to believe she was insane, and he couldn't handle what it said about him that his soul mate was an insane person, so he pretended it wasn't happening. He continued to drink and isolate himself from her rather than facing the reality of her illness.
In the spring of 1952, Teddy came home from work to find Dolores sopping wet and alone in the backyard. She'd drowned their three children in the lake and attempted to overdose on laudanum herself--laudanum he had been too drunk to lock up properly when he left the house--but she ran out before it could kill her. Teddy, overcome with grief and guilt over the fact that he'd killed his kids by refusing to get Dolores help, pulled his children's bodies out of the lake and lined them up neatly in a row. When Dolores came over insisting they could keep the kids' bodies like china dolls and begging him to set her free, Teddy shot her in the stomach.
Teddy had a psychological break and has been largely disconnected from reality ever since. He was charged with murder, deemed not guilty by reason of insanity, and committed to a mental institution. However, due to his intelligence, physical strength, military and law-enforcement training, and the fact that he strongly believed he was being held against his will, the various secure facilities to which he was assigned were unable to control him. His last chance was Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane on Shutter Island, where he has spent the past two years cycling through a delusion in which he is Edward Daniels, an anagram of his own name and a combination of his sons's names; he never had kids, Dolores died in that fire, and he is still a US marshal, on Shutter Island to investigate the disappearance of a patient named Rachel Solando (an anagram of Dolores Chanal) and to find Andrew Laeddis (himself), who he believed was an unaccounted-for patient at Ashecliffe.
PSYCHOLOGY:
Teddy is a severely delusional paranoid schizophrenic. He quite simply cannot cope with the reality that he killed the woman he loves, that he failed to keep her from killing their kids, and that he's still hopelessly in love with someone who committed such a heinous crime. These facts go against everything he believes about himself. So he refuses to accept them.
Instead, he has created an elaborate fantasy world in which he's lived since the day his family died. He is able to handle the fact that Dolores is gone; in his delusion she died painlessly in a fire from smoke inhalation, and he misses her more than there are words to describe it, but it was not his fault. He cannot even begin to rationalize the fact that his children are gone, so he refuses to believe they existed in the first place. He has no conscious memory of them at all. Every memory he has since their birth has been reconstructed without them in it so that he doesn't have to explain to himself where they went. He believes he is still a US marshal, not a patient of a mental institution, and he adapts every new experience to his mental framework so that nothing conflicts with that delusion.
However, at a subconscious level, Teddy is constantly struggling to deal with his suppressed memories and the emotions those traumas produced. He reconstructs events in remarkably vivid dreams as his subconscious tries to arrange his conscious experience in a way that he can cope with. When unmedicated, he hallucinates Dolores and (more rarely) their daughter speaking to him and guiding him. He also generates smaller self-deceptions, like believing his gun is real when it's not and visualizing the impact of bullets that couldn't possibly have been fired, if such illusions are necessary to maintain his fantasy world. Like many schizophrenics, Teddy fixates on the number thirteen, largely because there are thirteen letters in both his and Dolores's names. When inventing clues to substantiate his belief that he's a US marshall investigating a case, he draws on his background in Army Intelligence to create elaborate number-letter codes, which his subconscious twists to hint at (but never reveal) the truth of his identity and his crimes.
When Teddy is taking his meds, the hallucinations are minimal, though not absent, and he generates far fewer of these fake clues. He is highly functional; he's simply living outside reality. Teddy is capable of reconnecting with reality after long-term therapy, but he has no desire to do so. The last time he acknowledged his crime and came to terms with the fact that he's in a mental institution, he quickly relapsed into his delusion again. If relapsing isn't an option, he would honestly rather die than live with what he's done. As such, I don't expect to ever bring him to that point psychologically in gameplay, and if he ever approaches acknowledging the truth, it's likely he'll hit the mental reset button and start over from square one, as he has done several times in the past two years.
To avoid any of that happening, however, Teddy has some glorious defense mechanisms in place. He'll change the subject, deflect the conversation, turn inquiries around on the inquirer, and go to great lengths to avoid even addressing the issues that trigger him. When he does have to discuss them, he has reasonably solid excuses for why he feels and acts the way he does, even if all of those excuses are fabricated to some degree. Generally, he's smart enough to trick himself in believable ways, and unless you have a particular reason to suspect the truth, it's hard to tell that he's anything more than a little touchy.
TODAY:
In Xanadu, Teddy has had to adjust the framework of his delusion to some extent. He found the nexus by chance, snatched up out of Ashecliffe during what he believed to be an investigation into the disappearance of Rachel Solando but was actually an elaborate roleplay game staged by his psychiatrists to help him come to terms with reality. He is still looking for Rachel in Xanadu; he probably always will be. However, nowadays he believes he is working on an inter-departmental contract with the newly-formed CIA, studying the nexus and assessing its threat to national security. He does not trust his employers, nor does he think they trust him; he thinks they gave him this post to keep him busy when he got too close to something bigger. But since he thinks that something bigger has everything to do with the nexus and how his own government is using it, he is very interested in staying put. Which is a good thing, considering the fate that awaits him back home.