This grouping shows the curious gradation observed in these visions. First of all, disorderly and illogical activity as in dreams; then, more orderly activity: knowledge of forgotten facts, knowledge of past events unknown to the sensitive, knowledge of present events unknown to the sensitive, apparent prescience. I will give some examples.
A. Imagination—images are by far the most frequent. This phenomenon is analogous to ordinary visual hallucination, and seems to me to present the characteristic features of dream. This is hardly the place to discuss the state of consciousness during dream; for the form I am giving my recital would not bear any long psychological analyses. I will simply confine myself to resuming the conclusions of the detailed analysis, which I made in a work dealing with this subject.
The consciousness which works habitually in us, that which is manifested in our everyday life, is the personal consciousness. It is around this that are grouped the souvenirs accessible to our normal personality, to that part of ourselves which we call ‘I.’ This personal consciousness asserts itself in the highest acts of the psychic life, in the comparison of images one with another, in abstraction, judgment, and the voluntary selection of acts, which appear to us equally possible. This selection is the expression of our voluntary activity, personally conscious; it is determined by the comparison of acts between themselves, by the examination of their probable advantageous or disadvantageous consequences, by the appreciation of their morality or immorality, according to the social laws of the day, etc. Personal consciousness is the foundation of all our intelligent life; practically, it alone appears to exist, and its disappearance seems to us to annihilate our own personality.
In reality, such is not the case. With certain invalids, complete or partial modifications of the personal consciousness may be observed. Sometimes the notion of personality disappears. There are patients who suddenly forget everything, even to their own name. All their antecedent life is effaced, and they appear to return to the state they were in at birth. They have to learn again how to speak, to eat, and to dress themselves. Sometimes the amnesia is not so complete. I have been able to observe a patient, who had forgotten everything which had any connection whatever with his own personality. He was absolutely ignorant of all he had ever done, did not remember where he was born, who his parents were, or what his name was. He was thirty years of age.
Organic memory and memories organised apart from the personality subsisted. He could read, write, draw, and displayed a certain amount of musical talent. Amnesia, with him, was limited to all facts connected with his antecedent personality; it presented the type of systematised losses of memory. This is what is called in medical phraseology amnésie de dépersonnalisation.
In a lesser degree, amnesia only affects limited periods of life. Epileptics and hysterics often present the phenomenon of ecmnesia, a term chosen by the eminent professor of clinical medicine at the university of Bordeaux, M. Pitres, who was the first to point out this phenomenon with hysterical subjects. The patient forgets a part of his life, believes he is ten, fifteen, thirty years younger than he really is, and behaves as though he were at the age he thinks he is. The souvenirs of his ulterior life cease to be accessible to his conscious personality, which finds itself brought back exclusively to the elements which constituted it, at the time the ecmnesia carries him to. Every idea, foreign to that diminished personality, remains unintelligible to him. In order to make him understand, we must speak to him only of what he knew at the epoch to which he has been brought back.
Besides these disappearances or amoindrissements de la personnalité of the personal consciousness, which may be permanent or transitory, we also observe qualitative without quantitative alterations of the personal consciousness. These are changes or variations of personality, which have been well studied in hysterical subjects, but which also exist in other invalids, notably epileptics and victims of certain poisons.[9]
To sum up, the personal consciousness is susceptible of total or partial disappearance, or of being replaced by another consciousness which can be absolutely foreign to the normal personal consciousness, or preserve more or less close relationship with it, e.g. the patient who undergoes a change of personality may retain all the souvenirs of the normal personality A and those of the new personality B. But in an almost absolute manner the normal personality A is ignorant of all which concerns B. This is the type of periodical amnesia.
The clinical study of diseases of personality permits observation of the above facts. I ought to say that, in practice, they do not present the simplicity of the schéma which I have just given. Curious problems arise from the nature itself of amnesia, its degree, its mechanism, problems impossible to treat here.