It was by no means easy to get either at Achille or at his possessing devil. Attempts to hypnotise him failed, and any remonstrance was met with insult. But the wily psychologist was accustomed to such difficulties, and had resort to a plan too insidious for a common devil to suspect. He gently moved the hand of Achille in such a way as to suggest the act of writing, and having thus succeeded in starting automatic script, he got the devil thus to answer questions quietly put while the raving was going on as usual. "I will not believe in your power," said Professor Janet to the malignant intruder, "unless you give me a proof." "What proof?" "Raise the poor man's left arm without his knowing it." This was done—to the astonishment of poor Achille—and a series of suggestions followed, all of which the demon triumphantly and unsuspectingly carried out, to show his power. Then came the suggestion to which Professor Janet had been leading up. It was like getting the djinn into the bottle. "You cannot put Achille soundly to sleep in that arm-chair!" "Yes, I can!" No sooner said than done, and no sooner done than Achille was delivered from his tormentor—from his own tormenting self.
For there in that hypnotic sleep he was gently led on to tell all his story; and such stories, when told to a skilled and kindly auditor, are apt to come to an end in the very act of being told.
Achille had been living in a day-dream; it was a day-dream which had swollen to these nightmare proportions, and had, as it were, ousted his rational being; and in the deeper self-knowledge which the somnambulic state brings with it the dream and the interpretation thereof became present to his bewildered mind.
The fact was that on that fateful journey when Achille's troubles began he had committed an act of unfaithfulness to his wife. A gloomy anxiety to conceal this action prompted him to an increasing taciturnity, and morbid fancies as to his health grew on him until at last his day-dream led him to imagine himself as actually dead. "His two days' lethargy was but an episode, a chapter in the long dream."
What then was the natural next stage of the dream's development? "He dreamt that, now that he was dead indeed, the devil rose from the abyss and came to take him. The poor man, as in his somnambulic state he retraced the series of his dreams, remembered the precise instant when this lamentable event took place. It was about 11 A.M.: a dog barked in the court at the moment, incommoded, no doubt, by the smell of brimstone; flames filled the room; numbers of little fiends scourged the unhappy man, or drove nails into his eyes, and through the wounds in his body Satan entered in to take possession of head and heart."
From this point the pseudo-possession may be said to have begun. The fixed idea developed itself into sensory and motor automatisms—visions of devils, uncontrollable utterances, automatic script—ascribed by the automatist to the possessing devil within.
And now came the moment when the veracity, the utility, of this new type of psychological analysis was to be submitted to yet another test. From the point of view of the ordinary physician Achille's condition was almost hopeless. Physical treatment had failed, and death from exhaustion and misery seemed near at hand. Nor could any appeal have been effective which did not go to the hidden root of the evil, which did not lighten the load of morbid remorse from which the whole series of troubles had developed. Fortunately for Achille, he was in the hands of an unsurpassed minister to minds thus diseased. Professor Janet adopted his usual tactics—what he terms the dissociation and the gradual substitution of ideas. The incidents of the miserable memory were modified, were explained away, were slowly dissolved from the brooding brain, and the hallucinatory image of the offended wife was presented to the sufferer at what novelists call the psychological moment, with pardon in her eyes. "Such stuff as dreams are made of!"—but even by such means was Achille restored to physical and moral health; he leads now the life of normal man; he no longer "walketh in a vain shadow, and disquieteth himself in vain."
II. C. I give here the case of Dr. Azam's often quoted patient, Félida X.[216] In this case the somnambulic life finally became the normal life; as the "second state," which appeared at first only in short, dreamlike accesses, gradually replaced the "first state," which finally recurred but for a few hours at long intervals. But the point on which I wish to dwell is this: that Félida's second state was altogether superior to the first—physically superior, since the nervous pains which had troubled her from childhood disappeared: and mentally superior, inasmuch as her morose, self-centred disposition was exchanged for a cheerful activity which enabled her to attend to her children and her shop much more effectively than when she was in the "état bête," as she called what was once the only personality that she knew. In this case, then, which at the time Dr. Azam wrote—1887—was of nearly thirty years' standing, the spontaneous readjustment of nervous activities—the second state, no memory of which remained in the first state—resulted in an improvement profounder than could have been anticipated from any moral or medical treatment that we know. The case shows us how often the word "normal" means nothing more than "what happens to exist." For Félida's normal state was in fact her morbid state: and the new condition, which seemed at first a mere hysterical abnormality, brought her at last to a life of bodily and mental sanity which made her fully the equal of average women of her class.
A very complete account of the case, reproducing in full almost the whole of Dr. Azam's report, is given in Dr. A. Binet's Altérations de la Personnalité (pp. 6-20), and I briefly summarise this here:—
Félida was born at Bordeaux, in 1843, of healthy parents. Towards the age of thirteen years she began to exhibit symptoms of hysteria. When about fourteen and a half she used suddenly to feel a pain in her forehead, and then to fall into a profound sleep for some ten minutes, after which she woke spontaneously in her secondary condition. This lasted an hour or two; then the sleep came on again, and she awoke in her normal state. The change at first occurred every five or six days. As the hysterical symptoms increased, Dr. Azam was called in to attend her in 1858.