In case A I had an absolute knowledge that I was out of my mind, and that there was no meaning in my words; these were the very facts that I was anxious to conceal; and yet when I succumbed to the temptation of speaking my face was convulsed with anger, and I wrung my watcher's wrist with cruelty. Here is action, unnatural and uncharacteristic action, flowing from an idea in which I had no belief, and which I had been concealing for hours as a plain mark of aberration. Is it not so with lunatics?
I have called the one person myself, and the other the other fellow. It was myself who spoke and acted; the other fellow seemed to have no control of the body or the tongue; he could only act through myself, on whom he brought to bear a heavy strain, resisted in one case, triumphant in the two others. Yet I am tempted to think that I know the other fellow; I am tempted to think he is the dreamer described in my Chapter on Dreams to which you refer. Here at least is a dream belonging to the same period, but this time a pure dream, an illusion, I mean, that disappeared with the return of the sense of sight, not one that persevered during waking moments, and while I was able to speak and take my medicine. It occurred the day after case B and before case C.
Case D. In the afternoon there sprang up a storm of wind with monstrous clouds of dust; my room looked on a steep hill of trees whose boughs were all blowing in the same direction; the world seemed to pass by my windows like a mill-race. By this turmoil and movement I was confused, but not distressed, and surprised not to be distressed; for even in good health a high wind has often a painful influence on my nerves. In the midst of this I dozed off asleep. I had just been reading Scott's "Life of Dryden," and been struck with the fact that Dryden had translated some of the Latin hymns, and had wondered that I had never remarked them in his works. As soon as I was asleep I dreamed a reason why the sound of the wind and the sight of the flying dust had not distressed me. There was no wind, it seemed, no dust; it was only Dryden singing his translated hymns in one direction, and all those who had blamed and attacked him after the Revolution singing them in another. This point of the two directions is very singular and insane. In part it meant that Dryden was continuously flying past yet never passing my window in the direction of the wind and dust, and all his detractors similarly flying past yet not passing towards the other side. But it applied, besides this, both to the words and to the music in a manner wholly insusceptible of expression.
That was a dream; and yet how exactly it reproduces the method of my other fellow while I was awake. Here is an explanation for a state of mind or body sought, and found, in a tissue of rabid, complicated, and inexpressible folly.—Yours very sincerely.
Robert Louis Stevenson.
II. B. A good example of the application of true scientific method to problems which doctors of the old school did not think worth their science is Dr. Janet's treatment of a singular problem which the mistakes of brutal ignorance turned in old times into a veritable scourge of our race. I speak of demoniacal possession, in which affliction Dr. Janet has shown himself a better than ecclesiastical exorcist.
I give here a typical case of pseudo-possession from Névroses et Idées fixes (vol. i. pp. 377-389): Achille, as Professor Janet calls him, was a timid and rather morbid young man, but he was married to a good wife, and nothing went specially wrong with him until his return from a business journey in 1890. He then became sombre and taciturn—sometimes even seemed unable to speak—then took to his bed and lay murmuring incomprehensible words, and at last said farewell to his wife and children, and stretched himself out motionless for a couple of days, while his family waited for his last breath.
"Suddenly one morning, after two days of apparent death, Achille sat up in bed with his eyes wide open, and burst into a terrible laugh. It was a convulsive laugh which shook all his limbs; an exaggerated laugh which twisted his mouth; a lugubrious, satanic laugh which went on for more than two hours.
"From this moment everything was changed. Achille leapt from his bed and refused all attentions. To every question he answered, 'There's nothing to be done! let's have some champagne; it's the end of the world!' Then he uttered piercing cries, 'They are burning me—they are cutting me to pieces!'"
After an agitated sleep, Achille woke up with the conviction that he was possessed with a devil. And in fact his mouth now uttered blasphemies, his limbs were contorted, and he repeatedly made unsuccessful efforts at suicide. Ultimately he was taken to the Salpêtrière, and placed under Professor Janet, who recognised at once the classic signs of possession. The poor man kept protesting against the odious outrages on religion, which he attributed to a devil inside him, moving his tongue against his will. "Achille could say, like a celebrated victim of possession, Père Surin, 'It is as though I had two souls; one of which has been dispossessed of its body and the use of its organs, and is frantic at the sight of the other soul which has crept in.'"