"How much of our past lives- the thousands of moments we experience- help to make us who we are? if you took all of these remembrances- these memories- away, what would be left? How much is our personality, our identity, determined by the experiences we have, and how much is already there, pure us?"
Rupert Murray
At about 12:30 a.m. on October 9, a security guard noticed a girl wandering aimlessly on the sidewalk in front of Covenant House, a youth shelter in Manhattan. He tried to talk to her but when she did not respond he called the New York City Police Department. When the police tried to talk to her she was unable to tell them her name or any other authobiographical information. They dubbed her "Jane Doe" and guessed she was 14- 18 years old.
Jane Doe did not know her name, address, or when and how she arrived in the city, but she could recite passages from the novel Fool's Fate and said she was writing a fantasy story of her own. When CNN reported the story a viewer in Maryland recognized the girl as 18-year-old Kacie Aleece Peterson of Hansville, Washington. As family travelled to claim her it was revealed that she had suffered a similar incident in the past, when she was found lying beside a stream with only partial memories of who she was and how she got there.
What this story describes is an incident of dissociative fugue- a rare form of amnesia. Although many people associate the word fugue with music, in this case fugue is derived from the word Latin word for flight, fugere. Dissociative fugue is marked by flight. Sufferers literally become fugitives, often travelling many miles from home. From psychcentral.com:
Dissociative Fugue is one or more episodes of amnesia in which the inability to recall some or all of one's past and either the loss of one's identity or the formation of a new identity occur with sudden, unexpected, purposeful travel away from home.
Specific symptoms include:
People undergoing dissociative fugue are literally fleeing their lives. It's not uncommon to hear a recovering patient describe themselves as 'waking up' in a new place. They were not asleep. In many cases they were functioning well enough to purchase train or airline tickets without attracting any notice. Again, from psychcentral.com:The predominant disturbance is sudden, unexpected travel away from home or one's customary place of work, with inability to recall one's past.
Confusion about personal identity or assumption of a new identity (partial or complete).
The disturbance does not occur exclusively during the course of Dissociative Identity Disorder and is not due to the direct physiological effects of a substance (e.g., a drug of abuse, a medication) or a general medical condition (e.g., temporal lobe epilepsy).
The symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.
The length of a fugue may range from hours to weeks or months, occasionally longer. During the fugue, the person may appear normal and attract no attention. The person may assume a new name, identity, and domicile and may engage in complex social interactions.
...
A fugue in progress is rarely recognized. It is suspected when a person seems confused over his identity, puzzled about his past, or confrontational when his new identity or the absence of an identity is challenged. Sometimes the fugue cannot be diagnosed until the person abruptly returns to his prefugue identity and is distressed to find himself in unfamiliar circumstances.
Experts theorize that such sudden flight is a reaction to severe trauma. Unable to process a terrible experience, the mind rejects not just that memory, but all memories.
Maybe the quickest way to put horror behind you is to simply become another person.
Dissociative fugue has been romanticized in films like the Bourne Identity and The Long Kiss Goodnight, which depict screen heroes who recover their memories and go on to wreak righteous vengeance.
The reality is often less glamorous.
Consider the case of Hannah Emily Upp, a schoolteacher from New York City. Ms. Upp disappeared in late August 2008 and was found floating in the Hudson River on Septmber 16, 2008 in what appeared to be a suicide attempt:
The young woman was floating face down in the water, about a mile southwest of the southern tip of Manhattan. Wearing only red running shorts and a black sports bra, she was barely visible to the naked eye of the captain of the Staten Island Ferry: When he caught sight of her bobbing head, it was like glimpsing the tip of a ballpoint pen across a busy city street. Less than four minutes later, a skiff piloted by two of the ferry’s deckhands pulled up alongside the woman. One man took hold of her ankles while the other grabbed her shoulders. As she was lifted from the water, she gasped.
“I went from going for a run to being in the ambulance,” the woman said several months later in describing her ordeal. “It was like 10 minutes had passed. But it was almost three weeks.”
Roommates and family had been frantically searching for Ms. Upp during those three weeks. Security cameras eventually captured footage of her checking her gmail, which lead many to believe her disappearance was a fake, not a dissociative fugue. But people in a fugue state often retain unconnected scraps of information and can perform simple habitual acts, like logging into a computer account. (Recall Jason Bourne saying "I know I can run a mile flat out before my hands begin to shake.") In Ms. Upp's case, while she was able to access the account, she could not make any sense of the messages in it and did not understand why she felt compelled to check it:
The memory of how to perform mundane tasks like hailing a cab or even using the Internet remains intact. Victims lose only the memories tied to their identity.
“It’s as if a whole set of information about one’s self, our autobiography, goes off line,” said Dr. Richard Loewenstein, one of the nation’s few experts on dissociative fugue.
I suspect everyone has experienced a tiny piece of this. How often have you strode purposefully into a room and then stood there blankly, thinking, "I know I came in here for a reason, but I can't remember what it was."? Have you ever found yourself suddenly struggling to recite your own phone number, then apologizing by saying, "You asked me too fast!"
Now imagine if all that- and more- suddenly vanished. Without warning you are left gazing at your surroundings, heart fluttering, thinking, "Where am I?" And your only answer is: "I have to get out of here- right now!"
“We tend to experience our identity as a thing, as if it’s a constant,” added Dr. Loewenstein, who is medical director of the trauma program at Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital in Baltimore, and has treated five patients with dissociative fugue. “But it’s a lot less stable and has less unity than we want to believe.”
Dissociative disorders often appear to run in families and many people who enter the fugue state will experience another dissociative event later in life. Patients identified as at risk for such incidents often develop strategies that will enable their family and friends to locate them in the event of a relapse.
In 2005 the Sundance Film Festival was riveted by a documentary titled Unknown White Male which purported to describe the experiences of Douglas Bruce, who claimed to have undergone an episode of dissociative fugue. Doubts have been raised about its veracity, but the film is still a good introduction to the concept of dissociative fugue- and the haunting questions it raises about who we really are.
Comments