The science of life : fully illustrated in tone and line and including many diagrams, стр. 825

HUMAN BEHAVIOUR AND THE HUMAN MIND

irascible, sociable but worldly and vain, impatient of things intellectual and religious, self-opinionated. Br was devoted to children and the old; B4 frankly disliked them. Though both were unusually emotional, B4 reacted against her emotions, while Br let herself be carried away by them. Perhaps the most curious fact is that, although they shared the same body, they differed markedly in health. Br was easily tired and had poor general health ; B4 was energetic and robust.

The two personalities had no knowledge of each other’s inner life. Their memories were different. Both had knowledge of all Miss B’s early years, up to the first emotional crisis six years before, but Br alone could recall anything of the happenings of the six years since then. After the appearance of B4, each remembered only what happened during the periods when they were “ top dog.” Circumstances and tastes decreed that they had different friends ; and sometimes the change would come suddenly, and Br, for instance, would find herself talking to a friend of B4’s whom she, Br, did not even know, or if she knew, knew only slightly and disliked.

They could not communicate with each other directly, and so had to obviate some of the difficulties which their situation entailed by writing notes and leaving them where the other half-self would find them. The two alternating selves had to practise tolerance, but really disliked each other. B4 despised B1’s physical weakness and her idealism, and could not understand her wasting her time over books; Bi shrank from B4’s worldliness and found her selfish and hard. And yet here they were tied together, forced to share a single bodily frame, and by that fact often forced to commit each other in all kinds of disagreeable ways.

By the aid of hypnosis, Dr. Prince was able to dig deeper into the meaning of the case. To cut a long story short, he concluded that Br and B4 were really complementary parts of Miss B’s personality, organized round two sides of her nature which had long been in conflict—her altruistic impulses on the one hand, the more practical but egoistic side of her nature on the other. From earliest childhood the girl had been passionately attached to her mother ; but the mother had never cared for her, and had treated her unkindly. The conflict thus set up in the child’s mind between the unattainable happiness she longed for and the harsh world of actuality found expression in her day-dreaming,

where she could give free rein to her aspirations and suppress all thought of the practical reality which was always so unkind. The expansive altruism of adolescence ranged itself with the other battalions of idealism ; and doubtless any compromise with the worldly world of everyday was coloured by the suppressed conflict and made to appear despicable and hateful. The conflict must have been acute, with the forces of altruism and romance on the whole winning, when Miss B devoted herself to nursing. She undoubtedly gave full rein to her idealism in her thoughts of the young man to whom she grew attached; and when he failed to live up to the level of unreality which she has ascribed to him, and revealed himself as an inhabitant of the flesh-and-blood world which demands kisses as well as nebulous romance, the shock was so great that, in attempting to push him out of her thoughts, she automatically intensified the old-standing push against all the worldly, selfish, unromantic impulses and ideas, with which his behaviour was now associated. And under the intensified onslaught, this whole complex of ideas was pushed clean out of consciousness—dissociated from the rest of her mental life.

But though repressed, these tendencies were not extinguished. Everything that could feed them was switched away from the daylight of consciousness into the limbo of the Unconscious. The buried half-self could be stimulated, but could never act or express itself, save in obscure influence, upon the other halfself, exerted below the level of consciousness. ‘Then came the second shock, the mechanism of the mind was jarred, the repressive force weakened, and the repressed organization of ideas and desires sprang into conscious being as the new personality B4.

This story, which recalls Stevenson’s famous tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, would be remarkable enough, but it is made more so by the emergence of yet a third “personality? of quite a different type—childish, puckish, irresponsible—who christened herself Sally. ‘‘ She” appeared on the scene before B4, but at first only when Br was in hypnosis. Later, during the period of alternation between Br and Bg, she too sometimes managed to obtain possession of the waking body to the exclusion of the others. B4, on learning of Sally’s existence from Dr. Prince, and by letters from Br, made vigorous attempts to suppress her. Sally in return attempted her tricks on B4, but was less successful than with

799