Too much weight should not be laid upon memories of this kind after such long intervals of time, and I would not be understood as doing so; but that the memories of this secondary personality may be given their just value it should be explained that, like some other secondary personalities, B’s memory embraces not only the mental states (thoughts, perceptions, feelings, etc.,) of the principal personality which were within the focus of attention, but those which were in the fringe or margin of awareness and those which were entirely outside, i.e., fully subconscious. This has proved to be the case by numerous test observations and experiments. B might, therefore, remember split off (co-conscious) rebellious states if they existed. One reason for this enlargement of the field of memory of this phase of personality is that besides being an alternating personality[[280]] she is a co-conscious personality. But this is another story which we shall have to postpone for the present.
In the third place, the constant invasion of the field of the personal consciousness by the contrary impulses, which I have already spoken of, suggest, if they do not establish, a certain degree of automatic activity arising from the unconscious and dissociated from the rest of the conscious field. In the light of what has already been told and of later developments, to be described in the next lecture, the inference assumes a high degree of probability that these impulses were manifestations of ideas and feeling tones belonging to an earlier period of life—childhood or girlhood—which had been conserved in the unconscious and which now erupted into the field of the personal co-consciousness.
I do not want to make too much of these early tendencies to dissociation nor is the matter important. For historical comprehension, however, it is desirable that the facts should be mentioned for, if our interpretation be correct, they were evidently steps in the evolution of the final disintegration.
Thus matters went on during this first period, covering a span of 14 years; sometimes the rebellious complex, enlarged and constellated with conflicting thoughts, desires and impulses, recurred with frequency, and sometimes they remained dormant for considerable intervals, the state of general health apparently often being the conditioning factor.
III
The Evolution of the B Complex
PERIOD II
At the end of the 14-year span—when the second period begins—the subject “received a great shock in the sudden illness of her husband. This illness was of such a nature that she knew no complete recovery was possible and that death might result at any time.” This second shock aroused once more the emotion of fright, and the old rebellion and a certain apprehensiveness, a trait which is inherent to a marked degree in her character. During the following four years which covered the illness of her husband she was almost literally torn to pieces mentally by this apprehensiveness—always anticipating the inevitable hanging over her.
After the first two weeks, when her husband’s temporary recovery took place, the same old rebellious complex returned with intensified force as the condition that gave rise to it returned. But she repressed all expression of it, resolved that no one should guess her secret because she did not wish to give pain to another. So she kept her secret to herself, and what she kept to herself became the beginnings of a new personality. “Then came the nervous strain of sorrow, anxiety, and care, and the inability to reconcile herself to the inevitable. This nervous strain continued for four years. C’s life during this time was given up entirely to the care of her husband; she tried to live up to her ideal—which was a high one—of duty and responsibility, and always having the sense of failure, discouragement and apprehension.” Necessarily she was cut off from the social world of gaiety by the care that devolved upon her or, considering her temperament, thought she was. A person of less intense feeling and governed by pure intellect quite likely might have reasonably arranged her life so that she could have both given all the care she wished to the invalid, on the one hand, and participated in the pleasures of social life, on the other. But, like many anxious wives and mothers whom all physicians see, her anxiety and feelings were too intense for such cool reasoning, her mind became single tracked and she shut herself off from the world she loved. Consequently, during this period of stress and strain the old rebellious complex not only became intensified and more persistent, but also became enlarged and systematized with a still larger cluster of rebellious thoughts. To the old rebellion there was now added a rebellion against the hardness of fate which was about to cheat her out of the happiness which belonged to her, and still more against the new conditions of life as she found them. This is what the incurable illness of her husband meant to her.
She rebelled bitterly [B writes in a letter;] she could not have it so and it was so. No one knew what his illness was and she bent every energy to conceal his true condition. She blamed herself for his illness [in her ignorance of the pathology of disease], and after a time she began to have that sense of being double. More than anything else she wanted to be happy; she saw all happiness going and she could not let it go—it must not—she would be happy, and she couldn’t. It was a fight with herself all the time. We were A and B then just as much as we are now. The part that afterwards became A doing all that a devoted conscientious wife could do, determined that her husband should never miss anything of love and care; and the part that afterwards became B rebelling against it all, not willing to give up her youth, longing for pleasure, and above all for happiness. To be happy, that was always the cry, and it was not possible.
It was a longing for conditions which in her mind seemed essential, and she could not accept the conditions as they were. “It was a rebellion, a longing for happiness, a disinclination to give up the pleasures of life which the conditions required; and there was a certain determination to have these pleasures in spite of everything, and this resulted in a constant struggle between C and this complex.” It was that inability, which is so common and causes so much mental disturbance and unhappiness in so many people, to reconcile and adjust oneself to the actual situation of one’s life and accept it. And here, in the case of B. C. A., we recognize in the center of the rebellion of this second period of stress and strain, the same thoughts which had cropped up evanescently during the first period but now become more intense and persistent, more disturbing and the fundamental, cause of the inability to adjust herself to the situation.