PLURAL STATES OF BEING. 539 



PLURAL STATES OF BEING.* 



By ALFKED BINET. 



THE variations of personality found in diseased subjects take 

 on a great number of forms, of which, the phenomenon re- 

 sembling the presence of two or more personalities in the same 

 individual or " multiple personality " is the subject of our 

 present special study. It is common in hysteria, and the hys- 

 terical cases are those which have been most adequately in- 

 vestigated. These cases are often described as cases of som- 

 nambulism. In popular usage somnambulism is the state of 

 those who rise in the night and perform automatic and even 

 intelligent acts without waking. They dress themselves, perhaps, 

 resume their day's work, solve a problem to which they had 

 vainly sought the solution before, then return to bed and to sleep 

 again; the next morning they have no memory of having been 

 up in the night. Indeed, they are often much surprised to see a 

 piece of work now finished which had been unfinished the even- 

 ing before. Or they walk on the roof or perform some other 

 equally startling feat. Authors are not as yet entirely agreed 

 upon the nature of this sleep-walking, but the general tendency of 

 the day is to admit that it covers a mass of irregular phenomena 

 which resemble one another in appearance only, being really 

 quite distinct in nature. In these phenomena we may see an 

 example of double personality. These noctambulists are two per- 

 sons. The person who rises in the night is entirely distinct from 

 the one who is awake during the day, since the latter has no 

 knowledge or memory of anything that has happened during the 

 night. But it is not possible to make an adequate analysis of 

 this state ; the elements are too obscure. 



Another form of natural somnambulism is " daytime " som- 

 nambulism, or vigilambulism, and concerns hysterical patients 

 who possess, besides their normal and regular life, another psy- 

 chological existence or second state, so to speak, of which they 

 retain no memory in their normal condition. The peculiar char- 

 acteristic of this second state is that it constitutes a complete 

 psychological existence ; the subject lives the everyday life, his 

 mind is alive to all ideas and perceptions, and he is not delirious. 

 Uninformed persons would never know that the subject is in a 

 state of somnambulism. 



The best examples that can be cited of the somnambulism that 



* From Alterations of Personality. By Alfred Binet. Translated by Helen Green Bald- 

 win, witli Notes and a Preface by J. Mark Baldwin. (International Scientific Series.) In 

 press of D, Appleton & Co. 



