Unlike the fictional Jason Bourne, who immediately tries to find his identity, victims in the fugue state don't even realize anything has gone wrong, Schacter told. Then the victim enters a 'fugue state' in which he or she functions completely normally, even though there is no recollection of who he or she is. They go on functioning automatically.'Īccording to Elisabeth Moes, associate professor in the psychology department at Suffolk University, dissociative fugue can be brought on by traumatic events, 'usually after a physical injury together with a lot of stress. 'They don't know who they are, and they've lost all information about their past.

' is a state in which an individual has lost their identity,' explained Daniel Schacter, a psychology professor at Harvard. Ansel couldn't remember anything after he set out to visit his sister's house two months before.Īnsel's 'Bourne Identity'-like case was one of the first documented instances of a rare disorder known as dissociative fugue. Even more awestruck were the neighbors, who learned that the man's name was not Brown, but Ansel Bourne and that he was an evangelical preacher who lived in Rhode Island.

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