Integration and Disintegration of the Personality
Though the individual is always in one sense a unit, there is a sense in which he needs to achieve unity. His various native tendencies and interests do not always pull together, and in fact some necessarily pull against others. So that we sometimes say of a person that he is behaving so differently from usual that we should not know he was the same person. We may speak of one person as being well integrated, meaning that he is always himself, his various tendencies being so coördinated as to work reasonably well together; whereas of another we speak as poorly integrated, unstable, an uncertain quantity. Integration is achieved partly by selection from among conflicting impulses, partly by coördination, partly by judicious treatment of those impulses that are denied; as was partly explained in the last chapter.
The self, expanding socially, may expand in more than one direction, with the result that the individual has in a sense two or more selves, one for his business, one for his home; and it may happen that the instincts and interests dominating the individual in these two relations are quite different, so that a man who is hard and grasping in business is kind and generous to his wife and children. "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" gives an extreme picture of such lack of integration, a picture rather fanciful than drawn from real life.
But we do find in real life cases of dissociation of the personality, also called cases of double or multiple personality. The individual passes from one state to another, behaving very differently in the two states, and usually unable to remember in the primary or more lasting state what he has done in the secondary state. In the secondary state he remembers what he did in the primary state, but is apt to speak of it as if done by another person. In many cases, the primary state seems limited and hampered, as if the individual were not his complete self, while the secondary state is a sort of complement to the first, but decidedly imperfect in itself. Thus in the primary state the individual may be excessively quiet, while in the secondary state he is excessively mischievous. It is much as if some of his reaction-tendencies were forcibly kept apart from the rest, so that when they did become aroused to activity, the remainder of the individual went to sleep. The individual seems to function in fractions, and never as a whole.
Often the secondary state likes to have a name for itself and to be considered as a secondary personality, as if two persons were inhabiting the same body--a very forced conception. The secondary personality will even assert that it stays awake in the background and watches the primary personality when the latter is active, spying on it without [{560}] that personality being aware of it. Thus two fractions of the individual would be functioning at the same time, but still not working together as a unit.
This claim of the secondary personality has been experimentally checked up by Dr. Morton Prince, in the following way. He was able to cause his subject, a young woman, to pass from the primary to the secondary state and back again, by a procedure resembling hypnotism. While she was in the secondary state, he told her that she (the secondary personality) was to solve an arithmetical problem, the general nature of which he described to her then and there, while the actual numbers were not shown till she was put back in the primary state. He then put her into the primary state for a few moments, and placed the numbers unobtrusively before her, without the primary personality seeming to notice them. Put back now into the secondary state, she instantly shouted out the answer to the problem, and asserted that she (the secondary personality) had had the answer ready for some time, and had been impatiently waiting to be brought back and announce it. This is at least prima facie evidence in favor of Dr. Prince's view, that two separate fractions of the individual were both functioning consciously at the same time.
It is weird business, however interpreted, and raises the question whether anything of the same sort, only milder in degree, occurs in ordinary experience. Here is one somewhat similar fact that we are all familiar with: we have two matters in hand at the same time, very different in their emotional tone, one perhaps a worrisome matter of business, the other an interesting personal matter; and the shift from one to the other feels almost like changing personalities. Also, while busy with one, we may sometimes feel the other stirring, just barely awake and dimly conscious.
Also, is not something like this true?--A person, very [{561}] conscientious in the performance of his duties, always doing what he is told, feels stirrings of a carefree, independent spirit, as if some sides of his nature were not finding expression, and in little ways he gives it expression, not exactly by taking a "moral holiday" [Footnote: This is one of William James's expressive phrases.] or going on a spree of some sort, but by venting his impulses just an instant at a time, so that he scarcely remembers it later, and in such little ways that other people, also, are scarcely aware of It. He has a "secondary personality", only it is little developed, and it has its little place in the conscious life, instead of being dissociated.
In the cases of true dissociation, there was often a violent emotional shock that started the cleavage. One celebrated case started at 8 years of age, when the subject, a little girl, was thrown to the floor by a drunken father angered by finding the child asleep in his bed. From that moment, it would seem that the frolicsome side of childish behavior was banished from the main personality, and could get into action only when the main personality relaxed its control and became dormant; so that thereafter the child alternated between two states, one very quiet, industrious and conscientious, the other vivacious and mischievous; and the main personality never remembered what was done in this secondary, mischievous state. In such cases, it would appear that the cleavage resulted from a violent thrusting out from the main personality of tendencies inconsistent with the dominant (here serious) attitude of that personality.