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:—