“Why do you call me Smith?” he demanded. “That isn’t my name.”
“That’s the name you’ve gone by since you came among us six months ago.”
“Six months ago! You’re crazy, man. It isn’t half an hour since I left my wife and little ones to get a breath of fresh air before dinner.”
“Look here,” said the foreman, pressing him gently into a seat, “where do you suppose you are, anyway?”
“Why, in Philadelphia, of course.”
It was indeed the Philadelphia plumber, whose missing self had returned to him as suddenly and as mysteriously as it had vanished. A few days more and he was happily reunited with the family that had so long believed him to be among the dead.[46]
Where, it may well be asked, was this man’s original self during these two years? What had become of his normal ego, the ego of which alone he had formerly been aware? Yet at no time throughout the period when he lacked knowledge of his identity, and was without memory for his earlier life and social relationships, did he display the slightest sign of mental aberration. He was as sane and real to himself and to those with whom he came into contact, and was as able to take care of himself and earn a sufficient living, as he had ever been in the years before he experienced the remarkable psychical upheaval that had substituted an alien, a “secondary” self in the place of the self he had always been and known.
A blow, an illness, a fright, the stress of a prolonged emotion—any one of several causes may bring about this weird condition, of which I could give illustrative cases to a number that would fill many pages of this book.[47] Sometimes, though fortunately seldom, there may be—as in the case of BCA—a double or even a multiple dissociation, resulting in the development of two, three, four, or more secondary selves, which alternate with one another in a way productive of the most intense mental agony to the helpless victim.
But, after all, it is not necessary to insist on such extreme instances in order to demonstrate the essential instability and divisibility of that which we commonly have in mind when we speak of the “self.” Dissociation of personality is in evidence every day in the pathetic symptomatology of the various insanities, and in the chronic, if often masked and unrecognized, memory lapses universal among sufferers from the manifold affections of hysteria, such as we dealt with in the chapter on “Dissociation and Disease.” It is in evidence in the victims of alcoholic and drug excesses, who, in a very literal sense, may become “another person,” and say and do things quite alien from their usual self, and concerning which their usual self afterward has no knowledge.
Even normal sleep, albeit a wise provision for the rest and strengthening of the organism, involves dissociation. Still more strikingly is dissociation evident in the phenomena of the state of artificial sleep induced by hypnotism.