The science of life : fully illustrated in tone and line and including many diagrams, стр. 827

HUMAN BEHAVIOUR AND THE HUMAN MIND

There seem to be all gradations between such a complete splitting of the personality as we have here described and a mild degree of dissociation between two sets of tendencies —the evasion of conflict between two unreconciled systems of ideas. Insome types and temperaments dissociation evidently happens much more readily than in others. In what we may call the easily-dissociated type, real alternations of personality may come into being without treatment by suggestion, although the abnormal state of affairs rarely lasts so long as in Dr. Prince’s case, and the two personalities are rarely so sharply defined or so balanced in antagonism.

Many cases reported in the papers as “loss of memory” are really due to the emergence of a dissociated and repressed part of the personality which suddenly comes to the surface and ousts the normal self. Such happenings are called “fugues”? by psychologists. Professor Janet reports on one such case. A boy lived with his mother who kept a little shop in a city not far from the sea. He hated the routine of the life, and used to spend much of his spare time sitting with sailors in the bars and taverns and listening to their stories of adventure. One day he disappeared from home. Some months later, a travelling tinker in another part of the country treated himself and the lad who worked for him to some wine, mentioning that it was such and such a feast-day. At this the boy exclaimed, “ It’s my mother’s birthday,” and remembered that he was the boy who used to sit with the sailors and hate his home-life. But with the revival of these memories came an effacement of the memory of the intervening months. Later investigation showed that he had worked his way to the coast on canal barges and, after various hardships, had taken up with the tinker. His repressed dreams of romance had taken shape in this adventure.

There are plenty of other well-authenticated cases, but we will avoid vain repetitions and go on to other aspects of our subject with those two important facts establishedthe fact that minds can be split, and the fact that such splitting is usually at least the result of mental conflict.

87 Flysteria And now we will take up an instance or so of hysteria. The term hysteria itself has a curious origin; it is derived from the

Greek word for womb, since the ancients (and the moderns also until after the six-

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teenth century) regarded it as a disease of women only, caused by disorders of the womb, or by its getting loose from its anchorage and moving about within the body so as to press on various vital organs! It is now used to cover certain types of mental disorder, in men as well as women, which we can best défine by illustrative description.

The symptoms are extremely varied. At one extreme we have what is usually known as “hysterics,” when the sufferer (generally a woman, and more often a woman of Latin than of Teutonic type) indulges, to quote Dr. Gordon, in an “ ebullition of emotional expression, accompanied by diffuse and purposeless motor activities.” And this may terminate in a regular convulsive fit, closely resembling the fits of epilepsy. Apparently we have here a release of energy, a physical ebullition, but the reality of the case is that there has been an inhibition of the controlling centres in the higher part of the brain and the lower centres have broken loose. At the other end of the scale to “hysterics”? are cases which simulate those of some real complaint —hysterical blindness or dumbness, or the paralysis of a finger or a limb, or painwithout there being anything organically wrong with the affected part. In the past, hysterical symptoms were often put down to mere malingering ; and many laymen still hold this view, not only about hysteria, but about the complaints usually referred to under the name of “ neurasthenia,” which we will presently describe ; they think them moral lapses.

But true hysteria is as much a disease as measles, though the one is caused by a germ, the other by a conflict in the mind. The popular idea has, however, a grain of truth in it; the hysterical symptom is the work of our Unconscious; and our Unconscious often employs it to keep us from doing what some part of our nature does not want to do. The difference is that in hysteria we, as conscious beings, may have no notion of the cause of our disability.

Let us take one or two cases. Dr. Gordon, in his book, The Neurotic Personality, quotes one of a young man who came back to England after the War suffering from a paralysis of one hand; the fingers were held stiffly out, and he could not worka fact which gave him the greatest anxiety about his future. He had been a prisoner in Germany, and the paralysis dated from a day when a heavy piece of iron fell on his hand. Five minutes’ explanation and suggestion, without even hypnosis, cured him

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