ENTRIES A–Z
Philip Winn in Dictionary of Biological Psychology, 2003
(from Latin, fuga: flight) In music a fugue is a composition in which the principal subject is initiated by one part but then taken up by a second part while the first part switches to accompaniment. In biological psychology, fugue is a form of DISSOCIATIVE DISORDER. Control of the MUSCLES is intact but CONSCIOUSNESS is at best opaque, leading sufferers to wander aimlessly without awareness of what they are doing, where they are, or even who they are. Sufferers are often incoherent during the fugue state (which typically lasts for hours, but may last for days) and typically fail to remember anything of what has happened to them when they recover. There is disagreement as to whether this condition is associated with EPILEPSY or with other disorders; an older literature associated it with HYSTERIA (though this term is not now generally used).
Signs and Symptoms in Psychiatry
Mohamed Ahmed Abd El-Hay in Essentials of Psychiatric Assessment, 2018
Fugue is now a specifier of dissociative amnesia; people with dis sociative fugue temporarily are confused about their sense of personal identity and might even create new identities and impulsively wander or travel away from their homes or places of work. The person’s outward behavior of people with this disorder appears normal. Dissociative fugue has been linked to severe stress, which might be the result of traumatic events, such as war, abuse, accidents, disasters, or extreme violence that the person has experienced or witnessed. The use or abuse of alcohol and certain drugs also can cause fugue-like states, such as alcohol-induced “blackouts.”
Naming the Mad Mind
Petteri Pietikainen in Madness, 2015
The third diagnostic specialty of the (late) nineteenth century was fugue, a peculiar compulsion that led the afflicted to travel obsessively from place to place. Fugue was a very gender-specific neurosis: only men felt this compulsion to travel. What made it more than a harmless manifestation of wanderlust was that its symptoms included memory disturbances and confusion about one’s sense of self; men who suffered from this compulsion often did not know who they were or why they travelled. The first compulsive traveller was the Frenchman Albert Dadas, whose mad travelling in the 1880s became known after his physician wrote a thesis on fugue (Les Aliénés voyageurs, 1887). ‘Fuguers’ could travel around Europe, North Africa and the Near East for weeks. The mad traveller’s ‘unconscious’ will seemed to take control of his mind, which as an idea fits in well with the popular psychological conjecture that obsessive urges and compulsions may have their matrix in the mental sphere outside the jurisdiction of consciousness – in the unconscious, the subconscious or the split self. The fuguers represented the urban working class or lower middle class, and, unlike the more prosperous bourgeoisie, they lacked the possibility of tourism or vacationing. Albert Dadas’ doctor in fact believed that he suffered from ‘pathological tourism’. The epidemic of fugue lasted for a few decades between the 1880s and World War I, and then it faded away. Today, fugue is a very rare disorder known as dissociative fugue, which is a diagnostic fossil rather than a ‘true’ illness. It is explained by the compulsive traveller’s unconscious attempt to get rid of a stressful situation or crisis (Hacking 2002).
Dissociative Symptoms are Highly Prevalent in Adults with Narcolepsy Type 1
Published in Behavioral Sleep Medicine, 2022
Laury Quaedackers, Hal Droogleever Fortuyn, Merel Van Gilst, Martijn Lappenschaar, Sebastiaan Overeem
Over the past two decades, studies have increasingly shown a relationship between disordered sleep and dissociation (Koffel & Watson, 2009; Lynn et al., 2019; Selvi et al., 2015; Van Der Kloet et al., 2013; Van Der Kloet, Giesbrecht et al., 2012; Van Heugten-van Der Kloet et al., 2014). The American Psychiatric Association defines dissociation as “a disruption of the usually integrated functions of consciousness, memory, identity or perception of the environment” (American Psychiatric Association, 2000). Several pathologic dissociative symptoms can be distinguished. These include feeling like everything is unreal (derealization) and feeling disconnected from one’s body or feelings (depersonalization). In addition, they include amnesia for personal information or events that are too extensive to be explained by ordinary forgetfulness (dissociative amnesia). Dissociation may also lead to identity alteration; learning from others of activity of alternate identities, feeling possessed or controlled, and perceiving internal images and voices (identity alteration) (Korzekwa et al., 2009). The DSM-IV-TR lists four diagnoses under the category “dissociative disorder”: dissociative amnesia, dissociative fugue (a sudden, unexpected travel away from one’s home with an inability to recall some or all of one’s past), depersonalization disorder, dissociative identity disorder. Dissociative disorder “not otherwise specified” refers to various forms of dissociation that are not fully covered by any of the specific dissociative disorder (American Psychiatric Association, 2000)
Related Knowledge Centers
- Conversion Disorder
- Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
- Dissociative Amnesia
- Dissociative Disorder
- Nosology
- Psychoactive Drug
- Somatic Symptom Disorder
- Dissociative Identity Disorder
- Mental Disorder
- Abnormality
- Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders