Popular Science Monthly/Volume 50/November 1896/Double Personality

DOUBLE PERSONALITY.

By Prof. WILLIAM ROMAINE NEWBOLD.

BEFORE discussing the conception of double personality, it may be as well briefly to review the conceptions of which I have so far made use. I have held that the human mind must be conceived as a complex system of elements which is capable of greater or less degrees of disruption or disordination without the total destruction of its component elements. Disordination often takes place normally while falling asleep; it can be artificially produced by the use of certain drugs, and, in some persons, by concentration of attention; it is also found in some diseases, notably epilepsy and hysteria. In disordination the dissociated elements which remain work out their normal results with more fatal precision than usual; from this fact spring the phenomena of suggestibility, trance, and ecstasy, and some forms of hallucination and automatism. Frequently the dissociated elements recombine in new forms, some of the constituents of the former consciousness being omitted and new ones appearing; this gives rise to secondary states of all kinds, such as somnambulisms and successive modifications of the self.

The very conception of disordination involves the notion that mind may exist in forms very different from those with which we are familiar. For the present I shall limit the word "consciousness" to such an orderly system as yours or mine. The disordinated condition I would describe as "amorphous mind"—what I mean by that I will try to show a little further on.

In my last paper I discussed three typical cases in which the elements of personality seemed to have recombined in new forms, but throughout that discussion I tacitly assumed that the elements which were peculiar to one system became extinct upon the formation of another. From our present point of view this is the most natural assumption, and there was, in those cases, no evidence to the contrary. But that assumption is not essential to the theory, and often seems inconsistent with the facts.

Apparent evidence for the existence of mind in connection with a body of which the consciousness belonging to that body has no knowledge is not unusual, and I have given some illustrations of it in my recent papers. But the interpretation of such phenomena is not easy.

Since our first-hand knowledge of mind is nearly always in the form of a personal consciousness or self, one is at first inclined to ascribe such manifestations to a self. But since they are denied by the normal self, it would then be necessary to assume the existence of a second self in order to account for them, and this second self is conceived by some as existing beneath the level of the normal self and as having its own memories, interests, hopes, and fears, as acquainted with the existence of the upper self, and as bearing to it a relation sometimes hostile, sometimes benignant.

Of this theory and its congeners I shall have more to say at another time; for the present I must confine myself to that which I am developing. According to it the evidence which is sufficient to establish the existence of a mental event may be and usually is wholly insufficient to establish that of a personality or self. When an automatic hand writes a message of which the upper consciousness knows nothing a point, by the way, very hard to prove—we have evidence for the existence of a mental event; but if we ascribe it to a person of any sort, we are practically adding to it, without evidence, a multitude of mental events combined in definite ways.

Yet if a personality is no more than a system of mental states organized in a certain way, why should not the elements dissociated from the upper consciousness recombine and form a secondary self which may exist simultaneously with the upper self, and in a way beneath it as above described?

There is good reason for thinking that they do, to some extent to what extent is a question more easily asked than answered. In the first place, if the two groups are to be entirely distinct, there scarcely seems to be enough mental material to go around. The primary system would be so maimed and the secondary so incomplete that one could scarcely regard either as a full-fledged personality. If certain elements are to be simultaneously held in common by both groups the case would be different, but, so far as I know, there is no good evidence for this. In the second place, the will, or sense of effort, which I believe to be the essence of the self, raises a serious difficulty. We practically know nothing of its nature. The rival theories may be regarded as falling under two heads—those that make will but a name for the control exerted by the more complex ideas over the more simple, and those that make it something absolutely unique in mental life, and in no respect analogous to the control exerted by ideas, whether complex or simple. If we adopt the first, it is hard to believe that the secondary system could attain the degree of complexity necessary to the manifestation of will without destroying the complexity of the primary; if we adopt the second, it is as hard to believe that two of these unique phenomena should appear in one body. If the secondary system manifested a will of its own, we should expect to find that the primary had lost it, and then we would not have two simultaneous selves, but merely successive modifications of the original self, as in the cases discussed in my last paper.

Turning now from the abstract to the concrete, I shall give some of the facts upon which these conceptions are based. First I shall take up the case of Prof. Pierre Janet's famous patient Lucie, and show how he tried to prove in her the existence of subconscious states, and how he apparently succeeded in organizing them into a sort of dream self which existed only in his presence, faded away when he departed, and finally vanished when Lucie recovered her health. Then I shall try to throw a little light upon the actual character of this "amorphous mind" and the relations which may exist between secondary states and the primary system.

When Lucie fell into Prof. Janet's hands,[1] she was about nineteen years of age. She was intelligent, quick-witted, hot-tempered, and had a strong will of her own. She had wholly lost her sensations of touch, pain and temperature and all those sensations from the muscles and joints which make one aware of the position of one's limbs, so that, as she herself said, she "lost her legs in bed." Her other sensations were normal. She was subject to frightful hystero-epileptic convulsions which came on every day and lasted about five hours. During them she seemed delirious and talked constantly about men hidden behind curtains, but could not make intelligible what it was that troubled her. Her memory was good on the whole, but she never recalled anything that happened during these attacks, nor could she remember ever having had the sensations which she had lost.

When hypnotized, she was extremely suggestible, performed posthypnotic suggestions with fatal precision, but never seemed conscious of what she was doing. For example, she would carry her hands above her head in obedience to such a suggestion and yet stoutly maintain that they were in her lap. The same results could be got without hypnotizing her by simply distracting her attention. Some one would engage her in lively conversation while Prof. Janet whispered a command in her ear; the command would be obeyed, but Lucie would profess ignorance both of the command and of its execution. After a while the mere tone of command produced the same effect. Lucie would hear all that Prof. Janet said to her before and after the command, but the command itself was unheard by her, although invariably obeyed.

The significant feature of these experiments is that commands not heard by Lucie were obeyed by her body. In like manner, suggestions given through the sense of touch, which Lucie had wholly lost, were obeyed. If Prof. Janet clinched her fist, it would strike out and her face would assume an angry expression; if he carried her fingers to her lips, the lips smiled and the fingers threw kisses. Signals of the most complex kind were obeyed in the same way. She was told to perform a posthypnotic suggestion when Prof. Janet had clapped his hands twelve times. He then clapped his hands five times gently and at a distance from her while she was talking with some one else; he asked her what he had been doing and she could not tell him. He clapped his hands again and asked what that was. A handclap, she said. After waiting until her attention was again distracted he clapped them six times more, and the suggestion was obeyed. Lucie could remember having heard only one of the claps, but all twelve were in some way counted. He varied this experiment in many ways, but always with the same result.

Believing, then, that mental states really existed in Lucie's head, so to speak, of which she knew nothing, Prof. Janet next endeavored to get them more fully expressed than was possible in gestures and obedience. Since all talking was done by Lucie, he tried writing, and found, to his delight, that when her anæsthetic hand was hidden from her sight by a screen he could get answers to his questions in writing without Lucie's knowing that it was writing at all, much less what it said. At first it showed little or no spontaneity, and unless the content of the writing was determined by his suggestions it was limited to "Yes," "No," and "I don't know." He asked for a letter, and it wrote an apologetic refusal of an invitation; he asked it to solve little arithmetical problems, and if they were not very difficult it did so correctly while Lucie was talking or reading aloud or otherwise occupied. But there was never a sign of a self-conscious personality in the narrower sense of the word. The writer did not claim to be anybody in particular, and volunteered no information about herself.

One day Prof. Janet undertook to inquire into this point, as follows: "Do you hear me?" "No." "But you must, to answer." "Of course." "Then how do you do it?" "I do not know." "There must be some one who hears me?" "Yes." "Who, then?" "Some other person than Lucie." "Ah, some one else. Shall we name her Blanche?" "Yes, Blanche." But Lucie abhorred the name Blanche, and when the writing was shown to her she flew into a rage and tried to tear it up. So the name was changed. "What will you have?" asked Prof. Janet. "No name." "But it will be more convenient." "Very well, Adrienne." "Well, Adrienne, do you hear me?" "Yes."

It seems probable that the notion of being a person was first suggested by Prof. Janet. However that may be, thenceforward all these automatic phenomena seemed to become crystallized about the name Adrienne and the voice and touch of Prof. Janet, and were readily evoked by him but by no one else.

Having thus got access to the secondary system, the next point was to determine what it comprised. In brief, it was found that all Lucie had lost, whether spontaneously or by suggestion, Adrienne had, and, vice versa, whatever Adrienne got, whether spontaneously or by suggestion, Lucie lost.

Lucie had lost her sense of touch, but Adrienne's was perfect. Suggestions given through the sense of touch were executed, but made no impression upon Lucie's consciousness; Adrienne claimed to experience the corresponding mental states. Prof. Janet clinched the left fist, and it struck out; he then asked the right hand, "What are you doing?" "I am furious." "With whom?" "With F——." "Why?" "I do not know, but I am angry." Then he unclasped the fist and put the fingers to the lips—the lips smile and the fingers throw kisses. "Adrienne, are you still angry?" "No, it is gone." "And now?" "I am in a good humor." "And Lucie?" "She knows nothing—she is asleep."

Lucie remembered nothing of her hypnotic states and the suggestions given in them, but Adrienne could tell all about both. Lucie knew nothing about her convulsive attacks. When Adrienne was questioned during a convulsion she could only write, "I am afraid, I am afraid," but afterward she gave an account of them which was intelligible enough, although a little incoherent. "I see a curtain first, and then hidden men, who frighten me. In the country once, at grandmother's house during the holidays, two men came; then in the garden a big curtain, which they put on the trees and went behind it, which frightened us, and since then I have always been afraid." Lucie knew she had had a fright when about seven years old, but never could tell what it was. Prof. Janet does not say whether he verified this story or not, but seems to regard it as true.

So of states artificially dissociated from Lucie by suggestion. Bits of paper were put in Lucie's lap, some of which were marked, and she was told that she could not see those that were marked. If Adrienne were asked what was in Lucie's lap, she would describe those only which Lucie could not see. In this way Adrienne was proved capable of distinguishing odd numbers from even and of performing other simple judgments. Whenever a suggestion was given to Adrienne, it and all that it involved were withdrawn from Lucie. While Adrienne was writing the numbers Lucie could not count, and while Adrienne was writing the alphabet Lucie "had forgotten it." In such cases as these the fact might easily escape notice, but when the elements thus subtracted from Lucie's consciousness were such as she would be likely to miss, she supplied their place by a sort of dream of her own. Thus, when Adrienne was told to put her arms above her head, Lucie lost all consciousness of their true position and said they were in her lap. When Prof. Janet established this fact, it supplied the explanation of an occurrence which had puzzled him not a little at the time it happened. Adrienne was told to come to Dr. Povilevitch's house at a certain time, and Lucie's body came. But Lucie believed herself still to be at home, and mistook the furniture for her own, while Adrienne knew perfectly where she was.

Prof. Janet desired to reverse the relative positions of the two systems so as to make Adrienne speak and Lucie write, and, finding that his suggestions to this end were unavailing, he put Lucie into a deep sleep to make her more suggestible. After sleeping a half hour she awoke, and to his surprise he found that he had neither Lucie nor Adrienne, but a new personality derived from the coalescence of both. This personality called herself Adrienne, but had all Lucie's memories and sensations in addition to those of Adrienne. She was more vivacious and intelligent than Lucie, could not be distracted, and only laughed at Prof. Janet's attempts to give her suggestions. This new synthesis lasted only about twenty minutes; it was followed by a deep sleep of about fifteen minutes, and then Lucie awoke in her former condition.

At first, as I have said, Adrienne showed little spontaneity, but as time went on she acquired memories and developed more character. Once she got angry with Prof. Janet, and for some time all the tokens that showed her presence—automatic writing, catalepsy, and suggestibility—disappeared. When she was reconciled they came back again.

Adrienne existed after her first creation about six weeks. Then Prof. Janet undertook to cure Lucie by suggesting against her hysterical symptoms; little by little they disappeared, and with them Adrienne faded out of existence. "At last," says Prof. Janet, "one day I called upon Adrienne—it was Lucie that replied, laughing a good deal and asking whom I called Adrienne. A few days later the hypnotic sleep, which had ceased to be interesting, entirely disappeared, and it was found impossible to get Lucie asleep by any means."

For eight months Lucie was quite well. Then she had a relapse and Adrienne reappeared. For five days she remained evocable and then disappeared for the last time.

Since that time Prof. Janet has verified with many other patients the conclusions which he reached in the case of Lucie, and most of them have been confirmed in greater or less degree by other investigators in France, Austria, England, and America. But Lucie remains the best illustration of apparently simultaneous "double personality" that has yet been described.

We can not be too cautious in trying to picture to ourselves what the condition of this secondary system which called itself Adrienne really was, just as we can not be too cautious in trying to picture to ourselves the minds of the lower animals. It is much easier to say what Adrienne was not than what she was.

She was not a continuously existing, self-conscious being. She did not exist, in all probability, before Prof. Janet questioned the hand about the writer's name. She did not exist after Prof. Janet had left Lucie. No one but he could evoke Adrienne. Whenever he came into Lucie's presence a marked change came over her—she lost her vivacity, appeared subdued, almost timid, and then Adrienne could be elicited. It would seem that Prof. Janet was like a great magnet about which these dissociated subconscious elements gathered in a sort of dream self, but in his absence they again relapsed into their former incoherent condition.

What were they, then? Can we form any conception of what this "amorphous mind" is like?

I think we can to some degree and in some cases. In our own familiar dream life we have precisely those conditions realized which we suppose obtain in the subconscious realm of a hysteric. Nearly all sensations and most memories and ideas are withdrawn and the fragments remaining work out their own bizarre results free from the control of the organized system. We shall not be far wrong, I think, if we conceive of these subconscious states as a mere aggregation of very incoherent dreams. They are probably very much more incoherent than most of the dreams which we remember, although not more so than those that we forget. Under the guidance of a hypnotic suggestion, and under some other circumstances into which I can not now enter, they may become coherent to almost any degree.

There is a good deal of direct evidence for this. Prof. Janet found that he could sometimes, by awaking Lucie in the midst of a hallucination which he had suggested to her, get her to recall it, and she always spoke of it as a dream. Prof. Janet once tried[2] some experiments upon a patient whom he had not seen for some months. To his surprise she did not seem to understand him. When he asked why, she told him that she was too far away to understand; that M. X—— had sent her a month ago to Algiers, and he must bring her back before she could understand. This was found to be true: M. X—— had told her she was in Algiers, and had forgotten to remove the suggestion.

Another case will serve both to illustrate this point and also to introduce the question as to the relation between the primary and secondary systems. They need not be entirely distinct. Sometimes, as in this next case, the mere existence of the one may seem to disturb the other in some vague fashion, at other times scraps or fragments or consequences of either may appear in the other without their origin being recognized, and in still other cases the two appear to coalesce sufficiently for the one to recall the other while yet they remain dynamically distinct.

One of Mr. Gurney's patients[3] was told to write automatically while reading aloud. The result was that both reading and writing were imperfect and confused. He was then hypnotized again and asked what he had been trying to do. He said, "Trying to write, 'It has left off snowing.' " Then he was asked if he had been reading, and said: "Reading? No, I haven't been reading. Something seemed to disturb me; something seemed to move about in front of me, so that I got back into bed again." "Did not Mr. Gurney hold a book and make you read aloud?" "No. Somebody kept moving about. I did not like the looks of them. Kept wandering to and fro. Horrible, awful. I thought to myself, 'I'll get into bed.' It looked so savage it quite unnerved me." Here the reciprocal interference seems quite clear, and the subconscious state, instead of evolving on the lines laid down by the suggestion, has been perturbed and developed into a vague dream.

Another good case of interference is given by Prof. Janet:[4] "M—— came to me one evening complaining of sundry troubles, and after putting her into her second state I talked to her and gave her some advice, then wakened her without thinking of repeating the same advice in her waking state. Some days later she wrote me the following letter: 'I can not make out what is the matter with me. I must be very queer. I understand with difficulty, and it seems to me that everybody is looking at me, perhaps because I express myself badly. I feel absolutely nothing, and I let nearly everything fall, which makes me seem very stupid. I can not work, and if any one in the house should notice it I should be the loser. I may be wrong, but I have a dim idea that I ought to do something. For two days I have tried in every way to discover what it can be.' " All this annoyance was easily removed by destroying the subconscious suggestion.

Upon this conception of the interference between the two states without coalescence and without the formation of a memory bond, Prof. Janet has based a most interesting and important theory as to the origin of the hysterical and nervous troubles which so often follow a severe accident or fright where no actual injury can be detected. It is well known that such an experience often becomes a conscious fixed idea, and "haunts" one. But sometimes where there is no conscious "haunting," and even where the experience is forgotten, the same results are traceable. In these cases he believes that the fixed idea exists subconsciously as a continuous or frequently recurring dream.

Thus, Vel—— is a young man of twenty-four.[5] About every five minutes while awake and often while asleep he expels his breath violently through the left nostril and the muscles of the right cheek are contracted. He has had this spasm for eight years and can not explain why. He thinks it may be connected with a severe hæmorrhage from the nose which he had as a child. He is easily hypnotized and then affirms most positively that there is an obstruction in his nose which he must get rid of. "No matter when he is put to sleep, he makes the same statement; it is probable that this idea has existed more or less clearly in the patient's mind, and in any case unknown to him, for eight years. This dream was modified and suppressed very easily in the somnambulic state."

"A subconscious dream,[6] in which the movement of a limb is represented, tends to some extent to invade the primary consciousness and deprive it of control over that limb. Le—— dreams that he is fighting with a thief, and keeps off his assailant with his right hand; the thief puts his knee on his left side and clutches his neck with his hand. Upon awaking, Le—— has a hyperæthetic point on the left side, pressure upon which is sufficient to bring on the complete hallucination of the scene, and has, further, an anæsthetic spot upon the neck with complete insensibility and almost complete paralysis of the right arm. "Why do we find these two symptoms? Because these sensations of pressure on the neck and movement of the arm form, so to speak, part of the dream, are absorbed by it, and are no longer at the disposal of the self."

Sometimes we meet with cases in which the secondary system is not subconscious, but blends sufficiently with the primary system to be recalled, and at the same time retains its independent character. The experiences of Dr. Cocke and of Anna Katharina Emmerich, to which I allude in my paper on Hypnotic States, Trance, and Ecstasy, are of this type. Similar cases are not infrequent in insanity. One of the best accounts from normal life that I have seen is given by the late Robert Louis Stevenson in a letter to Mr. F. W. H. Myers, dated July 14, 1892:[7]

"During an illness at Nice I lay awake a whole night in extreme pain. From the beginning of the evening one part of my mind became possessed of a notion so grotesque and shapeless that it may best be described as a form of words. I thought the pain was, or was connected with, a wisp or coil of some sort; I knew not of what it consisted, nor yet where it was, and cared not; only I thought if the two ends were brought together the pain would cease. Now all the time, with another part of my mind, which I venture to think was myself, I was fully alive to the absurdity of this idea, knew it to be a mark of impaired sanity, and was engaged with my other self in perpetual conflict. Myself had nothing more at heart than to keep from my wife, who was nursing me, any hint of this ridiculous hallucination; the other was bound that she should be told of it and ordered to effect the cure. I believe it must have been well on in the morning before the fever (or the other fellow) triumphed, and I called my wife to my bedside, seized her savagely by the wrist, and looking on her with a face of fury, cried, 'Why do you not put the two ends together and put me out of pain?' "

In another illness, at Sydney, the other fellow had an explanation ready for my sufferings, of which I can only say that it had something to do with the navy, that it was sheer undiluted nonsense, had neither end nor beginning, and was insusceptible of being expressed in words. Myself knew this; yet I gave way, and my watcher was favored with some reference to the navy. Nor only that: the other fellow was annoyed—or I was annoyed—on two inconsistent accounts; first, because he had failed to make his meaning comprehensible, and, second, because the nurse displayed no interest. The other fellow would have liked to explain further, but myself was much hurt at having been got into this false position, and would be led no further."

Now, when such a disordinated system obtains complete control of the body, the patient is wholly insane. Not, of course, that every case of insanity belongs to this type, but that every case of this type belongs to insanity. The normal consciousness is then supposed to be wholly extinct, but there is no reason for believing that it necessarily must be. Take for example a case observed by the late Dr. Ira Barrows, of Providence, R. I., and printed by Prof. James.[8] The patient was a girl of nineteen. I make only a few extracts from Dr. Barrows's notes.

"September 17, 1860.—Wild with delirium. Tears her hair, pillowcases, bedclothes, both sheets, night dress, all to pieces. Her right hand prevents her left hand, by seizing and holding it, from tearing out her hair, but she tears her clothes with her left hand and teeth.

"29th.—Complains of great pain in right arm, more and more intense, when suddenly it falls down by her side. She looks at it in amazement. Thinks it belongs to some one else; is positive it is not hers. . . . She bites it, pounds it, pricks it, and in many ways seeks to drive it from her. She calls it 'Stump, old Stump!'

"January 10, 1862.—When her delirium is at its height, as well as at all other times, her right hand is rational, asking and answering questions in writing; giving directions; trying to prevent her tearing her clothes; when she pulls out her hair, it seizes and holds her left hand; when she is asleep, it carries on conversation the same; writes poetry; never sleeps; acts the part of the nurse as far as it can; pulls the bedclothes over the patient, if it can reach them, while uncovered; raps on the headboard to awaken her mother (who always sleeps in the room) if anything occurs, as spasms, etc."

"Old Stump" made no statements, so far as the account goes, about its own identity. It always spoke of the patient in the third person as "Anna," but that is common in changes of personality.

Dr. Barrows himself believed that "Old Stump" possessed more intelligence and knowledge than the patient ever had, but the record is not extensive enough to pronounce on that point. It seems most probable that "Old Stump" expressed what remained of the patient's sane self, which still existed, although the incoherent mass had control of the rest of her body.

In the case of successive personalities, if no memory is retained, each synthesis has to learn of the existence of the others as of third persons, and may cherish friendly or unfriendly feelings toward them. When memory is retained, if the change is not very great, the patient often expresses it by saying that he is "asleep," which is doubtless a phrase borrowed from the hypnotizer. According to Prof. Janet,[9] the more intelligent often say: "But I am not asleep, it is absurd to say that; only I am changed, I am queer; what have you done to me?" Rose, who has four or five states, says, "It is always I, but not always the same thing."

When the change is more extensive, the patient often hesitates or refuses to claim identity with her own past self. Leonie, another of Prof. Janet's patients, has two other states which can be evoked successively and which possibly exist simultaneously. The third, which calls itself Leonore, says of the first: "A good woman, but pretty stupid; she is not I"; while of the second state—Leontine—she says: "How can you think me like that madcap? Happily, I am nothing to her." Leontine several times wrote letters while Leonie's attention was distracted. One of these ran as follows:[10] "My dear good sir: I must tell you that Leonie really, really makes me suffer a great deal. She can not sleep, she gives me much trouble; I shall destroy her; she makes me dull, I am also sick and very tired. This is from your most devoted Leontine." When Leonie discovered these missives she always destroyed them, so the writer adopted the further plan of concealing them—with Leonie's own hands, of course in a photograph album, into which Leonie never dared look, because it had once contained the portrait of Dr. Gibert, who used to hypnotize her. In short, whenever Leonie fell into a fit of abstraction, she, or at least her body, was apt to do things which bore evidence of intelligent purpose and often of wishes very much at variance with Leonie's.

Subconscious states, which exist at the same time as the upper consciousness, may cause it many perplexities. Said one patient:[11] " 'I can not in the least understand what is going on. For some time past I have been working in an odd way; it is no longer I who am working, but only my hands. They get on pretty well, but I have no part in what they do. When it is over I do not recognize my work at all. I see that it is all right; but I feel that I am quite incapable of having accomplished it. If any one said, It is not you who did that! I would answer, True enough, it is not I. When I want to sing, it is impossible to me; yet at other times I hear my voice singing the song very well. It is certainly not I who walk; I feel like a balloon that jumps up and down of itself. When I want to write I find nothing to say; my head is empty, and I must let my hand write what it chooses, and it fills four pages, and if the stuff is silly I can not help it.' The curious point is that in this fashion she produces some really good things. If she makes up a dress or writes a letter, she sometimes shows real talent, but it is all done in a bizarre way. She looks absorbed in her work, but yet is unconscious of it; when she lifts her head she seems dazed, as if she were coming out of a dream, and does not recollect what she has been doing. . . . Although she still has activity, she has no longer the personal consciousness of this activity, and her acts therefore can no longer be called voluntary."

I have now briefly analyzed the leading types of what is known as double or multiple personality. Successive changes of personality are demonstrated facts. That subconscious states of some sort exist is also exceedingly probable. For the existence of simultaneous personalities there is also good evidence, and in some cases I am inclined to admit it. Yet I believe that we can not be too careful in making use of these conceptions. While the evidence upon which they are based is stong, it must not be forgotten that it is largely selected evidence, that multitudes of cases remain for which these theories afford no adequate explanation, and that the metaphysical basis upon which the theory itself rests is far from finally established. While formulating theories, we must not become theorists.



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  1. The most detailed accounts of Lucie's case are in Prof. Janet's articles in the Revue Philosophique, vol. xxii, pp. 577-592; vol. xxiii, pp. 449-572.  More facts are to be found in his work L. Automatisme Psychologique and in his other writings.
  2. L' Automatisme Psychologique, second edition, p. 328.
  3. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. iv, p. 319.
  4. Les Accidents Mentaux, p. 137.
  5. Ibid., p. 102.
  6. Op. cit., p. 132.
  7. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. ix, p. 9.
  8. Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research, vol. i, p. 552.
  9. L'Automatisme Psychologique, second edition, p. 130.
  10. Op. cit., p. 321.
  11. Quoted from Prof. Janet, by Mr. F. W. H. Myers, in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. ix, p. 21.