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In dissociative fugue, a traumatic event may prompt a person to embark on an unexpected journey that might last several months. During this journey, there is memory loss and confusion about personal identity, and the person might even adopt a distinct and separate identity. When the fugue comes an end, the person returns to their normal self and loses the memory of the journey.
Agatha Christie, the world-famous writer of murder mysteries known as the ‘Queen of Crime’, disappeared from her home in Berkshire, England, on the evening of December 3, 1926.
Her mother, to whom she had been very close, had died some months earlier, and her husband Colonel Archibald Christie (‘Archie’) was having an affair with one Nancy Neele. Archie made little effort to disguise this affair, and on the day that Agatha disappeared he had gone to the home of some friends in Surrey to be reunited with Nancy.
Before vanishing, Agatha had written several confused notes to Archie and others: in one, she wrote that she was going on holiday to Yorkshire, but in another that she feared for her life. The next morning, her abandoned car, with headlights on and bonnet up, was discovered in Surrey, not far from a lake called Silent Pool in which she had drowned one of her characters. Inside the green Morris Cowley, she had left her fur coat, a packed suitcase, and an expired driver’s license.
Fearing for the worst, the police dredged the lake, mobilized as many as 15,000 volunteers to beat the surrounding countryside, and even (for the first time in England for a missing person) flew aeroplanes overhead—but all without finding so much as a trace of Agatha.
In fact, Agatha had checked into a spa hotel in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, not under her own name but—significantly—under that of ‘Teresa Neele’. Her disappearance soon made the national headlines. Several people at the spa thought to have recognized her, but she stuck to her story of being a bereaved mother from Cape Town. Only when, on December 14, the police brought Archie up to Harrogate could she be reliably and conclusively identified. When Archie entered the hotel, Agatha said, “Fancy, my brother has just arrived.”
Agatha never discussed this perplexing episode and excluded it from her biography. Perhaps she contrived it as an act of revenge, or, some said, as a publicity stunt, but a dissociative fugue is an equally likely explanation and also the one upheld by her then doctors.
In any case, like dissociative fugue, revenge and fame can also be construed as forms of ego defence. In Agatha’s own words: ‘Most successes are unhappy. That’s why they are successes—they have to reassure themselves about themselves by achieving something that the world will notice…’
Read more in Hide and Seek: The Psychology of Self-Deception.
