There were certain other youthful traits and tastes in B which are worth mentioning. This personality was extravagant in money matters. “She,” the personality A wrote, “spends money as I used to, and will not acknowledge the necessity of economizing.” That is to say, the regulation of the household and personal expenses, according to the requirements of business sense, and proper appreciation of the financial management was scarcely recognized by B who desired to spend money as B. C. A. had done as a girl, before being initiated into the responsibilities of domestic management. Like such a girl, to the discomforture of the other personality, she spent money as if all were pin money, without appreciation of making ends meet in the management of the household.
Another and what will seem a strange peculiarity of B was the feeling that she was not the mother of her child. “I am not his mother,” she would say. “He is not my son”—“I never was married.” “I know all her experiences,” she wrote me in a letter, “but they are her experiences not mine. Why! I was never married, Dr. Prince, and I am not Willie’s mother. All those experiences belong to A. I know she had them, but then, so do you. The only difference is that I know exactly what she thought about them.” Indeed she carried this so far as to entirely neglect the responsibility of looking after his life. This was true also of the time when B. C. A. was ruled by the B complex before the change to the B personality. On one such occasion for example, she allowed this young boy to take a long journey of many hundred miles through the west, roughing it in the woods and canoes, without a care or anxious thought on her part during the whole time he was gone. All the arrangements were made by others while she herself did not even go to the station to see him off. Previously she had always felt the greatest motherly solicitude for the boy, even foolishly devoted to him, and could not bear to be parted from him even to accompany her husband on a journey.
This peculiar trait is easily understood on the theory that rebellious B was largely a systematized resurrection of pre-marital complexes but with a dissociation of the tender emotion (parental instinct). I have already pointed out that B regarded the “rebellious” complexes as herself, but not the other ideas of B. C. A. In referring to the former, as I have said, she used the word I, saying, I thought so and so, but she did not use such expressions regarding the other systems of B. C. A.’s thought after the genesis of these rebellious complexes. Likewise she regarded as her own the earlier youthful experiences before dissociation occurred. In the constellation of her complexes none of the experiences of maternity (which occurred after the development of the rebellious complex) were synthesized, any more than the sentiments and other conflicting thoughts of the A phase. Even in the embryonic contrary impulses of the B complex, it will be remembered, there were dislikes to “fuss” over the baby conflicting with the maternal instinct. She never, therefore, felt that motherhood was a part of her own experience. And so her conception of self in its content differed materially from that of C and A, in that it contained references to entirely different experiences, and, therefore, included entirely different images and feelings. And it was organized with a self-regarding sentiment in which the instinct of self-assertion predominated instead of that of self-abasement.
I said that the parental instinct with the emotion of tender feeling was dissociated. This absence of tender emotion (affection) was also manifested in her attitude towards the different members of her family and her friends. As a girl she was markedly affectionate just as A and later C was, but as B she had lost this trait. She neglected her family most shockingly, in a way that showed complete absence of the impulses that come from tender feeling, and without the slightest compunction or recognition of the fact that she was wanting in affection. I might give numerous specific instances of this but refrain from doing so for obvious reasons.[[289]] B liked people but for other reasons than those which depend on personal affection. This absence, then, of the tender emotion with its impulses was the second factor in determining the feeling that B had of not being the mother of her child. It also, of course, prevented the building up a new sentiment of maternal affection through experience. All this is in conformity with our interpretation.
The way other instincts and innate dispositions were affected will be better described in connection with the A personality for contrast.
Another peculiarity of B was the change in literary taste. The lighter reading in which B found pleasure contrasted strongly with the literature dealing with the deeper problems of life that appealed to A. This difference has been touched upon by C in her account. It would take us too far afield to enter into the psychological reasons for it.
It remains to point out that the reactions of the personality in accordance with the new synthesis were intensified and became the sole reactions by the fact of the dissociation of those systems of ideas which represented the wider world view and which were organized with instincts and innate dispositions now inhibited. Those systems were the outcome of the cares, anxieties, responsibilities, and sorrows of later life. All these, which were acquired and had their origin at a comparatively late period, had subsided into the unconscious and ceased to influence the conscious life and give rise to their corresponding reactions. The emotions and sentiments of anxiety, remorse, self-reproach and despair, so conspicuous in the A phase, were completely dissociated from the B phase and formed no part of it. Though there was no amnesia for them as past experiences they were dissociated in the sense that they did not take part as psycho-physiological dispositions in the personality. They could be voluntarily recalled in an intellectual way as memories, but like many memories they had lost their emotional tones and were not awakened by any contemplated or actual line of conduct. Not entering the new B synthesis there was no clash by which the reactions might be modified. The sole reactions were, therefore, those of the B synthesis and were mostly those of pleasure and joy. You must not overlook the fact, however, that the dissociated elements of personality were still conserved and, as we shall see, capable of being resurrected and thereby taking part in the reproduction of the original personality, or of forming by themselves another dissociated one.
The temperament of the B personality is in accord with the conception of a modified reversion to the conserved unconscious personality of early life. B. C. A. “was naturally very light-hearted, happy, buoyant.” Later when going through the stress and strain of her husband’s illness, and later still after becoming neurasthenic, she became apprehensive and given to self-reproaches, worry, and depression. She was racked by emotions of an anxious depressing kind. All this was enormously accentuated in the secondary personality A, (to be presently described) whom in banter I used to call “Mrs. Gummidge.” Now B reverted in temperament to the earlier period; she was free from depression; “had more courage, was light-hearted, merry; conditions did not seem so dreadful as they did to A,” and she “took things as they were”; “this was the way she used to be.”
If I may anticipate a little the development of the A personality, a passage or two from letters will show this difference in temperament as manifested by the emotions. B wrote, “A is nearly crazy about those papers. She simply ‘tears her hair’ and groans, and then, presto! change! and I am here.” Again in a note to her other self (A) she writes: “I suppose you have a ‘deep-horror-then-my-vitals-froze’ expression on your face now. Really, you suffer more to the square inch than any one I ever knew.” Although it is hardly fair to ascribe these emotional traits of A—a disintegrated personality—to the normal C, still they were and are at times noticeable in C as moods, or when under stress and strain. (C of course has pleasant affects and joyous moods as well.) B on the other hand was a perfect stranger to such feelings; she did not know the meaning of them; they were completely dissociated from her ideas. B’s sole emotions were those of pleasure and exaltation; C’s emotions included unpleasant and depressing ones as well, while A’s stock was made up almost entirely of the latter. This dissociation of unpleasant and depressing emotions from B is well manifested by her memories. When C (or A) recalled (and it is still true) an unpleasant experience the memory was accompanied by the original emotion in its full intensity. She lived over again the original experience and manifested all the feeling in the expression of her face and in gesture. But when B recalled this same experience of C (or A) she simple remembered it intellectually as a fact, without the feeling tone. In fact she would recite a painful fact of C’s experience with a gaiety of tone that betokened enjoyment at the other self’s expense. The same phenomenon was still more striking in B as a co-conscious personality.[[290]] As a co-consciousness she always insisted that while she knew C’s (and A’s) thoughts she did not feel her emotions. “You see I know all that A thinks but I do not feel her emotions; she is all emotion,” she wrote. This she insisted upon again and again. She only knew what the other personalities felt by the way they acted. Similarly the affect which was the cause of the “rebellion” was dissociated from B. This same phenomenon was observed in the case of Miss Beauchamp. Sally as a co-consciousness knew the thoughts of the personal consciousness (B I or B IV) but she was not aware of the feelings that accompanied the thoughts; the feelings she could only guess from the actions of the principal personality, and as an alternating personality Sally likewise was entirely devoid of certain emotions which were strongly accentuated in the other personalities.[[291]] This dissociation of affects from B helps us to understand the difference in the reactions of B, C, and A to the same stimuli.