Ordinary gunner’s life; a few days’ feeling of moral and physical discomfort: Obsession leading to fugue.
Case 445. (Mallet, July, 1917.)
An artilleryman, 32, gave himself up a few kilometers back of the lines, three days after deserting his post. The man was a very good gunner and had never been punished once. Moreover, the battery was not under any special bombardment, and he had been in the same place a number of weeks.
He explained that he had gotten tired during the last few days. Everything was well at home and in the regiment, but he felt sad, his head felt bad, and he couldn’t sleep. Something drew him to leave, but then “sang froid came back to me, and I gave myself up.” He had lived the three days without eating and without sleeping. He was very emotional over what he had done, but he began to work and asked that he be sent back.
His mother had been very nervous. There was a marked facial asymmetry and faulty arrangement of teeth. The man was not alcoholic.
According to Mallet, in these cases of fugue, and in other cases of absolute delirium of apparently sudden onset, there is a feeling of moral and physical discomfort for some days before the outbreak. The outbreak itself is sudden on the occasion of some idea, either an obsession or a hallucination. Of all the prodromal signs, headache is the most striking. According to Mallet, such fugues are the expression of a mental imbalance allied to the onirism of Régis.