[281]. As illustrated by her responsive behaviour at the theatre (p. 558), as I have witnessed it there and socially.
[282]. “Hysteria from the Point of View of Dissociated Personality.” Journal Abnormal Psychology, 1906.
[283]. It is interesting to note the apparent paradox of an increasing physically neurasthenic phase coincident with an increasing physically healthy phase. With the subsidence of the latter the neurasthenic state became obvious.
LECTURE XIX
(THE SAME CONTINUED)—THE B PERSONALITY
PERIOD III
Let us now return to C’s account of the shock which occurred at this time, while the B complex was periodically dominant. It was the cause of the final complete dissociation of personality and the eruption of the secondary personality B.
The shock I received was of an intensely emotional nature. It brought to me, suddenly, the realization that my position in life was entirely changed, that I was quite alone, and with this there came a feeling of helplessness and desolation beyond my powers of description. I felt, too, angry, frightened, insulted. For a few minutes these ideas flashed through my mind and then—all was changed. All the distressing ideas of the preceding moments left me, and I no longer resented what, a moment before, had caused me so much distress. I became the personality which we have since called “B.” I do not feel now that the episode was of a character that would have affected a person of a different nature, or even myself had I been in good health. Psychologically speaking, I suppose I was already in a somewhat disintegrated condition and therefore more susceptible. At any rate it did affect me. From the moment of that shock I was, literally, a different person. Even the episode itself now became of little or no importance to me; indeed I looked upon it rather as a lark and really enjoyed it, as I did, in this character, succeeding events. With the change to “B” there was no loss of memory as sometimes occurs under such conditions. It seems very curious to me that the effect of this shock was to change me not to the despondent, despairing mood of “A” which came later, but to the happy mood of “B.”
In describing the two personalities I shall sometimes have to refer to them by the letters A and B to avoid the constant repetition of “myself as A—myself as B.”
As B, I was, apparently, a perfectly normal person, as will be seen from the description which follows, except that I was ruled by the fixed idea that upon me, and me alone, depended the salvation, moral and physical, of a person who was almost a perfect stranger to me and who was the subject of a drug habit. I had known this person but a few weeks. This idea became an obsession; all else sank into insignificance beside it; nothing else was of any consequence; I went to all lengths to help this person, doing things which, though quite right and proper, indeed imperative from my point of view as B, were unwise and unnecessary. I believed that I was the only one in the world who would stand by him; that every one else had given him up as hopeless and that his one chance lay in his belief in me.
The writer neglects here to say that it was not only as B that she had undertaken the “salvation” of the drug addict. As C she also shared in this solicitude and had begun the reformation. B only continued it but from different motives as later stated by C herself. B does not refer to it in her story apparently not taking it very seriously. Of course in my numerous interviews I heard an exhaustive account of the whole affair.