CHAPTER II

DISINTEGRATIONS OF PERSONALITY

[Greek: Thanatos estin okosa egerthentes oreomen, okosa de eudontes, upnos.]

--HERACLITUS.

Of the race of man we know for certain that it has been evolved through many ages and through countless forms of change. We know for certain that its changes continue still; nay, that more causes of change act upon us in "fifty years of Europe" than in "a cycle of Cathay." We may reasonably conjecture that the race will continue to change with increasing rapidity, and through a period in comparison with which our range of recorded history shrinks into a moment.

The actual nature of these coming changes, indeed, lies beyond our imagination. Many of them are probably as inconceivable to us now as eyesight would have been to our eyeless ancestors. All that we can do is to note so far as possible the structural laws of our personality as deduced from its changes thus far; inferring that for some time to come, at any rate, its further changes will proceed upon similar lines.

I have already (Chapter I) indicated the general view as to the nature of human personality which is maintained in this work. I regard each man as at once profoundly unitary and almost infinitely composite, as inheriting from earthly ancestors a multiplex and "colonial" organism--polyzoic and perhaps polypsychic in an extreme degree; but also as ruling and unifying that organism by a soul or spirit absolutely beyond our present analysis--a soul which has originated in a spiritual or metetherial environment; which even while embodied subsists in that environment; and which will still subsist therein after the body's decay.

It is, of course, impossible for us to picture to ourselves the way in which the individual life of each cell of the body is reconciled with the unity of the central life which controls the body as a whole. But this difficulty is not created or intensified by the hypothesis of a separate and persistent soul. On no hypothesis can we really understand the collaboration and subordination of the cell-lives of any multicellular animal. It is as mysterious in the starfish as it is in Plato; and the "eight brains of Aurelia," with their individual and their common life, are as inconceivable as the life of the phagocytes in the philosopher's veins, in their relation to his central thought.[7]

I claim, in fact, that the ancient hypothesis of an indwelling soul, possessing and using the body as a whole, yet bearing a real, though obscure relation to the various more or less apparently disparate conscious groupings manifested in connection with the organism and in connection with more or less localised groups of nerve-matter, is a hypothesis not more perplexing, not more cumbrous, than any other hypothesis yet suggested. I claim also that it is conceivably provable,--I myself hold it as actually proved,--by direct observation. I hold that certain manifestations of central individualities, associated now or formerly with certain definite organisms, have been observed in operation apart from those organisms, both while the organisms were still living, and after they had decayed. Whether or no this thesis be as yet sufficiently proved, it is at least at variance with no scientific principle nor established fact whatever; and it is of a nature which continued observation may conceivably establish to the satisfaction of all. The negative thesis, on the other hand, is a thesis in unstable equilibrium. It cannot be absolutely proved by any number of negative instances; and it may be absolutely disproved by a single positive instance. It may have at present a greater scientific _currency_, but it can have no real scientific authority as against the view defended in these pages.

Leaving these questions, however, aside for the present, we may agree that in the organism as we can observe it in common life we have no complete or unchanging unity, but rather a complex hierarchy of groups of cells exercising vaguely limited functions, and working together with rough precision, tolerable harmony, fair success. That these powers ever work _perfectly_ together we have no evidence. Our feeling of health is but a rough haphazard register of what is passing within us. Nor would it ever be possible to define a permanently ideal status in an organism in moving equilibrium,--an organism which lives by exploding unstable compounds, and which is constantly aiming at new ends at the expense of the old.

Many disturbances and disintegrations of the personality must presently fall to be discussed. But the reader who may follow me must remember the point of view from which I am writing. The aim of my analysis is not to destroy but to fulfil;--or say, rather, my hope is that observation of the ways in which the personality tends to disintegrate may suggest methods which may tend on the other hand to its more complete integration.

Such improvements upon the natural conditions of the organism are not unknown. Just as the study of hysteria deals mainly with instabilities in the threshold of consciousness, so does the study of zymotic disease deal mainly with instabilities in the constitution of the blood. The ordinary object of the physician is to check these instabilities when they occur; to restore healthy blood in the place of vitiated. The experimental biologist has a further aim. He wishes to provide men with _better_ blood than nature has bestowed; to elicit from virus and decay some element whose infusion into the veins may give immunity against microbic invasion. As the adult is safer against such attacks than the child by dint of his more advanced development, so is the immunised adult safer than the common man. The change of his blood which healthy maturity has induced has made him safe against whooping-cough. The change in his blood which we effect by injecting antitoxin makes him temporarily safe against diphtheria. We have improved upon nature;--and our artifice has been _prophylactic_ by virtue of being in a certain sense _developmental_.

Even such, I trust, may be the achievement of experimental psychology in a later day. I shall be well content if in this chapter I can give hints for some future colligation of such evolutive phenomena as may lurk amid a mass of phenomena mainly dissolutive--phenomena whose records are scattered and imperfect, and have as yet only in some few directions, and by quite recent writers, been collated or systematised on any definite plan.

The discussion of these disintegrations of personality needs, I think, some little clearing of the ground beforehand, if it is to avoid confusion. It will be needful to speak of concurrent and alternating streams of consciousness,--of subliminal and supraliminal strata of personality and the like;--phrases which save much trouble when used with care, but which need some words of preliminary explanation. It is not easy to realise that anything which deserves the name of consciousness can be going on within us, apart from that central stream of thought and feeling with which we identify ourselves in common life. Something of definition is needed;--not indeed of any formal or dogmatic kind;--but enough to make clear the sense given to such words as consciousness, memory, personality, in the ensuing pages.

I begin, then, with the obvious remark that when we conceive any act other than our own as a conscious act, we do so either because we regard it as _complex_, and therefore _purposive_, or because we perceive that it has been _remembered_. Thus we call the fencer or the chess-player fully conscious; or, again, we say, "The man who seemed stunned after that blow on the head must really have been conscious all the time; for he afterwards recalled every incident." The _memorability_ of an act is, in fact, a better proof of consciousness than its complexity. Thus consciousness has been denied both to hypnotised subjects and to dogs; but it is easier to prove that the hypnotised subject is conscious than that the dog is conscious. For the hypnotised subject, though he may forget the incidents of the trance when he awakes, will remember them in the next trance; or he may be trained to remember them in the waking state also; while with regard to the dog we cannot decide from the mere complexity of his actions how far he is conscious of their performance. With him, too, the best line of proof lies in his obvious memory of past acts. And yet, although all agree that our own memory, broadly speaking, proves our past consciousness, some persons would not admit that a dog's memory does so too. The dog's organism, they would say, responds, no doubt, in a new manner to a second repetition of a previous stimulus; but this is more or less true of all living organisms, or parts of organisms, even far below what we generally regard as a conscious level.

Reflections of this kind naturally lead to a wider conception of consciousness. It is gradually seen that the earlier inquiries which men have made about consciousness have been of a merely ethical or legal character;--have simply aimed at deciding whether at a given moment a man was _responsible_ for his acts, either to a human or to a divine tribunal. Commonsense has seemed to encourage this method of definite demarcation; we judge practically either that a man is conscious or that he is not; in the experience of life intermediate states are of little importance.

As soon, however, as the problem is regarded as a psychological one, to be decided by observation and experiment, these hard and fast lines grow fainter and fainter. We come to regard consciousness as an attribute which may possibly be present in all kinds of varying degrees in connection with the animal and vegetable worlds; as the psychical counterpart of life; as conceivably the psychical counterpart of all phenomenal existence. Or, rather, we may say this of _mind_, to which, in its more elementary forms, consciousness bears somewhat the same relation as self-consciousness bears to consciousness, or some higher evolution may bear to self-consciousness.

This being so, I cannot see how we can phrase our definition more simply than by saying that any act or condition must be regarded as conscious if it is _potentially memorable_;--if it can be recollected, under any circumstances, by the subject concerned. It does not seem needful that the circumstances under which such recollection may occur should arise while the subject is still incarnated on this planet. We shall never on this planet remember the great majority of our dreams; but those dreams were presumably no less conscious than the dreams which a sudden awakening allowed us to keep in memory. Certain hypnotic subjects, indeed, who can be made to remember their dreams by suggestion, apparently remember dreams previously latent just as easily as dreams previously remembered. And we shall have various other examples of the unexpected recollection of experiences supposed to have been entirely devoid of consciousness.

We are bound, I think, to draw at least this negative conclusion: that we must not take for granted that our apparently central consciousness is something wholly different in kind from the minor consciousnesses out of which it is in some sense elaborated. I do indeed believe it to be in an important sense different; but this difference must not be assumed on the basis of our subjective sensations alone. We must approach the whole subject of split or duplicated personalities with no prepossession against the possibility of any given arrangement or division of the total mass of consciousness which exists within us.

Before we can picture to ourselves how that mass of consciousness may _disintegrate_, we ought, were it possible, to picture to ourselves how it is in the first instance _integrated_. That, however, is a difficulty which does not begin with the constitution of man. It begins when unicellular develop into multicellular organisms. It is, of course, a mystery how a single cell can hold together, and what kind of unity it can possess. But it is a fresh mystery when several cells cohere in a conjoint and independent life. In the collective unity of certain "colonial animals" we have a kind of sketch or parody of our own complex being. Higher intelligences may possibly see us as we see the hydrozoon--a creature split up into different "persons," a "hydriform person" who feeds, a "medusiform person" who propagates, and so on--elements of the animal differentiated for different ends--interconnected from one point of view as closely as our stomach and brain, yet from another point of view separable existences, capable of detachment and of independent regeneration in all kinds of different ways. Still more composite, though less conspicuously composite, is every animal that we meet as we rise through the scale; and in man we reach the summit both of colonial complexity and of centralised control.

I need hardly say that as regards the inner nature of this close co-ordination, this central government, science can at present tell us little or nothing. The growth of the nervous mechanism may be to some extent deciphered; but how this mechanism is centrally governed; what is the tendency which makes for unity; where precisely this unity resides, and what is its exact relation to the various parts of the multicellular organism--all these are problems in the nature of _life_, to which as yet no solution is known.

The needed clue, as I believe, can be afforded only by the discovery of laws affecting primarily that unseen or spiritual plane of being where I imagine the origin of life to lie. If we can suppose telepathy to be a first indication of a law of this type, and to occupy in the spiritual world some such place as gravitation occupies in the material world, we might imagine something analogous to the force of cohesion as operating in the psychical contexture of a human personality. Such a personality, at any rate, as the development of higher from lower organisms shows, involves the aggregation of countless minor psychical entities, whose characteristics still persist, although in a manner consistent with the possibility that one larger psychical entity, whether pre-existent or otherwise, is the unifying continuum of which those smaller entities are fragments, and exercises over them a pervading, though an incomplete, control.

It is plainly impossible to say beforehand what will be the relation to the ordinary stream of consciousness of a personality thus composed. We have no right to assume that all our psychical operations will fall at the same time, or at any time, into the same central current of perception, or rise above what we have called the ordinary conscious threshold. We can be sure, in fact, that there will be much which will not so rise; can we predict what _will_ rise?

We can only reply that the perception of stimuli by the supraliminal consciousness is a kind of exercise of function; and that here, as in other cases where a function is exercised, part of its range will consist of such operation as the primary structure of the organism obliges it to perform, and part will consist of such operation as natural selection (after the structure has come into being) has trained it to perform. There will be something which is structurally inevitable, and something which was not structurally inevitable, but which has proved itself practically advantageous.

Thus it may be inevitable--a necessary result of nervous structure--that consciousness should accompany unfamiliar cerebral combinations;--that the "fraying of fresh channels" should carry with it a perceptible tingle of novelty. Or it is possible, again, that this vivid consciousness of new cerebral combinations may be a later acquisition, and merely due to the obvious advantage of preventing new achievements from stereotyping themselves before they have been thoroughly practised;--as a musician will keep his attention fixed on a difficult novelty, lest his execution should become automatic before he has learnt to render the piece as he desires. It seems likely, at any rate, that the greater part of the contents of our supraliminal consciousness may be determined in some such fashion as this, by natural selection so operating as to keep ready to hand those perceptions which are most needed for the conduct of life.

The notion of the upbuilding of the personality here briefly given is of use, I think, in suggesting its practical tendencies to dissolution. Subjected continually to both internal and external stress and strain, its ways of yielding indicate the grain of its texture.

It is possible that if we could discern the minute psychology of this long series of changes, ranging from modifications too minute to be noted as abnormal to absolute revolutions of the whole character and intelligence, we might find no definite break in all the series; but rather a slow, continuous detachment of one psychical unit or element of consciousness after another from the primary synthesis. It is possible, on the other hand, that there may be a real break at a point where there appears to our external observation to be a break, namely, where the personality passes into its new phase through an interval of sleep or trance. And I believe that there is another break, at a point much further advanced, and not to be reached in this chapter, where some external intelligence begins in some way to possess the organism and to replace for a time the ordinary intellectual activity by an activity of its own. Setting, however, this last possibility for the present aside, we must adopt some arrangement on which to hang our cases. For this purpose the appearance of sleep or trance will make a useful, although not a definite, line of demarcation.

We may begin with localised psychical hypertrophies and isolations,--terms which I shall explain as we proceed; and then pass on through hysterical instabilities (where intermediate periods of trance may or may not be present) to those more advanced sleep-wakings and dimorphisms which a barrier of trance seems always to separate from the primary stream of conscious life. All such changes, of course, are generally noxious to the psychical organism; and it will be simpler to begin by dwelling on their noxious aspect, and regarding them as steps on the road--on one of the many roads--to mental overthrow.

The process begins, then, with something which is to the psychical organism no more than a boil or a corn is to the physical. In consequence of some suggestion from without, or of some inherited tendency, a small group of psychical units set up a process of exaggerated growth which shuts them off from free and healthy interchange with the rest of the personality.

The first symptom of disaggregation is thus the _idée fixe_, that is to say, the persistence of an uncontrolled and unmodifiable group of thoughts or emotions, which from their brooding isolation,--from the very fact of deficient interchange with the general current of thought,--become alien and intrusive, so that some special idea or image presses into consciousness with undue and painful frequency.

The fixed idea, thus originating, may develop in different ways. It may become a centre of explosion, or a nucleus of separation, or a beginning of death. It may induce an access of hysterical convulsions, thus acting like a material foreign body which presses on a sensitive part of the organism. Or it may draw to its new parasitic centre so many psychical elements that it forms a kind of secondary personality, co-existing secretly with the primary one, or even able at times (as in some well-known cases) to carry the whole organism by a _coup-de-main_. (Such changes, it may be noted in passing, are not always for the _worse_.) Or, again, the new quasi-independent centres may be merely _anarchical_; the revolt may spread to every cell; and the forces of the environment, ever making war upon the organism, may thus effect its total decay.

Let us dwell for a few moments on the nature of these fixed or insistent ideas. They are not generally or at the first outset extravagant fancies,--as that one is made of glass or the like. Rather will "fixed ideas" come to seem a mere expression for something in a minor degree common to most of us. Hardly any mind, I suppose, is wholly free from tendencies to certain types of thought or emotion for which we cannot summon any adequate check--useless recurrent broodings over the past or anxieties for the future, perhaps traces of old childish experience which have become too firmly fixed wholly to disappear. Nay, it may well be that we must look even further back than our own childhood for the origin of many haunting troubles. Inherited tendencies to terror, especially, seem to reach far back into a prehistoric past. In a recent "Study of Fears," which Professor Stanley Hall has based on a wide statistical collection,[8] it would seem that the fears of childhood often correspond to no existing cause for uneasiness, but rather to the vanished perils of primitive man. The fear of darkness, for instance, the fear of solitude, the fear of thunder-storms, the fear of the loss of orientation, speak of primitive helplessness, just as the fear of animals, the fear of strangers, suggest the fierce and hazardous life of early man. To all such instinctive feelings as these a morbid development is easily given.

Of what nature must we suppose this morbid development to be? Does it fall properly within our present discussion? or is it not simply a beginning of brain-disease, which concerns the physician rather than the psychologist? The psychologist's best answer to this question will be to show cases of fixed ideas _cured_ by psychological means.[9] And indeed there are few cases to show which have been cured by any methods _except_ the psychological; if hypnotic suggestion does not succeed with an _idée fixe_, it is seldom that any other treatment will cure it. We may, of course, say that the brain troubles thus cured were functional, and that those which went on inevitably into insanity were organic, although the distinction between functional and organic is not easily demonstrable in this ultra-microscopic realm.

At any rate, we have actually on record,--and that is what our argument needs,--a great series of _idées fixes_, of various degrees of intensity, cured by suggestion;--cured, that is to say, by a subliminal setting in action of minute nervous movements which our supraliminal consciousness cannot in even the blindest manner manage to set to work. Some such difference as exists on a gross scale between striped and unstriped muscle seems to exist on a minute scale among these smallest involved cells and fibres, or whatever they be. Some of them obey our conscious will, but most of them are capable of being governed only by subliminal strata of the self.

If, however, it be the subliminal self which can reduce these elements to order, it is often probably the subliminal self to which their disorder is originally due. If a fixed idea, say agoraphobia, grows up in me, this may probably be because the proper controlling co-ordinations of thought, which I ought to be able to summon up at will, have sunk below the level at which will can reach them. I am no longer able, that is to say, to convince myself by reasoning that there is no danger in crossing the open square. And this may be the fault of my subliminal self, whose business it is to keep the ideas which I need for common life easily within my reach, and which has failed to do this, owing to some enfeeblement of its grasp of my organism.

If we imagine these obscure operations under some such form as this, we get the advantage of being able to connect these insistent ideas in a coherent sequence with the more advanced phenomena of hysteria. We have seen that the presence of insistent ideas implies an instability of the conscious threshold; and this, in its turn, indicates a disorderly or diseased condition of the hypnotic stratum,--of that region of the personality which, as we shall see, is best known to us through the fact that it is reached by hypnotic suggestion.

Now we shall find, I think, that all the phenomena of hysteria are reducible to the same general conception. To understand their many puzzles we have to keep our eyes fixed upon just these psychological notions--upon a threshold of ordinary consciousness above which certain perceptions and faculties ought to be, but are not always, maintained, and upon a "hypnotic stratum" or region of the personality to which hypnotic suggestion appeals; and which includes faculty and perception which surpass the supraliminal, but whose operation is capricious and dreamlike, inasmuch as they lie, so to say, in a debateable region between two rules--the known rule of the supraliminal self, adapted to this life's experience and uses, and the conjectured rule of a fuller and profounder self, rarely reached by any artifice which our present skill suggests. Some of these conscious groupings have got separated from the ordinary stream of consciousness. These may still be unified in the subliminal, but they need to be unified in the supraliminal also. The normal relation between the supraliminal and the subliminal may be disturbed by the action of _either_.

Let us now see how far this view, which I suggested in the S.P.R. _Proceedings_ as far back as 1892,[10] fits in with those modern observations of hysteria, in Paris and Vienna especially, which are transforming all that group of troubles from the mere opprobrium of medicine into one of the most fertile sources of new knowledge of body and mind.

First, then, let us briefly consider what is the general type of hysterical troubles. Speaking broadly, we may say that the symptoms of hysteria form, in the first place, a series of phantom copies of real maladies of the nervous system; and, in the second place, a series of fantasies played upon that system--of unreal, dreamlike ailments, often such as no physiological mechanism can be shown to have determined. These latter cases are often due, as we shall see, not to purely physiological, but rather to intellectual causes; they represent, not a particular pattern in which the nervous system tends of itself to disintegrate, but a particular pattern which has been imposed upon it by some intellectual process;--in short, by some form of self-suggestion.

Let us briefly review some common types of hysterical disability,--taking as our first guide Dr. Pierre Janet's admirable work, _L'Etat Mental des Hystériques_ (Paris, 1893).

What, then, to begin with, is Dr. Janet's general conception of the psychological states of the advanced hysteric? "In the expression _I feel_," he says (_L'Etat Mental_, p. 39), "we have two elements: a small new psychological fact, 'feel,' and an enormous mass of thoughts already formed into a system 'I.' These two things mix and combine, and to say _I feel_ is to say that the personality, already enormous, has seized and absorbed this small new sensation; ... as though the _I_ were an amoeba which sent out a prolongation to suck in this little sensation which has come into existence beside it." Now it is in the assimilation of these elementary sensations or affective states with the _perception personnelle_, as Janet terms it, that the advanced hysteric fails. His field of consciousness is so far narrowed that it can only take in the minimum of sensations necessary for the support of life. "One must needs have consciousness of what one sees and hears, and so the patient neglects to perceive the tactile and muscular sensations with which he thinks that he can manage to dispense. At first he could perhaps turn his attention to them, and recover them at least momentarily within the field of personal perception. But the occasion does not present itself, and the _psychological bad habit_ is formed.... One day the patient--for he is now veritably a patient--is examined by the doctor. His left arm is pinched, and he is asked whether he feels the pinch. To his surprise the patient realises that he can no longer feel consciously, can no longer bring back into his personal perception sensations which he has neglected too long--he has become anæsthetic.... Hysterical anæsthesia is thus a fixed and perpetual distraction, which renders its subjects incapable of attaching certain sensations to their personality; it is a restriction of the conscious field."

The proof of these assertions depends on a number of observations, all of which point in the same direction, and show that hysterical anæsthesia does not descend so deep into the personality, so to say, as true anæsthesia caused by nervous decay, or by the section of a nerve.

Thus the hysteric is often _unconscious_ of the anæsthesia, which is only discovered by the physician. There is none of the distress caused by true anæsthesia, as, for instance, by the "tabetic mask," or insensibility of part of the face, which sometimes occurs in _tabes dorsalis_.

An incident reported by Dr. Jules Janet illustrates this peculiarity. A young woman cut her right hand severely with broken glass, and complained of insensibility in the palm. The physician who examined her found that the sensibility of the right palm was, in fact, diminished by the section of certain nerves. But he discovered at the same time that the girl was hysterically anæsthetic over the whole left side of her body. She had never even found out this disability, and the doctor twitted her with complaining of the small patch of anæsthesia, while she said nothing of that which covered half her body. But, as Dr. Pierre Janet remarks, she might well have retorted that these were the facts, and that it was for the man of science to say why the small patch annoyed her while the large one gave her no trouble at all.

Of similar import is the ingenious observation that hysterical anæsthesia rarely leads to any accident to the limb;--differing in this respect, for instance, from the true and profound anæsthesia of syringomyelitis, in which burns and bruises frequently result from the patient's forgetfulness of the part affected. There is usually, in fact, a supervision--a _subliminal_ supervision--exercised over the hysteric's limbs. Part of her personality is still alive to the danger, and modifies her movements, unknown to her supraliminal self.

This curious point, I may remark in passing, well illustrates the kind of action which I attribute to the subliminal self in many phases of life. Thus it is that the hypnotised subject is prevented (as I hold) from committing a real as opposed to a fictitious crime; thus it is that fresh ideas are suggested to the man of genius; thus it is--I will even say--that in some cases monitory hallucinations are generated, which save the supraliminal self from some sudden danger.

I pass on to another peculiarity of hysterical anæsthesiæ;--also in my eyes of deep significance. The anæsthetic belts or patches do not always, or even generally, correspond with true anatomical areas, such as would be affected by the actual lesion of any given nerve. They follow arbitrary arrangements;--sometimes corresponding to rough popular notions of divisions of the body,--sometimes seeming to reflect a merely childish caprice.

In these cases what is only a silly fancy seems to produce an effect which is not merely fanciful;--which is objective, measurable, and capable of causing long and serious disablement. This result, however, is quite accordant with my view of what I have termed the _hypnotic stratum_ of the personality. I hold, as our coming discussion of hypnotism will more fully explain, that the region into which the hypnotic suggestion gives us access is one of strangely mingled strength and weakness;--of a faculty at once more potent and less coherent than that of waking hours. I think that in these cases we get at the subliminal self only somewhat in the same sense as we get at the supraliminal self when the "highest-level centres" are for the time inoperative (as in a dream) and only "middle-level centres" are left to follow their own devices without inhibition or co-ordination. I hold that this is the explanation of the strange contrasts which hypnosis makes familiar to us--the combination of profound power over the organism with childish readiness to obey the merest whims of the hypnotiser. The intelligence which thus responds is in my view only a fragmentary intelligence; it is a dreamlike scrap of the subliminal self, functioning apart from that self's central and profounder control.

What happens in hypnotism in obedience to the hypnotiser's caprice happens in hysteria in obedience to the caprice of the hypnotic stratum itself. Some middle-level centre of the subliminal self (to express a difficult idea by the nearest phrase I can find) gets the notion that there is an "anæsthetic bracelet," say, round the left wrist;--and lo, this straight-way is so; and the hysteric loses supraliminal sensation in this fantastic belt. That the notion does not originate in the hysteric's supraliminal self is proved by the fact that the patient is generally unaware of the existence of the bracelet until the physician discovers it. Nor is it a chance combination;--even were there such a thing as chance. It is a dream of the hypnotic stratum;--an incoherent self-suggestion starting from and affecting a region below the reach of conscious will. Such cases are most instructive; for they begin to show us divisions of the human body based not upon local innervation but upon ideation (however incoherent);--upon intellectual conceptions like "a bracelet," "a cross,"--applied though these conceptions may be with dreamlike futility.

In this view, then, we regard the fragments of perceptive power over which the hysteric has lost control as being by no means really extinguished, but rather as existing immediately beneath the threshold, in the custody, so to say, of a dreamlike or hypnotic stratum of the subliminal self, which has selected them for reasons sometimes explicable as the result of past suggestions, sometimes to us inexplicable. If this be so, we may expect that the same kind of suggestions which originally cut off these perceptions from the main body of perception may stimulate them again to action either below or above the conscious threshold.

We have already, indeed, seen reason to suppose that the submerged perceptions are still at work, when Dr. Janet pointed out how rare a thing it was that any accident or injury followed upon hysterical loss of feeling in the limbs. A still more curious illustration is afforded by the condition of the field of vision in a hysteric. It often happens that the field of vision is much reduced, so that the hysteric, when tested with the perimeter, can discern only objects almost directly in front of the eye. But if an object which happens to be particularly exciting to the hypnotic stratum--for instance the hypnotiser's finger, used often as a signal for trance--is advanced into that part of the hysteric's normal visual field of which she has apparently lost all consciousness, there will often be an instant subliminal perception,--shown by the fact that the subject promptly falls into trance.

In such cases the action of the submerged perceptions, while provoked by very shallow artifices, continues definitely _subliminal_. The patient _herself_, as we say, does not know why she does not burn her anæsthetic limbs, or why she suddenly falls into a trance while being subjected to optical tests.

But it is equally easy to devise experiments which shall call these submerged sensations up again into supraliminal consciousness. A hysteric has lost sensation in one arm: Dr. Janet tells her that there is a caterpillar on that arm, and the reinforcement of attention thus generated brings back the sensibility.

These hysterical anæsthesiæ, it may be added here, may be not only very definite but very profound. Just as the reality,--though also the impermanence,--of the hysterical retrenchment of field of vision of which I have been speaking can be shown by optical experiments beyond the patient's comprehension, so the reality of some profound organic hysterical insensibilities is sometimes shown by the progress of independent disease. A certain patient feels no hunger or thirst: this indifference might be simulated for a time, but her ignorance of severe inflammation of the bladder is easily recognisable as real. Throw her into hypnosis and her sensibilities return. The disease is for the first time felt, and the patient screams with pain. This result well illustrates one main effect of hypnosis, viz., to bring the organism into a more normal state. The deep organic anæsthesia of this patient was dangerously abnormal; the missing sensibility had first to be restored, although it might be desirable afterwards to remove the painful elements in that sensibility again, under, so to say, a wiser and deeper control.

What has been said of hysterical defects of sensation might be repeated for motor defects. There, too, the powers of which the supraliminal self has lost control continue to act in obedience to subliminal promptings. The hysteric who squeezes the dynamometer like a weak child can exert great muscular force under the influence of emotion.

Very numerous are the cases which might be cited to give a notion of dissolutive hysterical processes, as now observed with closer insight than formerly, in certain great hospitals. But, nevertheless, these hospital observations do not exhaust what has recently been learnt of hysteria. Dealing almost exclusively with a certain class of patients, they leave almost untouched another group, smaller, indeed, but equally instructive for our study.

Hysteria is no doubt a disease, but it is by no means on that account an indication of initial weakness of mind, any more than an Arctic explorer's frost-bite is an indication of bad circulation. Disease is a function of two variables: power of resistance and strength of injurious stimulus. In the case of hysteria, as in the case of frost-bite, the inborn power of resistance may be unusually great, and yet the stimulus may be so excessive that that power may be overcome. Arctic explorers have generally, of course, been among the most robust of men. And with some hysterics there is an even closer connection between initial strength and destructive malady. For it has often happened that the very feelings which we regard as characteristically civilised, characteristically honourable, have reached a pitch of vividness and delicacy which exposes their owners to shocks such as the selfish clown can never know. It would be a great mistake to suppose that all psychical upsets are due to vanity, to anger, to terror, to sexual passion. The instincts of personal cleanliness and of feminine modesty are responsible for many a breakdown of a sensitive, but not a relatively _feeble_ organisation. The love of one's fellow-creatures and the love of God are responsible for many more. And why should it not be so? There exist for many men and women stimuli far stronger than self-esteem or bodily desires. Human life rests more and more upon ideas and emotions whose relation to the conservation of the race or of the individual is indirect and obscure. Feelings which may once have been utilitarian have developed wholly out of proportion to any advantage which they can gain for their possessor in the struggle for life. The dangers which are now most shudderingly felt are often no real risks to life or fortune. The aims most ardently pursued are often worse than useless for man regarded as a mere over-runner of the earth.

There is thus real psychological danger in fixing our conception of human character too low. Some essential lessons of a complex perturbation of personality are apt to be missed if we begin with the conviction that there is nothing before us but a study of decay. As I have more than once found need to maintain, it is his steady advance, and not his occasional regression, which makes the chief concern of man.

To this side of the study of hysteria Drs. Breuer and Freud have made valuable contribution. Drawing their patients not from hospital wards, but from private practice, they have had the good fortune to encounter, and the penetration to understand, some remarkable cases where unselfish but powerful passions have proved too much for the equilibrium of minds previously well-fortified both by principle and by education.[11]

"Wax to receive and marble to retain"; such, as we all have felt, is the human mind in moments of excitement which transcend its resistant powers. This may be for good or for evil, may tend to that radical change in ethical standpoint which is called _conversion_, or to the mere setting-up of some hysterical disability. Who shall say how far we desire to be susceptible to stimulus? Most rash would it be to assign any fixed limit, or to class as inferior those whose main difference from ourselves may be that they feel sincerely and passionately what we feel torpidly, or perhaps only affect to feel. "The term degenerate," says Dr. Milne Bramwell, "is applied so freely and widely by some modern authors that one cannot help concluding that they rank as such all who do not conform to some primitive, savage type, possessing an imperfectly developed nervous system." Our "degenerates" may sometimes be in truth _progenerate_; and their perturbation may mask an evolution which we or our children needs must traverse when they have shown the way.

Let us pause for a moment and consider what is here implied. We are getting here among the _hystériques qui mènent le monde_. We have advanced, that is to say, from the region of _idées fixes_ of a paltry or morbid type to the region of _idées fixes_ which in themselves are reasonable and honourable, and which become morbid only on account of their relative intensity. Here is the debateable ground between hysteria and genius. The kind of genius which we approach here is not, indeed, the purely intellectual form. Rather it is the "moral genius," the "genius of sanctity," or that "possession" by some altruistic idea which lies at the root of so many heroic lives.

The hagiology of all religions offers endless examples of this type. That man would hardly be regarded as a great saint whose conduct seemed completely reasonable to the mass of mankind. The saint in consequence is apt to be set unduly apart, whether for veneration or for ridicule. He is regarded either as inspired or as morbid; when in reality all that his mode of life shows is that certain _idées fixes_, in themselves of no unworthy kind, have obtained such dominance that their impulsive action may take and retake, as accident wills, the step between the sublime and the ridiculous.

Martyrs, missionaries, crusaders, nihilists,--enthusiasts of any kind who are swayed by impulses largely below the threshold of ordinary consciousness,--these men bring to bear on human affairs a force more concentrated and at higher tension than deliberate reason can generate. They are virtually carrying out self-suggestions which have acquired the permanence of _idées fixes_. Their fixed ideas, however, are not so isolated, so encysted as those of true hysterics. Although more deeply and immutably rooted than their ideas on other matters, these subliminal convictions are worked in with the products of supraliminal reason, and of course can only thus be made effective over other minds. A deep subliminal horror, generated, say, by the sight of some loathsome cruelty, must not only prompt hallucinations,--as it might do in the hysteric and has often done in the reformer as well,--it must also, if it is to work out its mission of reform, be held clearly before the supraliminal reason, and must learn to express itself in writing or speech adapted to influence ordinary minds.

* * * * *

We may now pass from the first to the second of the categories of disintegration of personality suggested at the beginning of this chapter. The cases which I have thus far discussed have been mainly cases of _isolation_ of elements of personality. We have not dealt as yet with _secondary personalities_ as such. There is, however, a close connection between these two classes. There are cases, for example, where a kind of secondary state at times intervenes--a sort of bewilderment arising from confluent _idées fixes_ and overrunning the whole personality. This new state is often preceded or accompanied by something of somnambulic change. It is this new feature of which we have here a first hint which seems to me of sufficient importance for the diagnosis of my second class of psychical disintegrations. This second class starts from sleep-wakings of all kinds, and includes all stages of alternation of personality, from brief somnambulisms up to those permanent and thorough changes which deserve the name of dimorphisms.

We are making here a transition somewhat resembling the transition from isolated bodily injuries to those subtler changes of diathesis which change of climate or of nutrition may induce. Something has happened which makes the organism react to all stimuli in a new way. Our best starting-point for the study of these secondary states lies among the phenomena of _dream_.

We shall in a later chapter discuss certain rare characteristics of dreams; occasional manifestations in sleep of waking faculty heightened, or of faculty altogether new. We have now to consider ordinary dreams in their aspect as indications of the structure of our personality, and as agencies which tend to its modification.

In the first place, it should be borne in mind that the dreaming state, though I will not call it the normal form of mentation, is nevertheless the form which our mentation most readily and habitually assumes. Dreams of a kind are probably going on within us both by night and by day, unchecked by any degree of tension of waking thought. This view--theoretically probable--seems to me to be supported by one's own actual experience in momentary dozes or even momentary lapses of attention. The condition of which one then becomes conscious is that of swarming fragments of thought or imagery, which have apparently been going on continuously, though one may become aware of them and then unaware at momentary intervals;--while one tries, for instance, to listen to a speech or to read a book aloud between sleep and waking.

This, then, is the kind of mentation from which our clearer and more coherent states may be supposed to develop. Waking life implies a fixation of attention on one thread of thought running through a tangled skein. In hysterical patients we see some cases where no such fixation is possible, and other cases where the fixation is involuntary, or follows a thread which it is not desirable to pursue.

There is, moreover, another peculiarity of dreams which has hardly attracted sufficient notice from psychologists, but which it is essential to review when we are dealing with fractionations of personality.[12] I allude to their _dramatic_ character. In dream, to begin with, we have an environment, a surrounding scene which we have not wittingly invented, but which we find, as it were, awaiting our entry. And in many cases our dream contains a _conversation_ in which we await with eagerness and hear with surprise the remarks of our interlocutor, who must, of course, all the time represent only another segment or stratum of ourselves. This duplication may become either painful or pleasant. A feverish dream may simulate the confusions of insanity--cases where the patient believes himself to be two persons at once, and the like. [See R. L. Stevenson's dream, given in Appendix II. A] These complications rarely cause the dreamer any surprise. One may even say that with the first touch of sleep the superficial unity of consciousness disappears, and that the dream world gives a truer representation than the waking world of the real fractionation or multiplicity existing beneath that delusive simplicity which the glare of waking consciousness imposes upon the mental field of view.

Bearing these analogies in mind, we shall see that the development of somnambulism out of ordinary dream is no isolated oddity. It is parallel to the development of a secondary state from _idées fixes_ when these have passed a certain pitch of intensity. The sleep-waking states which develop from sleep have the characteristics which we should expect from their largely subliminal origin. They are less coherent than waking secondary personalities, but richer in supernormal faculty. It is in connection with displays of such faculty--hyperæsthesia or telæsthesia--that they have been mainly observed, and that I shall, in a future chapter, have most need to deal with them. But there is also great interest simply in observing what fraction of the sleep-waker's personality is able to hold intercourse with other minds. A trivial instance of such intercourse reduced to its lowest point has often recurred to me. When I was a boy another boy sleeping in the same room began to talk in his sleep. To some slight extent he could answer me; and the names and other words uttered--_Harry, the boat_, etc.--were appropriate to the day's incidents, and would have been enough to prove to me, had I not otherwise known, who the boy was. But his few coherent remarks represented not facts but dreaming fancies--_the boat is waiting_, and so forth. This trivial jumble, I say, has since recurred to me as precisely parallel to many communications professing to come from disembodied spirits. There are other explanations, no doubt, but one explanation of such incoherent utterances would be that the spirit was speaking under conditions resembling those in which this sleeping boy spoke.

There are, of course, many stages above this. Spontaneous somnambulistic states become longer in duration, more coherent in content, and may gradually merge, as in the well-known case of Félida X. (see Appendix II. C) into a continuous or dimorphic new personality.

The transition which has now to be made is a very decided one. We have been dealing with a class of secondary personalities consisting of elements _emotionally selected_ from the total or primary personality. We have seen some special group of feelings grow to morbid intensity, until at last it dominates the sufferer's mental being, either fitfully or continuously, but to such an extent that he is "a changed person," not precisely insane, but quite other than he was when in normal mental health. In such cases the new personality is of course dyed in the morbid emotion. It is a kind of dramatic impersonation, say, of jealousy, or of fear, like the case of "demoniacal possession," quoted from Dr. Janet in Appendix II. B. In other respects the severance between the new and the old self is not very profound. Dissociations of memory, for instance, are seldom beyond the reach of hypnotic suggestion. The cleavage has not gone down to the depths of the psychical being.

We must now go on to cases where the origin of the cleavage seems to us quite arbitrary, but where the cleavage itself seems even for that very reason to be more profound. It is no longer a question of some one morbidly exaggerated emotion, but rather of a scrap of the personality taken at random and developing apart from the rest.

The commonest mode of origin for such secondary personalities is from some access of sleep-waking, which, instead of merging into sleep again, repeats and consolidates itself, until it acquires a chain of memories of its own, alternating with the primary chain.[13]

And now, as an illustration of a secondary condition purely degenerative, I may first mention _post-epileptic_ states, although they belong too definitely to pathology for full discussion here. Post-epileptic conditions may run parallel to almost all the secondary phases which we have described. They may to all outward semblance closely resemble normality,--differing mainly by a lack of rational _purpose_, and perhaps by a recurrence to the habits and ideas of some earlier moment in the patient's history. Such a condition resembles some hypnotic trances, and some factitious personalities as developed by automatic writing. Or, again, the post-epileptic state may resemble a suddenly developed _idée fixe_ triumphing over all restraint, and may prompt to serious crime, abhorrent to the normal, but premeditated in the morbid state. There could not, in fact, be a better example of the unchecked rule of middle-level centres;--no longer secretly controlled, as in hypnotic trance, by the higher-level centres,--which centres in the epileptic are in a state not merely of psychological abeyance, but of physiological exhaustion.[14]

The case of Ansel Bourne is interesting in this connection.[15] Subject from childhood to fits of deep depression, and presenting in later life symptoms suggestive of epilepsy, Ansel Bourne was struck down in his thirty-first year by what was supposed to be a severe sunstroke. Connected with this event were circumstances which led to a profound religious conversion. At sixty-one years of age, being at that time an itinerant preacher, and living in the small town of Greene, in the State of Rhode Island, Ansel Bourne disappeared one morning, whilst apparently in his usual state of health, and remained undiscovered for a period of two months. At the end of this time he turned up at Norristown, Pennsylvania, where for the previous six weeks he had been keeping a small variety store under the name of A. J. Brown, appearing to his neighbours and customers as an ordinary normal person, but being, as it would seem, in a somnambulistic condition all the while. When he regained his ordinary waking consciousness, Ansel Bourne lost all memory of his actions while in his secondary state. In the year 1890, however, having been hypnotised by Professor James, he was able while in the trance state to give an account of his doings during the eight weeks that the Brown personality lasted.

In this case it is perhaps safest to regard the change of personality as _post-epileptic_, although I know of no recorded parallel to the length of time during which the influence of the attack must have continued. The effect on mind and character would suit well enough with this hypothesis. The "Brown" personality showed the narrowness of interests and the uninquiring indifference which is common in such states. But on this theory the case shows one striking novelty, namely, the recall by the aid of hypnotism of the memory of the post-epileptic state. It is doubtful, I think, whether any definite post-epileptic memory had ever previously been recovered. On the other hand, it is doubtful whether serious recourse had ever been had at such times to hypnotic methods, whose increasing employment certainly differentiates the latter from the earlier cases of split personality in a very favourable way. And this application of hypnotism to post-epileptic states affords us possibly our best chance--I do not say of directly checking epilepsy, but of getting down to the obscure conditions which predispose to each attack.

Next we may mention two cases reported by Dr. Proust and M. Boeteau. Dr. Proust's patient,[16] Emile X., aged thirty-three, was a barrister in Paris. Although of good ability and education in classical studies, both as a boy and at the university he was always nervous and over sensitive, showing signs, in fact, of _la grande hystérie_. During his attacks he apparently underwent no loss of consciousness, but would lose the memory of all his past life during a few minutes or a few days, and in this condition of secondary consciousness would lead an active and apparently normal life. From such a state he woke suddenly, and was entirely without memory of what had happened to him in this secondary state. This memory was, however, restored by hypnotism.

M. Boeteau's patient, Marie M.,[17] had been subject to hysterical attacks since she was twelve years old. She became an out-patient at the Hôpital Andral for these attacks: and on April 24, 1891, being then twenty-two years old, the house physician there advised her to enter the surgical ward at the Hôtel-Dieu, as she would probably need an operation for an internal trouble. Greatly shocked by this news, she left the hospital at ten A.M., and lost consciousness. When she recovered consciousness she found herself in quite another hospital--that of Ste. Anne--at six A.M. on April 27. She had been found wandering in the streets of Paris, in the evening of the day on which she left the Hôpital Andral. On returning to herself, she could recollect absolutely nothing of what had passed in the interval. While she was thus perplexed at her unexplained fatigue and footsoreness, and at the gap in her memory, M. Boeteau hypnotised her. She passed with ease into the hypnotic state, and at once remembered the events which filled at least the earlier part of the gap in her primary consciousness.

These two cases belong to the same general type as Ansel Bourne's. There does not seem, however, to be any definite evidence that the secondary state was connected with epileptic attacks. It was referred rather by the physicians who witnessed it to a functional derangement analogous to hysteria, though it must be remembered that there are various forms of epilepsy which are not completely understood, and some of which may be overlooked by persons who are not familiar with the symptoms.

Another remarkable case is that of the Rev. Thomas C. Hanna,[18] in whom complete amnesia followed an accident. By means of a method which Dr. Sidis (who studied the case) calls "hypnoidisation," he was able to prove that the patient had all his lost memories stored in his subliminal consciousness, and could temporarily recall them to the supraliminal. By degrees the two personalities which had developed since the accident were thus fused into one and the patient was completely cured.

For another case of the ambulatory type, like Ansel Bourne's, but remarkable in that it was associated with a definite physical lesion--an abscess in the ear--the cure of which was followed by the rapid return of the patient to his normal condition, see Dr. Drewry's article in the _Medico-Legal Journal_ for June 1896 [228 A].

Again, in a case reported by Dr. David Skae,[19] the secondary state seems to owe its origin to a kind of tidal exhaustion of vitality, as though the repose of sleep were not enough to sustain the weakened personality, which lapsed on alternate days into exhaustion and incoherence.

The secondary personalities thus far dealt with have been the spontaneous results of some form of _misère psychologique_, of defective integration of the psychical being. But there are also cases where, the cohesion being thus released, a slight touch from without can effect dissociations which, however shallow and almost playful in their first inception, may stiffen by repetition into phases as marked and definite as those secondary states which spring up of themselves, that is to say, from self-suggestions which we cannot trace. In Professor Janet's _L'Automatisme Psychologique_ the reader will find some instructive examples of these fictitious secondary personalities [230 A and B].

Up to this point the secondary states which we have considered; however startling to old-fashioned ideas of personality, may, at any rate, be regarded as forms of mental derangement or decay--varieties on a theme already known. Now, however, we approach a group of cases to which it is difficult to make any such definition apply. They are cases where the secondary state is _not_ obviously a degeneration;--where it may even appear to be in some ways an _improvement_ on the primary; so that one is left wondering how it came about that the man either originally was what he was, or--being what he was--suddenly became something so very different. There has been a shake given to the kaleidoscope, and no one can say why either arrangement of the component pieces should have had the priority.

In the classical case of Félida X. the second state is, as regards health and happiness, markedly superior to the first. (See Appendix II. C.)

The old case of Mary Reynolds[20] is again remarkable in respect of the change of character involved. The deliverance from gloomy preoccupations--the childish insouciance of the secondary state--again illustrates the difference between these _allotropic_ changes or reconstructions of personality and that mere predominance of a morbid factor which marked the cases of _idée fixe_ and hysteria. Observe, also, in Mary Reynolds's case the tendency of the two states gradually to _coalesce_ apparently in a third phase likely to be preferable to either of the two already known.

We now come to spontaneous cases of multiple personality, of which Louis Vivé's is one of the best known. Louis Vivé exhibited an extraordinary number and variety of phases of personality, affording an extreme example of dissociations dependent on _time-relations_, on the special epoch of life in which the subject was ordered to find himself.[21] Among various conditions of his organism--all but one of them implying, or at least simulating, some grave central lesion--any given condition could be revived in a moment, and the whole gamut of changes rung on his nervous system as easily as if one were setting back or forward a continuous cinematograph. It is hard to frame a theory of memory which shall admit of these sudden reversions,--of playing fast and loose in this manner with the accumulated impressions of years.

Yet if Louis Vivé's case thus strangely intensifies the already puzzling notion of _ecmnesia_--as though the whole organism could be tricked into forgetting the events which had most deeply stamped it--what are we to say to Dr. Morton Prince's case of "Sally Beauchamp,"[22] with its grotesque exaggeration of a subliminal self--a kind of hostile bedfellow which knows everything and remembers everything--which mocks the emotions and thwarts the projects of the ordinary reasonable self which can be seen and known? The case must be studied in full as it stands; its later developments may help to unravel the mysteries which its earlier stages have already woven.[23]

I quote in full in the text the next case, reported by Dr. R. Osgood Mason (in a paper entitled "Duplex Personality: its Relation to Hypnotism and to Lucidity," in the _Journal of the American Medical Association_, November 30th, 1895). Dr. Mason writes:--

Alma Z. was an unusually healthy and intellectual girl, a strong and attractive character, a leading spirit in whatever she undertook, whether in study, sport, or society. From overwork in school, and overtaxed strength in a case of sickness at home, her health was completely broken down, and after two years of great suffering suddenly a second personality appeared. In a peculiar child-like and Indian-like dialect she announced herself as "Twoey," and that she had come to help "Number One" in her suffering. The condition of "Number One" was at this time most deplorable; there was great pain, extreme debility, frequent attacks of syncope, insomnia, and a mercurial stomatitis which had been kept up for months by way of medical treatment and which rendered it nearly impossible to take nourishment in any form. "Twoey" was vivacious and cheerful, full of quaint and witty talk, never lost consciousness, and could take abundant nourishment, which she declared she _must_ do for the sake of "Number One." Her talk was most quaint and fascinating, but without a trace of the acquired knowledge of the primary personality. She gave frequent evidence of supranormal intelligence regarding events transpiring in the neighbourhood. It was at this time that the case came under my observation, and has remained so for the past ten years. Four years later, under depressing circumstances, a third personality made its appearance and announced itself as "The Boy." This personality was entirely distinct and different from either of the others. It remained the chief alternating personality for four years, when "Twoey" again returned.

All these personalities, though absolutely different and characteristic, were delightful each in its own way, and "Twoey" especially was, and still is, the delight of the friends who are permitted to know her, whenever she makes her appearance; and this is always at times of unusual fatigue, mental excitement, or prostration; then she comes and remains days at a time. The original self retains her superiority when she is present, and the others are always perfectly devoted to her interest and comfort. "Number One" has no personal knowledge of either of the other personalities, but she knows them well, and especially "Twoey," from the report of others and from characteristic letters which are often received from her; and "Number One" greatly enjoys the spicy, witty, and often useful messages which come to her through these letters and the report of friends.

Dr. Mason goes on to say:--

Here are three cases [the one just given, that of another patient of his own, and that of Félida X.] in which a second personality--perfectly sane, thoroughly practical, and perfectly in touch and harmony with its surroundings--came to the surface, so to speak, and assumed absolute control of the physical organisation for long periods of time together. During the stay of the second personality the primary or original self was entirely blotted out, and the time so occupied was a blank. In neither of the cases described had the primary self any knowledge of the second personality, except from the report of others or letters from the second self, left where they could be found on the return of the primary self to consciousness. The second personality, on the other hand, in each case, knew of the primary self, but only as another person--never as forming a part of, or in any way belonging to their own personalities. In the case of both Félida X. and Alma Z., there was always immediate and marked improvement in the physical condition when the second personality made its appearance.

The case of Mollie Fancher,[24] which, had it been observed and recorded with scientific accuracy, might have been one of the most instructive of all, seems to stand midway between the transformations of Louis Vivé--each of them frankly himself at a different epoch of life--and the "pseudo-possessions" of imaginary spirits with which we shall in a later chapter have to deal.

The case of Anna Winsor[25] goes so far further in its suggestion of interference from without that it presents to us, at any rate, a contrast and even conflict between positive insanity on the part of the organism generally with wise and watchful sanity on the part of a single limb, with which that organism professes to have no longer any concern.

The last case[26] that I shall mention is that of Miss Mary Lurancy Vennum, the "Watseka Wonder."

The case briefly is one of alleged "possession," or "spirit-control." The subject of the account, a girl nearly fourteen years old, living at Watseka, Illinois, became apparently controlled by the spirit of Mary Roff, a neighbour's daughter, who had died at the age of eighteen years and nine months, when Lurancy Vennum was a child of about fifteen months old. The most extraordinary feature in the case was that the control by Mary Roff lasted almost continuously for a period of four months.

For the present we must consider this case as a duplication of personality--a pseudo-possession, if you will--determined in a hysterical child by the suggestion of friends, but at a later stage, and when some other wonders have become more familiar than now, we may find that this singular narrative has further lessons to teach us.

We have now briefly surveyed a series of disintegrations of personality ranging from the most trifling _idée fixe_ to actual alternations or permanent changes of the whole type of character. All these form a kind of continuous series, and illustrate the structure of the personality in concordant ways. There do exist, it must be added, other forms of modified personality with which I shall not at present deal. Those are cases where some telepathic influence from outside has been at work, so that there is not merely dissociation of existing elements, but apparent introduction of a novel element. Such cases also pass through a long series, from small phenomena of motor automatism up to trance and so-called possession. But all this group I mention here merely in order to defer their discussion to later chapters.

The brief review already made will suffice to indicate the complex and separable nature of the elements of human personality. Of course a far fuller list might have been given; many phenomena of actual insanity would need to be cited in any complete conspectus. But hysteria is in some ways a better dissecting agent than any other where delicate psychical dissociations are concerned. Just as the microscopist stains a particular tissue for observation, so does hysteria stain with definiteness, as it were, particular synergies--definite complexes of thought and action--more manifestly than any grosser lesion, any more profound or persistent injury could do. Hysterical mutism, for instance (the observation is Charcot's[27]), supplies almost the only cases where the faculty of vocal utterance is attacked in a quite isolated way. In aphasia dependent upon organic injury we generally find other word-memories attacked also,--elements of agraphy, of word-blindness, of word-deafness appear. In the hysteric the incapacity to speak may be the single symptom. So with anæsthesiæ; we find in hysteria a separation of sensibility to heat and to pain, possibly even a separate subsistence of electrical sensibility. It is worth remarking here that it was during the hypnotic trance, which in delicacy of discriminating power resembles hysteria, that (so far as I can make out) the distinctness of the temperature-sense from the pain-sense was first observed. Esdaile, when removing tumours under mesmerism in Calcutta, noticed that patients, who were actually undergoing capital operations without a murmur, complained if a draught blew in upon them from an open window.

Nor is it only as a dissecting agent that hysteria can aid our research. There are in hysteria frequent _acquisitions_ as well as _losses_ of faculty. It is not unusual to find great hyperæsthesia in certain special directions--of touch, hearing, perception of light, etc.--combined with hysterical loss of sensation of other kinds. This subject will be more conveniently treated along with the hyperæsthesia of the hypnotic trance. But I may note here that just such occasional quickenings of faculty were, in my view, almost certain to accompany that instability of psychical threshold which is the distinguishing characteristic of hysteria, since I hold that subliminal faculty habitually overpasses supraliminal. These also are a kind of capricious _idées fixes_; only the caprice in such cases raises what was previously submerged instead of exaggerating what was previously emergent.

And from this point it is that our inquiries must now take their fresh departure. We in this work are concerned with changes which are the _converse_ of hysterical changes. We are looking for integrations in lieu of disintegrations; for intensifications of control, widenings of faculty, instead of relaxation, scattering, or decay.

Suppose, then, that in a case of instability of the psychical threshold,--ready _permeability_, if you will, of the psychical diaphragm separating the supraliminal from the subliminal self,--the elements of emergence tend to increase and the elements of submergence to diminish. Suppose that the permeability depends upon the force of the uprushes from below the diaphragm rather than on the tendency to sink downwards from above it. We shall then reach the point where the vague name of _hysteria_ must give place to the vague name of _genius_. The uprushes from the subliminal self will now be the important feature; the down-draught from the supraliminal, if it still exists, will be trivial in comparison. The content of the uprush will be congruous with the train of voluntary thought; and the man of genius will be a man more capable than others of utilising for his waking purposes the subliminal region of his being.

Next in order to the uprushes of genius will come the uprushes of dream. All men pass normally and healthily into a second phase of personality, alternating with the first. That is _sleep_, and sleep is characterised by those incoherent forms of subliminal uprush which we know as dreams. It is here that our evidence for telepathy and telæsthesia will first present itself for discussion. Sleep will indicate the existence of submerged faculty of a rarer type than even that to which genius has already testified.

There are, moreover, other states, both spontaneous and induced, analogous to sleep, and these will form the subject of the fifth chapter, that on Hypnotism. Hypnotism, however, does not mean trance or somnambulism only. It is a name, if not for the whole _ensemble_, yet for a large group of those artifices which we have as yet discovered for the purpose of eliciting and utilising subliminal faculty. The results of hypnotic suggestion will be found to imitate sometimes the subliminal uprushes of genius, and sometimes the visions of spontaneous somnambulism; while they also open to us fresh and characteristic accesses into subliminal knowledge and power.

Further than this point our immediate forecast need not go. But when we have completed the survey here indicated, we shall see, I think, how significant are the phenomena of hysteria in any psychological scheme which aims at including the hidden powers of man. For much as the hysteric stands in comparison to us ordinary men, so perhaps do we ordinary men stand in comparison with a not impossible ideal of faculty and of self-control.

But apart from these broader speculations, it has become evident that disturbances of personality are not mere empty marvels, but psycho-pathological problems of the utmost interest:--no one of them exactly like another, and no one of them without some possible _aperçu_ into the intimate structure of man.

The purpose of this book, of course, is not primarily practical. It aims rather at the satisfaction of scientific curiosity as to man's psychical structure; esteeming _that_ as a form of experimental research which the more urgent needs of therapeutics have kept in the background too long. Yet it may not have been amiss to realise thus, on the threshold of our discussion, that already even the most delicate speculations in this line have found their justification in helpful act; that strange bewilderments, paralysing perturbations, which no treatment could alleviate, no drug control, have been soothed and stablished into sanity by some appropriate and sagacious mode of appeal to a _natura medicatrix_ deep-hidden in the labouring breast.