The subconscious, I repeat, does not always exercise a helpful influence; there are times when it may impose upon us indescribable misery.

It is able to do this by virtue of the intimate relations existing between the mind and the body. At this late day it is scarcely necessary for me to undertake to demonstrate that the state of one’s mind has a great deal to do with the health of one’s body. What is not so generally known, and what all of us ought to know, is the further fact that many diseases are directly due to distressing mental states, and in such cases usually to subconscious mental states—that is to say, to thoughts and emotions of which the sufferer consciously has no knowledge. The same often holds good even with regard to maladies the symptoms of which are almost wholly if not altogether physical, and the causes of which one would naturally expect to find physical, likewise.

Indeed, ignorance of the tremendous rÔle played by the subconscious in the causation of disease, has in the past been responsible for many medical shortcomings. Nor is the situation as yet much improved, although it is rapidly improving, thanks chiefly to the labors of a little group of scientific investigators known as psychopathologists, or medical psychologists, who have made it their special business to ascertain the different ways in which the subconscious may affect health adversely, and to devise methods for coping with mentally caused diseases.

These men are not “faith healers.” They are not making any war on medicine. They are, in fact, themselves physicians, graduates of the best medical schools, of excellent standing in their profession, and seeking, above all things, to increase the usefulness and precision of medical science. Already, though their labors were begun only a few years ago, they have effected numerous cures of a seemingly miraculous character; but always they have effected them by utilizing natural laws which they have discovered by the rigorous processes of scientific experiment.

Of fundamental importance among these laws is one known as the law of dissociation. It might almost be called the law of forgotten memories, for to a large extent its workings depend on the interesting circumstance, to which attention has previously been drawn, that ideas which have faded from the conscious memory persist in the subconsciousness. As Pierre Janet, the distinguished Frenchman and most eminent of living psychopathologists, has tersely phrased it, “Nothing that goes into the human mind is ever really lost.”

No matter how remote, past experiences, as I have shown in earlier chapters, can be recovered and recalled to mind by means of crystal-vision, automatic writing, or other psychological methods of “tapping the subconscious.” Obviously we have here no absolute loss of memory, but merely a splitting off, or “dissociation,” from the field of waking consciousness.

Now, while the memories thus dissociated and lying hidden in the subconscious usually exercise no appreciable effect other than in the molding of character, the enlargement of our store of knowledge, etc., there are conditions under which, in the case of persons predisposed by circumstances of heredity or environment, they may give rise to all manner of mental and physical ills.

A person, for instance, experiences a sudden fright. Time passes, the fright is completely forgotten, or, at most, vaguely remembered. But one day unmistakable, and sometimes exceedingly peculiar, symptoms of disease appear. The victim, it may be, suffers from a strange obsession or “fixed idea,” or from a general “nervous breakdown,” or from an actual paralysis of some bodily organ, or from the development of abdominal or other enlargements resembling true organic growths.

Whatever the symptoms, the mechanism of the puzzling malady is always the same. There has been an abnormal dissociation. The ideas connected with the original shock, although submerged beneath the threshold of consciousness—in a word, forgotten—remain vividly alive in the subconscious, to act as perpetual irritants of the nervous system and in time to give rise to the appearance of the symptoms of which the sufferer complains. Often, indeed, the dissociation is instantaneous, and the appearance of the disease symptoms equally rapid.

In either case, the resultant malady is purely psychical in its origin, and can be cured only by psychical, not by physical means. What is needed is to get at the dissociated mental states—the forgotten, disease-creating memories—and reassociate them with the upper consciousness, or root them out completely by means of “suggestions” skillfully applied.

This is no fanciful theory. It is the solidest kind of fact, repeatedly tested and verified. Time and again, patients pronounced incurable by competent physicians have been taken in hand by the psychopathologists and, once their disease has been definitely traced to some dissociation, have been restored to perfect health.

For the matter of that, of course, the same thing has been done to some extent by Christian Science healers and other irregular practitioners of “mental medicine.” But the difference between all of these and the psychopathologists is just this—that the former apply the healing power of suggestion to all sorts of diseases, and without any adequate understanding of its laws and limitations, whereas the psychopathologists recognize that it is only one of several valuable medical methods, and that it is legitimately applicable only to certain maladies.

Experience has taught them, too, that even within its proper sphere of usefulness it often is of therapeutic value only after a searching scientific examination of the patient’s subconsciousness has brought to light the particular dissociated states which have to be corrected before a cure can be wrought.

Nevertheless, the range of maladies susceptible of cure by psychopathological processes is marvelously wide, and it is no exaggeration to say that the discovery of the influence exercised by the subconscious in the causation of disease is one of the most vitally significant ever made in the history of medicine.

The truth of this may readily be shown by citing a few cases illustrating some of the manifold ways in which dissociation works havoc in the human organism, and the extreme ingenuity displayed by the skilled psychopathologist in overcoming its ravages.

There was brought one day to the Parisian hospital of the SalpÊtriÈre, the world’s greatest center of psychopathological investigation, a woman of forty, designated in the medical record of her case by the name of Justine. She was accompanied by her husband, who explained that he wished Doctor Janet to examine her because he feared that she had become insane. And, in fact, she presented the aspect of a veritable maniac. Her jet-black hair was flowing loosely over her shoulders, her eyes were fixed and glaring, her hands trembling, the muscles of her neck twitching, and she constantly made the most horrible grimaces. When Doctor Janet gently sought to question her, she buried her face in her hands, and cried:

“Oh, it is terrible to live thus! I am afraid, I am so afraid!”

“And of what, pray, are you afraid?” the physician asked.

“I am afraid of cholera.”

“Is that all you are afraid of?”

“But surely it is quite enough.”

Doctor Janet turned for an explanation to her husband, who shook his head despairingly, as he replied in an undertone:

“This is the way she has been for years, doctor, only lately she has grown much worse. She will scarcely eat anything, for fear of catching cholera. It is difficult to persuade her to stir from the house. She seems to think the air is full of cholera germs. She sees cholera in everything. Tell me, doctor, is my poor Justine mad? Must we be separated, she and I? Is it that she will have to spend the rest of her life in an asylum?”

“Leave her here a few days,” said Doctor Janet, “and I can tell you better then.”

Psychopathologists have invented some delicate tests for discriminating infallibly between true organic insanity, which in the present state of medical knowledge is quite incurable, and functional mental troubles due to dissociation. Applying these, Doctor Janet soon reached the conclusion that Justine was not really insane, and that her “phobia,” or irrational fear, was due to some forgotten shock connected with the disease cholera.

But, closely though he questioned her, she could recall nothing of the sort. He then decided to try the effect of hypnotizing her, for, as all psychopathologists are aware, hypnotism, when it is possible to use it, is an unrivaled agency for recovering lost memories. Put into the hypnotic state, patients easily remember incidents in their past of which they have no conscious recollection when in the normal, waking state. It was thus with Justine, who proved to be most hypnotizable.

“I want you,” Doctor Janet told her, after she had passed into deep hypnosis, “to try to remember whether at any time in your life you saw a person suffering from cholera, or one who had died from cholera.”

“Why, certainly I did,” she promptly replied, shuddering violently.

“When was it?”

“When I was a little girl—fifteen years old.”

“Tell me the circumstances.”

“My mother was very poor. She had to take all sorts of work. Sometimes she nursed sick people, and when they died she got them ready for burial. Once two people in our neighborhood died from cholera, and I helped her with the corpses. They made a frightful sight—one of them, at all events. It was the body of a man, naked, and all blue and green. Oh, frightful, frightful! What if I should catch the cholera? I shall catch it, I know I shall! Nothing can save me!”

Her voice rose in a shriek of terror, and Doctor Janet hastened to de-hypnotize her.

The situation was now perfectly clear to him. Evidently the sight of the corpse, “naked, and all blue and green,” had so profoundly affected the impressionable girl as to cause a severe dissociation whereby all memory of the shocking episode had been blotted out of her consciousness, only to be subconsciously remembered in most minute detail.

To bring about a cure, to free her from the obsessing dread of cholera, it was necessary to remove the gruesome subconscious memory image, and Doctor Janet essayed to do this through suggestions given to her when she was again hypnotized.

“You will no longer think of this,” he kept assuring her. “You will forget it, absolutely, permanently.”

Day after day, for weeks, he hypnotized her, and reiterated similar commands. But she continued to be afflicted with her irrational fear, and it finally became certain that her subconscious recollection of the phobia-causing scene of twenty-five years before was too deeply rooted to be destroyed by direct attack. Instead, however, of abandoning the task as hopeless, Doctor Janet, with a shrewdness born of long experience, made a clever change in tactics.

“You insist,” he said to the hypnotized Justine, “that you cannot help seeing in your mind’s eye the corpse of the man who died. Very well, I have no objection to that. But hereafter you must see it decently clothed. So when it next appears to you, you will see it wearing a bright blue-and-green uniform, the uniform of a foreign military officer.”

Happily, this suggestion “took,” and Doctor Janet followed up his advantage by suggesting that the subconscious memory image which she regarded as that of a corpse was, in reality, the image of a living man. This suggestion likewise being successful, he set about getting rid of the idea “cholera,” and its dire implications. Hypnotizing the patient as usual, he demanded:

“What is this ‘cholera’ that troubles you so much? Do you not understand that it is only the name of the fine gentleman in blue and green, whom you see marching up and down? He is a Chinese general, and his name is Cho Le Ra. Bear that well in mind.”

Quite evidently there was nothing to inspire dread in the image of a picturesque Chinese officer, General Cho Le Ra. Little by little, as this artificial conception obtained firmer lodgment in Justine’s subconsciousness, the baneful idea which it was intended to supplant faded away, and with its fading the abnormal fear diminished, until at length it entirely disappeared, greatly to her joy and the warm gratitude of her devoted husband.[39]

Other psychopathologists, following Doctor Janet’s lead, have similarly used this method of substituting one subconscious idea for another. Doctor John E. Donley, a well-known neurologist of Providence, Rhode Island, and one of the few psychopathologists whom the United States has yet produced, was once consulted by a young man of thirty-two, who said to him:

“Doctor Donley, I hear you have been very successful in handling people troubled with foolish notions. I’m bothered with as foolish a notion as any one could possibly imagine. I simply can’t bear to ride in a street-car with an odd number. Even-numbered cars give me no trouble at all, but if an odd-numbered car comes along, I’ve got to let it pass, no matter how great my hurry. My friends laugh at me, but I tell you it’s no laughing matter. The thing has got on my nerves so that it is unbearable.”

“How long have you been suffering in this way?” asked Doctor Donley.

“For years. Just when it began I can’t remember.

“Is it only odd-numbered cars that affect you? How about odd-numbered houses, for instance?”

“No, no,” answered the young man, “it isn’t odd numbers in general. That doesn’t bother me a bit. It’s just when they’re painted on street-cars.”

“H’m,” said Doctor Donley. “Ever been in a street-car accident?”

“Never.”

“Ever seen one?”

“Not that I remember.”

“You are quite sure as to that?”

“Quite.”

“Have you any objection to my hypnotizing you?”

“Not in the least, if it is likely to do me any good.”

In another ten minutes the problem was solved. Doctor Donley from the outset had felt confident that the young man’s phobia must be connected in some way with a street-car accident, and so it proved. Fourteen years earlier, when walking along the street, he had seen a car strike and seriously injure a child who unexpectedly came from behind a wagon. He had noticed at the time that the car bore the number two hundred and thirteen, and he remembered thinking to himself: “There is always bad luck in thirteen.” The sight of the accident gave him a marked emotional shock, which, he said, upset him for several days.

All of this had long since passed from his waking memory, but was distinctly recalled during hypnosis. It was clear to Doctor Donley that the case was one of dissociation, and that the exciting cause of the young man’s unreasonable dread of odd-numbered cars was based on a painfully vivid subconscious memory image of the consciously forgotten tragedy. Also, it was evident that before the dread could be overcome the distressing memory image would have to be eradicated.

To accomplish this, Doctor Donley resorted to the method of substitution, suggesting to the patient, while still under hypnotic influence, that he was quite mistaken in supposing that the street-car had seriously injured the little girl; that, on the contrary, it had scarcely touched her.

The result, after only eight days’ treatment, was effectually to replace the painful memory image with one free from distressing associations. As by magic, the young man shook off his absurd phobia. No longer, when he had to take a car, did he stand on street corners, sometimes for an hour at a time, waiting anxiously for a car with an even number to appear.[40]

Bizarre as these cases must seem, they are actually typical of a widespread malady that causes an amount of suffering only appreciable by the sufferers themselves. In every land there are thousands of men and women afflicted with obsessions equally strange and equally distressing, yet amenable to treatment by the methods of psychopathology.

Often, in order to effect a cure, it is not necessary to make use of the roundabout device just described. Direct suggestion—a strongly negative command imposed in the hypnotic state—is frequently sufficient.

Often, besides, it is not necessary to use hypnotism at all, a cure resulting if only the psychopathologist can dig down to the root of the trouble, and, by recalling to conscious recollection the lost memory image, reassociate it with the rest of the contents of the upper consciousness.

Particularly interesting in this connection, as being illustrative also of an ingenious method of “mind tunnelling” nowadays frequently employed to get at forgotten memories, is a case reported by Doctor A.A. Brill, a New York psychopathologist. His patient was a young woman who applied to be treated for extreme nervousness. She had been perfectly well until three months before, when, she said, she had begun to suffer from a complication of disorders, including insomnia, loss of appetite, constant headache, irritability, and stomach trouble. No physical cause for her condition could be detected, and Doctor Brill suspected that it was due to some secret anxiety, but the patient earnestly assured him that she “had nothing on her mind.”

To get at the facts which he suspected she was consciously or unconsciously concealing from him, Doctor Brill decided to make use of what is known as the “association-reaction method of mental diagnosis,” a cumbersome and formidable term for a really simple process.

Everybody knows that if a man is suddenly asked a question bearing on matters which personally concern him and which he is anxious to keep entirely to himself, he is apt to “react” to the question in a way that will betray the true state of affairs. He may blush or stammer before replying, may reply evasively, may find it impossible to reply at all. If he is a man of uncommon self-control, and not to be taken off his guard, the reply may come smoothly enough, and to all appearance without hesitation. Nevertheless, experiment has shown that, even in such cases, there is an appreciable difference in the time, if not in the character, of the replies he makes to emotion-arousing questions, as compared with the time it takes him to reply to questions that have no special significance to him. The same holds good in the case of questions evoking within him memories—albeit perhaps wholly subconscious memories—of happenings that may be no longer, but once were, of keen emotional import to him.

Out of the discovery of this fact the association-reaction method has been evolved. The specialist using it reads slowly to his patient a list of one hundred words or more, and requests him, as he hears each, to respond with the first word that comes into his mind. Seemingly the list of stimulus words is chosen at random; actually it is so constructed that some of the words are likely to stir into activity the subconscious memories of which the physician is in search. If they do this the fact will be disclosed in the time of his reaction-words—the words he utters in reply—as measured by a chronoscope or stop-watch; or in their character, as noted down by the specialist.

Of course, it is necessary for the physician to select words having, or likely to have, emotional significance to the particular patient; and as a guide in the selection, strange though it may seem, nothing is more useful than the patient’s dreams. For it has been definitely established that dreams are far from being the haphazard products of imagination they are generally supposed to be; that on the contrary, no matter how trivial or nonsensical they seem, they always have an emotional foundation corresponding with some present or past reality; and that usually they mask matters of distinct significance to the dreamer.

As a preliminary, then, in the treatment of his nervous patient, Doctor Brill asked her to write out her dreams and bring them to him.

“But,” she said, “I never dream, except when I am troubled by indigestion, and then my dreams are so absurd that they are not worth telling.”

“Never mind,” was his reply. “Whenever you do happen to have a dream, report it to me.”

Laughingly she promised to comply, and one day brought him the following:

“I dreamed that I was in a lonely country place and was anxious to reach my home, but could not get there. Every time I made a move there was a wall in the way—it looked like a street full of walls. My legs were as heavy as lead; I could only walk very slowly as if I were very weak or very old. Then there was a flock of chickens, but that seemed to be in a crowded city street, and they—the chickens—ran after me, and the biggest of all said something like: ‘Come with me into the dark.’”

“There,” she said, “that is my dream, and if you can make head or tail of it, it is more than I can. It is so ridiculous that I am ashamed to tell it.”

But Doctor Brill was already at work drawing up a test list, with the more striking words of the dream sprinkled through it. Twice he read the list to her, noting not only the time of her responses, but also their character.

He was immediately impressed by the fact that certain of the dream words—such as “chicken,” “street,” and “dark” had caused a noticeable time variation; and that she had also given in her responses words that would not ordinarily be associated with the test words. Especially peculiar was the association of “mystery” and “marriage” with the word “dark.” The suspicion formed in his mind that a disappointment in love might be at the bottom of all her disease symptoms. But he did not at once give voice to this idea; instead, he sought to obtain corroboration from her own lips without her appreciating his purpose, by means of another method of “mind tunnelling” known as the method of free association.

“I want you,” he said to her, “to concentrate your attention on the word ‘chicken,’ and state the thoughts that come to you in connection with it.”

Her reply, given after a few moments of silent meditation, was:

“I remember now that I could see only the biggest chicken; all the others seemed blurred; it was unusually big and had a very long neck and it spoke to me. The street in which I saw it recalls where I used to go to school—the block was always crowded with school children.”

She paused, and began to blush and laugh.

“Go on,” said Doctor Brill encouragingly. “What next?”

“Why, it recalls the happy school days when I was young and had no worries. I even had a beau, a boy who attended the same school. We used to meet after school hours and walk home together. He was lanky and thin, and the girls used to tease me about him. Whenever they saw him coming, they said: ‘Belle, here comes your chicken.’ That was his nickname among the boys.”

Stopping suddenly, she exclaimed:

“Doctor Brill, it couldn’t be possible that the chicken with the long neck, that I saw in my dream, was my old beau!”

“It begins to look very much like it,” he smiled. “Have you seen him lately?”

“Not for months.”

“And before then?”

Little by little the whole story came out. They had kept up their acquaintance after the school days were long gone. Three times he had asked her to marry him, but each time she had refused, because although she “liked” him she was not at all sure that she “loved” him. At last she had decided that the next time he proposed she would accept. But he had not proposed again. And shortly before she became ill she had heard that he was paying attentions to another young lady.

“I take it,” interposed Doctor Brill, “that he is not so well off as he might be, and that this had something to do with your refusing to marry him.”

“What makes you say that?”

“In your dream I note that you state: ‘Every time I made a move there was a wall in the way; it looked like a street full of walls.’ A street full of walls might easily signify Wall Street—hence money. That has been the real obstacle, has it not?”

She confessed that he was right.

He then explained that the one great cause of her ills was her insistent, if subconscious, brooding over the disappointment she had experienced, and that her cure depended upon her ability to overcome this mental attitude. Realizing for the first time, as a result of the dream analysis, that she was really in love with the man she had three times declined to wed, she soon solved the problem. Only a hint was needed to transform him into a suitor once more, and within a very few months they were happily married.[41]

Sometimes direct questioning is sufficient to enable the physician to get at the underlying mental cause of trouble. Take, for example, another case successfully treated by Doctor Donley.

The patient was a woman of thirty-five who was troubled by a constant and involuntary hacking, which sounded as though she were trying to clear her throat. Drugs, local applications, and electricity had been tried at intervals during more than four years, but to no purpose. On inquiry, it was found that the trouble had set in about five years before, when the patient, who was a mill hand, had suffered from a sore throat. The physician whom she then consulted told her that she had a bad case of tonsilitis, and that her tonsils would have to be burned out.

Greatly frightened, she had hurried home, refusing to submit to the operation. In a few days the tonsilar symptoms disappeared, and she returned to work. But she was attacked a second time three weeks later, and visited another doctor, to be informed that her tonsils were so badly diseased that it would be well to have them removed by cutting.

Again she refused to submit to an operation, but the fear of cutting, added to her previous fear, now revived, of burning out her tonsils, threw her into a highly nervous state. She then began to experience an unpleasant stinging, tickling feeling in her throat, which she tried to remove by hacking. As the tickling continued, the hacking became more and more frequent, and by the time she came under Doctor Donley’s observation had taken on the character of a “tic,” or uncontrollable muscular movement.

These facts in the early history of the case, the patient herself remembered only vaguely. But she confessed that she was still tormented by a haunting fear of a possible future burning or cutting of her tonsils. Finding her exceedingly suggestible, Doctor Donley made no attempt to hypnotize her. He merely requested her to close her eyes, remain perfectly passive, and listen attentively to him.

“She was then told, with much emphasis,” he says, in describing the treatment, “that her tonsils were perfectly healthy, that no cutting or burning ever was or ever would be required; that the tickling sensation in her throat arose from the constant fixation of attention upon this part; that she would feel no more desire to hack because her supposed reason for hacking had ceased to exist, and finally, that when she should open her eyes she would feel better than she had in a good many years.

“Much emphasis was placed upon this feeling of health, because it was desired to leave her on the crest of a pleasurable emotion, which of itself has a very great suggestive value. What had been predicted in her regard actually occurred. When she sat up, her tic had disappeared, and she expressed herself as feeling quite grateful and happy. The treatment lasted an hour, and except for two slight recurrences easily removed by waking suggestion, this patient has had no further difficulty.”[42]

Unfortunately, such an easy solution of problems like this is comparatively rare, particularly when, as in this instance, a physical trouble is superadded to the mental. Often—a fact which cannot be emphasized too strongly—it happens that, in dissociational cases, physical symptoms so far predominate as to lead to totally wrong diagnosis, even by experienced physicians. This results, as was hinted above, from the power inherent in subconscious “fixed ideas” of producing an endless variety of disturbances simulating true organic diseases, it may be diseases remediable only through surgical operations.

As a consequence, innumerable operations have been performed on patients who should have been given, not surgical but psychopathological treatment. I have in mind as I write a case of this kind that was called to my attention by a friend who participated in the lamentable affair.

A middle-aged woman entered one of the Boston hospitals and complained of severe abdominal pains, which she attributed to cancer of the stomach or intestines. She was obviously greatly frightened, and suffering intense agony. A diagnosis of appendicitis was made, and an immediate operation deemed imperative.

But, to the surprise of the surgeons, the appendix was found to be in a normal condition. At once they directed their attention to the other abdominal organs, examining them one by one. None showed any sign of disease. Finally, with a rueful smile, one of the surgeons straightened up, and, touching a finger to his head, said:

“The trouble with this poor woman, gentlemen, is here, not in the region that we have been exploring. But we should not undeceive her. We will remove the appendix, on general principles, and that will probably be all that is needed to cure the trouble in her head.”

Under the circumstances, it was excellent advice. But how much better it would have been for the unfortunate woman, whose life was thus endangered by the surgeon’s knife, if it had been recognized from the beginning that her malady was only a “hysterical simulation” of the symptoms of appendicitis. Some day, when physicians generally make themselves acquainted with the diagnostic methods of psychopathology, blunders like this will be, as they ought to be, most exceptional.

In point both of diagnosis and treatment, again, psychopathological knowledge is indispensable to the correct handling of such cases as the following, reported by Doctor Janet.[43] It is, I am ready to concede, an unusual case, but it is unusual only because it presents a complex of symptoms commonly found singly or in simpler combination.

It would be impossible to estimate with any accuracy the number of persons who, afflicted only in scant degree like this poor Marcelle, have been obliged to drag out an existence worse than death, either in the care of their friends or immured in an institution, simply because their medical attendants, ignorant of the workings of the law of dissociation, have been unable to fathom the true nature of their ills and adopt adequate curative measures.

Marcelle, as Doctor Janet calls her, was only nineteen years old when she began to astonish her relatives by developing what they were at first disposed to regard as nothing but an eccentric form of laziness. She would constantly ask them to give her objects—a book, her crochet work, a plate—which she could easily have got for herself by stretching out her hand and picking them up. To all expostulations, she would calmly reply:

“I can’t help it. I can’t use my hands as I once did, and that’s all there is to it.”

“You can’t use your hands! What nonsense! You can use them to eat with, well enough, and you are crocheting most of the time.”

“Oh, but that’s different.”

“What’s the difference? Tell us.”

But Marcelle could not, or would not, tell them, and from joking with her the family soon passed to a state of wrath, endeavoring in every way to overcome her “stupid obstinacy.” Their anger in turn gave way to fear, when, one night, noticing a glimmer of light in her room, they entered, and found her standing, fully dressed, before the bed.

“But what is this!” they exclaimed, in amazement. “Why don’t you get your clothes off and go to bed?”

“Because,” she cried, “I can’t undress!”

And, all arguments proving vain, it was necessary for her sister to disrobe her as though she were a tiny child. Next day a consultation was held, and it was decided to take her to the SalpÊtriÈre.

“She doesn’t seem insane,” her mother explained, when applying to have her admitted. “She talks sensibly about most things. Can it be that she is really suffering from some kind of paralysis?”

“Most assuredly,” was the reply, “and we will do our best to discover what it is and cure it.”

This turned out to be no easy matter. Doctor Janet, into whose care she came, had no difficulty in determining that the specific malady which afflicted her was an extreme form of “aboulia,” a disease involving temporary paralysis of the will, and thereby preventing all muscular movement. But it was one thing to make a diagnosis, and another to effect a cure.

Presently, too, indications of mental disturbance developed. Doctor Janet had discovered that by distracting her attention he could induce her to rise, extend her hands, and perform other acts that were impossible to her when she concentrated her attention on them. He utilized this as an argument to try and persuade her that she could always control her limbs if she only made sufficient effort.

“But you are quite wrong,” she calmly informed him. “I have not left my chair, I have not put out my hand.”

“Most assuredly you have. You know very well I did not give you that piece of crochet work. How, then, does it come into your hands?”

“I did not pick it up.”

“Who did, then?”

“Somebody else—somebody acting in me.”

A little later arose another complication. She refused to eat, and it became necessary to administer food to her forcibly. She kept saying to herself:

“You must die, you must die as soon as possible. You must not eat, you have no need of eating. You must not speak, you have no voice, you are paralyzed.”

“Why do you say this?” Doctor Janet one day asked her.

“Why do I say what?”

He repeated her words.

“But I have said nothing of the sort.”

“Oh, yes, you have.”

“No, no, no—it was not I; it was somebody else acting in me.”

Again that phrase—“somebody else acting in me.” Greatly impressed, Doctor Janet threw her into deep hypnosis. Now, an unexpected and most pathetic passage of personal history came to light. A year before, Marcelle had had a secret love affair, her lover had deserted her, she had determined to commit suicide. Failing to do this, she had, none the less—overwhelmed by the shock of the desertion, and giving herself wholly to grief and chagrin, which she felt obliged to allow no one to perceive—gradually passed into a dissociated, dreamlike state, in which she subconsciously pictured herself to herself either as no longer existing or as about to perish.

Hence her “aboulia,” hence the “somebody else acting in me,” hence the refusal to take food. To Doctor Janet the situation was now almost as clear as the light of day—so, likewise, was the course which he would need to follow to restore the sufferer to her “real self,” and rid her of all disease symptoms.

The dissociation, to put it briefly, had in this case been so complete as to cause an actual disruption of the sense of personality. Nor is this malady of “loss of personality” as rare as one might be tempted to think. I could mention many cases not unlike that of Marcelle’s, and some far surpassing it in astounding developments. There is, for example, the singular case of BCA. But this is so remarkable, so weirdly fascinating, and so instructive that it deserves to be treated, as I shall treat it in the next chapter, entirely by itself.