Automatisme Ambulatoire: Fugue, Hysteria, and Gender at the Turn of the Century

Hacking, Ian Automatisme Ambulatoire: Fugue, Hysteria, and Gender at the Turn of the Century"Modernism/modernity - Volume 3, Number 2, April 1996, pp. 31-43 The Johns Hopkins University PressExcerptModernism/Modernity 3.2 (1996) 31-43


By the term ambulatory automatism is understood a pathological syndrome appearing in the form of intermittent attacks during which the patient, carried away by an irresistible impulse, leaves his home and makes an excursion or journey justified by no reasonable motive. The attack ended, the subject unexpectedly finds himself on an unknown road or in a strange town. Swearing by all the gods never again to quit his penates, he returns home but sooner or later a new attack provokes a new escapade. 1
Ambulatory automatism, by whatever name--dromomanie, poriomenie, Wandertrieb, determinismo ambulatorio, psychogenic fugue, or, in the parlance of the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, dissociative fugue--is exemplary for, even a caricature of, late century madness. It is also a distorting mirror of one of the middle class obsessions of the modern world, the world of Thomas Cook and Son, the world of the comfortable traveller. For les alienés voyageurs--to use the title of the first medical thesis about these men--were compulsive travellers, solid artisans or honest men of the laboring classes, who on hearing the name of a distant place would set out, on foot, or by fourth class carriage, not knowing why they went. So far as casual passers-by could tell, they behaved, en route, quite sensibly, yet they knew not what they were doing, or, in some cases, who they were. That is the prototype. 2 Rich men had fugues, and so did knaves, but the central examples for nineteenth-century fugue were humble, decent men, who remained humble and decent on their deliberate yet unwanted trips, of which they later had [End Page