Janet himself, experimenting with Madame B., the peasant wife of a charcoal-burner, had been astonished to find that when hypnotized she developed a personality markedly different from that of her normal waking life. The waking Madame B. was a timid, dull, ignorant woman; the hypnotized Madame B. (who called herself Léontine) was bright, vivacious, even inclined to be mischievous. Between the two personalities, again, there was an absolute cleavage of memory; each knew nothing of the other’s thoughts and actions. And after a time, to Janet’s profound astonishment, the Léontine personality began to manifest spontaneously. In an article contributed to the Revue Philosophique, for March, 1888, he records (translation by Frederic Myers):
She had left Havre more than two months when I received from her a very curious letter. She was unwell, she said, worse on some days than on others, and she signed her true name, Madame B. But over the page began another letter in a very different style, and which I may quote as a curiosity, “My dear good sir, I must tell you that B. really, really makes me suffer very much; she cannot sleep, she spits blood, she hurts me; I am going to demolish her, she bores me, I am ill also, this is from your devoted Léontine.” When Madame B. returned to Havre I naturally questioned her about this singular missive. She remembered the first letter very distinctly ... but had not the slightest recollection of the second.... I at first thought that there must have been an attack of spontaneous somnambulism between the moment when she finished the first letter and the moment when she closed the envelope.... But afterward these unconscious, spontaneous letters became common, and I was better able to study their mode of production. I was fortunately able to watch Madame B. on one occasion while she went through this curious performance. She was seated at a table, and held in her left hand the piece of knitting at which she had been working. Her face was calm, her eyes looked into space with a certain fixity, but she was not cataleptic, for she was humming a rustic air; her right hand wrote quickly, and, as it were, surreptitiously. I removed the paper without her noticing me, and then spoke to her; she turned round, wide awake, but surprised to see me, for in her state of abstraction she had not noticed my approach. Of the letter which she was writing she knew nothing whatever.
To Janet this strange occurrence, when viewed in conjunction with phenomena manifested by two or three other of his “subjects,” was chiefly significant as hinting at the possibility that the same mechanism which produced the various phenomena of the hypnotic state—from hallucinations, loss of memory, and automatic execution of “suggestions” given during hypnosis, to the production of blisters, paralyses, and other physical effects of hypnotic suggestion—might be operant in, and responsible for, the protean manifestations of that baffling disease hysteria, with which Madame B. and the other subjects were known to be afflicted. On this theory, hysteria—which until then had been generally assumed to have a physical basis—would be essentially a mental malady; and its fundamental characteristic would be some degree of dissociation of personality.
Already, as Janet was aware, Charcot had demonstrated the inadequacy and downright error of the prevalent medical notions concerning hysteria, and had also rendered a splendid service to humanity by compelling recognition of the fact that sufferers from hysteria often develop symptoms—paralyses, growths, etc.—all too easily mistaken for the symptoms of some really organic disease perhaps incurable, or curable only by the aid of the surgeon’s knife. But while he had thus revealed the wholly functional character of hysteria, and had saved countless sufferers from useless and unnecessary operations, Charcot had thrown little or no light on its causation and mechanism, and this was the problem which Janet now undertook to solve, removing from Havre to Paris, and associating himself with Charcot in the latter’s clinic at the Salpétrière Hospital.
Observing, experimenting, recording—with a truly catholic mind profiting from the observations and experiments of other workers, including his fellow-members in the Society for Psychical Research—he gradually achieved his epoch-marking demonstration of the rôle played by “dissociated memories” in the causation, not alone of hysteria, but of all functional nervous and mental troubles. He showed that severe emotional shocks—frights, griefs, worries—might be, and frequently were, completely effaced from conscious recollection, while continuing to be vividly remembered in the depths of the subconscious; he showed that thence they might, and frequently did, exercise a baneful effect on the whole organism giving rise to disease-symptoms, the particular types of which were determined by the victim’s “self-suggestions” (just as Mr. Dickinson’s “medium” suggested to herself the Blanche Poynings impersonation); and he showed how important it was, as a preliminary to effecting a permanent cure, to get at these dissociated memories and drag them back to the full light of conscious recollection.
To get at them he made use, as medical psychologists all over the civilized world are today making use, of hypnotism, of automatic writing, even of the “mystical” crystal-gazing, the use of which for medical purposes was directly suggested to him by the experiments of Miss Goodrich-Freer. Janet himself, it should perhaps be added, would be the last to disavow the assistance he received in one way or another from the “psychical researchers” of England; indeed, he has not forgotten that everything he has accomplished is the outgrowth of his early studies in the “occult” phenomena of hypnotism. It is to be regretted that many of his present-day fellow-workers in the domain of scientific psychotherapy are not equally appreciative of the fact that every “cure” they put to their credit—every hysteric, neurasthenic, or psychasthenic patient whom they send on his or her way rejoicing in a restoration to health—is a living witness to the beneficial results that have flowed from the patient labors of the courageous pioneers, who, at the risk of their scientific reputations, so boldly adventured into the psychical thirty years ago.
We shall have more to say in a later article on what society owes to psychical research.