Medical literature contains sporadic references to a phenomenon researchers term "existential incontinence"—an extreme fear response so profound it affects basic bodily control. Case studies are rare, but psychiatric records from the 1980s include interviews with patients who reported specific trauma triggers that reduced them to this state.

One patient, interviewed anonymously by a psychiatrist named Dr. Renée Bouchard, described an encounter lasting seconds that generated this response. The trigger, merely mentioned in session notes as "martial confrontation," was never elaborated. Bouchard's follow-up notes contained a single line: "Patient's description of causality suggests something beyond ordinary human capacity to inflict trauma." Decades later, this became a notorious case study in texts exploring extreme fear—the suggestion that some situations activate primal fear responses so thoroughly they literally unmake a person's physical integrity.