Sherwood Anderson’s Dissociative Fugue: He Traveled Four Days and Had Amnesia, Similar to the Real-Life Dissociative Fugue of Agatha Christie

See the two recent posts on Sherwood Anderson’s autobiography and on dissociative fugues. This is the second real-life dissociative fugue discussed in this blog. The first was Agatha Christie’s (see past posts). A fictional fugue has also been discussed, Flitcraft’s fugue in Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon (see past posts).

On November 28, 1912, Thanksgiving Day, Anderson and his employees went to work as usual, but his behavior was unusual. He told his secretary that he was going for a walk and that he did not know whether he would be back or not. He did not return to the office in Elyria, Ohio, and he did not come home that day or night, nor on Friday or Saturday or Sunday.

His so-called “Amnesia Letter” was postmarked from Cleveland on November 30. It was correctly addressed to his wife, but the biographer describes it as “the work of a person suffering severe mental and emotional stress.” The seven pages were “elliptic, dissociated, even surreal.” It includes four references to “his alter-ego T Powers.”

On Sunday, December 1, he entered a Cleveland drug store, where he told the pharmacist that he did not know where he was, where he had come from, or even what his name was. On being told it was Cleveland, he provided a pocket notebook, and someone who knew him in Cleveland was contacted. That person arranged for Anderson’s hospitalization.

“In his four-day escape from Elyria and its agonizing conflicts…Anderson was clearly undergoing what psychiatrists” call a “dissociative reaction…the more exact term…would seem to be ‘fugue’ ”… ‘fugue’ would seem to describe the 1907 breakdown as well, since in that incident too he left home and office and was found ‘wandering around in the woods.’”

On Monday, December 2, his wife visited him in the hospital. At first, he recognized her only with difficulty. However, after some sleep, he seemed to recover, was surprised to find himself in a hospital, and talked with her.

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What is important here about Anderson’s fugue is simply that he had one (actually, two, according to the biographer). In the psychiatric diagnostic manual, dissociative fugues are in the same chapter with other dissociative disorders, including dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality). And as I pointed out in my recent post on dissociative fugues, they are really a common, routine symptom of multiple personality.

But the routine mini-fugues and mini-amnesias of multiple personality are inconspicuous. It is usually only the person with multiple personality who knows when something has occurred that only he could have done, but he doesn’t remember doing it.

Walter B. Rideout. Sherwood Anderson: A Writer in America, Volume 1. Madison, The University of Wisconsin Press, 2006, pp. 155-161.