Dissociative Fugue: The Preacher Who Lived Two Months as Another Man

On January 17, 1887, a Rhode Island preacher withdrew 551 dollars from the bank, boarded a horse-car and vanished. Two months later he woke up frightened in another state, himself once more and with no memory of the weeks he had spent running a shop there under another name. His dissociative fugue remains one of the most cited cases in the history of psychology.

His name was Ansel Bourne, and William James devoted several pages to him in chapter X of The Principles of Psychology (1890), in the section on “mutations of the self.”

Today his story still appears in textbooks, usually next to a related but different condition: dissociative identity disorder.

Who was Ansel Bourne?

James describes him carefully, almost like a character witness:

• A carpenter by trade, from Greene, Rhode Island.
• Converted to Christianity just before turning 30 and, from then on, mostly an itinerant preacher.
• Subject to headaches, bouts of low spirits and a few brief spells of unconsciousness.
• So upright in reputation that no one who knew him doubted his story for a moment.

On that January day he drew the money in Providence to pay for a plot of land, settled some bills and got into a Pawtucket horse-car. It was the last thing he remembered.

Newspapers reported him missing. Police suspected foul play.

Two months as “A. J. Brown”

On the morning of March 14, in Norristown, Pennsylvania, a man calling himself A. J. Brown woke up in a fright and called in the people of the house to ask where he was.

Six weeks earlier he had rented a small shop and stocked it with stationery, confectionery and fruit.

The neighbors remembered him as quiet and orderly:

• He traveled to Philadelphia to restock.
• He cooked and slept in the back of the shop.
• He went to church regularly and once gave a well-received address at a prayer meeting.

Bourne had never been in trade in his life. He refused to believe two months had passed.

He had lost over twenty pounds and had such a horror of the candy store that he never set foot in it again.

1890: hypnosis and the return of Brown

In June 1890, James persuaded Bourne to undergo hypnosis to see whether the Brown memories would come back.

They came back with surprising ease:

• Under hypnosis, Brown had heard of Ansel Bourne but “didn’t know as he had ever met the man.”
• Faced with Mrs. Bourne, he said he had “never seen the woman before.”
• As for motive, he said only that there had been “trouble back there” and he “wanted rest.”
• About the gaps in his memory, he described himself as hedged in, with no way out at either end.

James hoped to fuse the two memories into one through suggestion. Nothing worked.

His conclusion:

Mr. Bourne’s skull to-day still covers two distinct personal selves.

William James

Richard Hodgson published the full account in 1891 in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research.

Dissociative fugue vs. dissociative identity disorder

The two are often confused, so it helps to separate them.

According to the DSM-5 (American Psychiatric Association, 2013):

• Dissociative fugue is no longer a stand-alone diagnosis. It is a specifier of dissociative amnesia: apparently purposeful travel or bewildered wandering, with amnesia for one’s identity or other key personal information.
• Dissociative identity disorder requires two or more distinct personality states, recurrent memory gaps and significant distress or impairment.
• Until the DSM-IV (1994) it was called multiple personality disorder.

Bourne’s episode fits the first description better. James stresses that it never recurred and that no eccentricity of character came out.

How common is dissociative identity disorder? Estimates vary widely. In a community sample of 658 adults in New York State, Johnson and colleagues (2006) found:

• 1.5% with dissociative identity disorder.
• 1.8% with dissociative amnesia.
• A link between these conditions and poorer everyday functioning.

It is one sample, and the true figure is still debated.

What other multiple personality cases did James collect?

James gathered several cases from his era:

• Mary Reynolds (Pennsylvania, 1811), reported by the physician Weir Mitchell: after sleeping 18 to 20 hours she woke with no memories and had to relearn how to read. Melancholy before, she became cheerful and fearless, laughing off warnings about bears. The two states alternated for 15 or 16 years until she remained in the second.
• Léonie, studied by Pierre Janet: in trance she spoke of her everyday self as “that good woman” who “is not myself.”
• Félida X, described by Dr. Azam in Bordeaux.

James explained them as systems of brain paths acting dissociated from one another, each on its own.

It is an intuition that echoes, decades later, Roger Sperry’s split-brain experiments, although the two phenomena are different.

Trauma or suggestion: a debate still open

There are two main positions on where the disorder comes from:

• The trauma model. Dalenberg and colleagues (2012, Psychological Bulletin) concluded that the link between trauma and dissociation is consistent and moderate in strength.
• The sociocognitive model. Lynn and colleagues (2014) replied that the evidence falls short and that suggestion, fantasy proneness and memory errors matter more than is acknowledged.

Bourne’s case shows why the debate is delicate: the Brown personality resurfaced under hypnosis, a technique that, according to memory research, can increase confidence in inaccurate recollections.

The link between intense stress and memory has its own biological basis, covered in why stress blocks memory.

What James got right, and what he didn’t

James got something important right: he described with respect and precision a phenomenon many of his contemporaries dismissed as fraud or possession.

His broader hypothesis also holds up: identity is not an indivisible block but an integration of memories and functions that, under certain conditions, can come apart.

But his cases belong to the age of hypnotism and psychical research. They are not modern diagnoses, and none was assessed with today’s criteria or tools.

Sources

• James, W. (1890). The Principles of Psychology. Henry Holt and Company.
• Hodgson, R. (1891). A case of double consciousness. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 7, 221-257.
• American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.). American Psychiatric Publishing.
• Johnson, J. G., Cohen, P., Kasen, S., & Brook, J. S. (2006). Dissociative disorders among adults in the community, impaired functioning, and axis I and II comorbidity. Journal of Psychiatric Research, 40(2), 131-140. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpsychires.2005.03.003
• Dalenberg, C. J., Brand, B. L., Gleaves, D. H., Dorahy, M. J., Loewenstein, R. J., Cardeña, E., Frewen, P. A., Carlson, E. B., & Spiegel, D. (2012). Evaluation of the evidence for the trauma and fantasy models of dissociation. Psychological Bulletin, 138(3), 550-588. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0027447
• Lynn, S. J., Lilienfeld, S. O., Merckelbach, H., Giesbrecht, T., McNally, R. J., Loftus, E. F., Bruck, M., Garry, M., & Malaktaris, A. (2014). The trauma model of dissociation: Inconvenient truths and stubborn fictions. Comment on Dalenberg et al. (2012). Psychological Bulletin, 140(3), 896-910. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0035570