The Psychology of Identity: Lessons from The Real Life Jason Bourne
By all accounts, A.J. Brown was an ordinary man. He lived in Norristown, Pennsylvania, and made a living making stationary. He lived in a modest apartment and had a good relationship with his neighbors.
On March 14th, 1887 he woke up and had no idea who he was.
The first person he had contact with that day was his landlord, who was greeted by Brown’s knock at his door with the question, “Who am I?”
Physicians were brought in to examine Brown. The obvious diagnosis was amnesia. Brown had somehow lost his memory, and couldn’t remember who he was and how he got there. But when doctors probed deeper, they quickly learned it wasn’t quite so simple. Brown hadn’t lost his memory. Brown wasn’t Brown at all.
What the physicians learned is that the person they were treating was actually named Ansel Bourne. He wasn’t from Norristown at all and didn’t work making stationary. He had only come to Norristown and lived as such for two months. Before that, the 61-year-old had lived his whole life in Coventry, Rhode Island, working as a carpenter and serving as a pastor.
Bourne had no recollection of the previous two months and had no idea who AJ Brown was. According to reports, he had never even heard the name before. The name of a perfect stranger.
How can we make sense of Ansel?
Anomolies of Identity
Over 150 years later, Ansel Bourne became the inspiration for the Jason Bourne books and movies. But unlike Jason, who merely lost his memory, Ansel completely lost his identity, and took on a new one.
Ansel Bourne was one of the first cases of “dissociative fugue”, an extremely rare condition that has only been documented in a handful of cases since.
It presents as a shorter-term version of “dissociative personality disorder”, where the personality splits off into several distinct individuals with no recognition or understanding of one another. These cases too, have been popularized in mass media with movies like Sybil (1976), Me, Myself, and Irene (2000), and Identity (2003).
Both conditions are so rare that they remain poorly understood. It’s unclear why someone is prone towards dissociation in the first place, and what triggers a dissociative fugue state. However, it would be a mistake to cast these experiences as completely alien. If we probe deeper, we can see a hint of Ansel Bourne in all of us.
The Ansel Bourne Identity In All of Us
One window into this everyday dissociation is in how we feel across different environments. From one context to the next, we often feel like very different people, each with its own slightly different personality, vocabulary, preferences, and behavior.
We act very differently when we're around our family members than we do around friends, and even from our colleagues. We feel very different when we’re away at school than we are when we’re back home with family. Our sense of identity is contingent on where we are and who we’re with.
This is further compounded by the fact that the brain’s learning systems are very much context-dependent. That is, if you learn something in one context, you’re much more likely to remember it in that same context. So when we re-enter a familiar context - such as coming home to our childhood home for Thanksgiving, all of the memories associated with that place suddenly come back.
Memory is crucial here. We wake up every morning as a slightly different entity, and yet memory holds us together. It’s the glue that maintains us as a single, consistent person. As James McGaugh, memory expert and professor of neurobiology at UC Irvine describes, “Memory is our most important ability. Without memory, there would be no human beings”.
The intertwining of memory, context, and “identity” complicates the idea of a coherent self. If we can feel like a different person from one context to the next, and memory, the glue which holds the self together, is also context-dependent, then the “self” may be much more nebulous than we think.
The picture is further muddied when we take a neuroscientific perspective. If the self exists anywhere, it should be found in our heads, but there is scant evidence for a single, unified ‘self’ in the brain. Neuroscience suggests that, instead of being located inside the brain, the self is a representation created by the brain.
As psychiatrist and writer Ralph Lewis, MD explains, “The self is not a unified ‘thing.’ Rather, the brain is actually a confederation of independent modules working together. The vastly complex unconscious neuronal determinants that give rise to our choices and actions are unknowable to us. The brain conveniently constructs a simplified narrative of a unitary ‘self,’ the independent agent of all our thoughts and behaviors..”
In other words, the “self” is an idea; a mental construct that the brain creates to help us navigate the world. And just like all constructs, the self is malleable.
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Ansel Bourne was one of the first documented cases of dissociative fugue, he’s far from the only. Jeff Ingram of Olympia, Washington “came to” in Denver, Colorado with no idea who he was or how he arrived there. Hannah Upp had several documented cases of dissociative fugue and has been missing in The Virgin Islands since 2018. Jody Roberts of Washington state disappeared in 1985, and was found over a decade later living a peaceful life in Alaska under the name of "Jane Dee Williams".
From one perspective, we can look at cases like Bourne’s, and others like him, in complete amazement. You’ve lost your keys before. You’ve lost memories before. But losing your self? It’s very literally the one constant in our lives.
But when we look further, we can see that such instances, while anomalous, aren’t categorically different. The self may feel as real as can be. But ultimately, it’s a construction of the brain - a representation, pieced together over time and place, which is much more fragile than we may realize.
In this light, A.J. Brown doesn’t seem like such a stranger after all.
Photo by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona on Unsplash
About the author
Matt Johnson, PhD is a researcher, writer, and consumer neuroscientist focusing on the application of psychology to branding. He is the author of the best-selling consumer psychology book Blindsight, and Branding That Means Business (Economist Books, Fall 2022). Contact Matt for speaking engagements, opportunities to collaborate, or just to say hello
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