Adventurings in the Psychical

by H. Addington Bruce

And, in a day or so, she had an even stranger story to relate.

“Yesterday afternoon,” she said, “I went for a walk, not because I wanted to, but because you had told me that I ought to take some exercise. I returned home about four o’clock, and went straight to my room. I remember nothing of what then happened until, in the evening, I suddenly became aware that I was at a gay dinner party, drinking wine—which is contrary to my principles—and, what was far worse, smoking a cigarette. Never in my life had I done such a thing, and my humiliation at the discovery was deep and keen.

“I assure you, on my honor, that I have not the least recollection of accepting an invitation to dine out, of dressing for dinner, or of leaving the house to attend the party. Everything is a blank to me from the moment I went to my room, in the afternoon, until I came to my senses, several hours afterward, to find a lively group about me, a wineglass at my plate, and a half-smoked cigarette in my fingers. Tell me, Doctor Prince, am I going insane?”

The physician hastened to reassure her, but nevertheless he felt seriously alarmed. It was evident that she was in a thoroughly dissociated condition, and that she had become, so to speak, a battleground on which was to be fought out the weirdest and most uncanny of conflicts—a duel between two separate selves for absolute supremacy in the use of the organs of her body.

Further, it soon developed that the advantage would lie with the secondary self—which Doctor Prince called her B self—because, although her ordinary, or A self, suffered from amnesia, or loss of memory, regarding her actions when in the B state, the B self had a memory extending over both states. The mental agony growing out of this recurring forgetfulness on A’s part may readily be imagined. As the patient herself has since expressed it, in an autobiographical account written at Doctor Prince’s request:[44]

“The amnesia made life very difficult; indeed, except for the help you gave me, I think it would have been impossible, and that I should have gone truly mad. How can I describe or give any clear idea of what it is to wake suddenly, as it were, and not to know the day of the week, the time of the day, or why one is in a given position? I would come to myself as A, perhaps on the street, with no idea of where I had been, or where I was going; fortunate if I found myself alone, for if I was carrying on a conversation I knew nothing of what it had been; fortunate, indeed, in that case, if I did not contradict something I had said, for, as B, my attitude toward all things was quite the opposite of that taken by A.”

Picture to yourself, my reader, how you would feel if, for a few hours almost every day, and sometimes for whole days at a stretch, you became virtually nonexistent, yet were made to realize, from what your friends told you, that a something or a somebody had taken possession of your organism, and was veritably acting in your place, and in a way utterly unlike your natural self. This was the state of affairs with Doctor Prince’s luckless patient. In moods, tastes, points of view, habits of thought, and controlling ideas, her secondary personality was the very reverse of that which had been dominant when she first sought medical advice.

There even were pronounced physical differences. Whenever she was in the A state, she was extremely neurasthenic, being afflicted now by one, now by another, of the multifarious functional disturbances that accompany neurasthenia, and being exhausted by the slightest effort. A walk of a few hundred yards would be almost enough to prostrate her.

In the B state, on the contrary, she did not know the meaning of the word “pain,” and was seemingly incapable of feeling fatigue. She would walk for miles without experiencing the slightest distress, was constantly on the go, and appeared to be in every way an exceptionally robust, healthy woman. Thus, physically, she was—as B—a decided improvement over herself as A. But with respect to psychical differences it was altogether another matter.

In the A state, she was kind, considerate of others, self-sacrificing, animated by a keen sense of, and devotion to, duty; profoundly stirred by any tale of sorrow or suffering, and most conscientious—if anything, overconscientious, being tortured at times in an extraordinary degree by moral doubts. In the B state, she was selfish, thoughtless, and cold; one might almost say devoid of human feeling. Here is the way she herself has put it: