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A specialist in escapes (epileptic fugues).

Case 62. (Logre, March, 1917.)

An epileptic fugue with recidivism is described by Logre. He described himself as a specialist in escapes. As a schoolboy, he had practised escapes and run away without purpose, and without remembering fully what he had done. His father would bring him back to school. At first they had punished him and then would pardon him. These escapades in his work as a shoemaker caused him to lose various places, but he had been kept by one employer for a long time nevertheless. From 11 years on, this patient had never ceased living either in foreign parts or in prison.

The fugues on military service began to multiply. The military chiefs did not abide the escapades like the schoolmaster or the employer. Every punishment he received had to do with some fugue. Three times he gave himself up to the military authorities. Three times after a few more days’ service or a week in prison, he left the barracks or escaped. There had never been any appeal throughout this history to an alienist. On the declaration of war, he had returned to Belgium and was put into the army; whereupon in January, he carried out a fugue of a few hours which was rewarded with eight days in prison. There was a five-days fugue in July, whereupon he was taken before the council.

Upon investigation, these fugues seemed to have the classical features of epileptic fugues. They were sudden, unconscious, blindly automatic, almost completely forgotten afterwards and of a stereotyped and recidivistic nature. Most of the fugues had been preceded by a slight excess in drinking. An investigation was made to see if there were any convulsive antecedents; none were found. This mental epilepsy, then, it was thought, must be an isolated symptom, free from every motor symptom. But his mother and one of his brothers had also shown a number of attacks of some sort of epilepsy. In all three cases there was impulsivity, unconsciousness, absurdity, recidivism, and refractoriness to treatment. On these grounds the fugue was regarded as pathological and as epileptic probably. The patient himself thought that these coups-de-tête and this mania for running away without knowing where, made really a very ugly fault, particularly in a soldier.

Re such specialists in escapes as Case 62, Lépine speaks of a type of military delinquent which he calls Ceux qui sautent le mur. Some of the fugue subjects, as well as other types of imbalance can apparently be held by no possible kind or degree of discipline. They jump any guardhouse or any other form of imprisonment through what amounts to a wild instinct for liberty. In some cases, this instinct appears in a relatively pure form; that is, without any combined tendency to dipsomania and without any sexual factor. Some of them are, in fact, very good soldiers, especially in shock troops. They, in fact, belong to what one might call the good element among delinquents. In the French Army some of them have been old legionaries and have even been, as in Case 62, previously condemned for desertion. They form a curious minority among the wall jumpers. Wall-jumping makes, so to say, the entire pathological phenomenon, and the recidivism is a part of the disease.