THE SELF AND ITS DERANGEMENTS. 813 



Great changes in one's circumstances and surroundings are 

 often connected with similar changes in the self-consciousness. 

 A journey to a foreign land, the sudden death of a relative or 

 friend, a great disappointment in love or in business, or an equally 

 great and unexpected success — all these necessarily involve the 

 demolition of many of one's most permanent habits, plans, and 

 expectations. There may follow a period of confusion in which 

 the self of the present moment looks back upon the self of the 

 past as a very different being. 



Analogous changes take place normally in the course of life 

 with the constant addition of new experiences and development 

 of new instincts. The sense of self usually changes impercepti- 

 bly to keep pace with these new growths, but sometimes the 

 change can be felt. The young man or young girl sometimes 

 notices it during or at the close of the period of adolescence, and 

 we frequently become conscious of it at other times, when some- 

 thing brings very clearly to mind the events of years ago. Not 

 long since I ran across a book over which I used to pore as a 

 child, but had not seen for years ; when I opened it, my present 

 self for just one moment fell away, and I was again a child of 

 eight. It was a strange experience, and the childish self that then 

 for a second or two lived again was much more unlike the present 

 I than I commonly think of it as being. 



If our memories are constituent parts of our self -conscious- 

 ness, it follows that any extensive abolition of memories will im- 

 pair or destroy a man's sense of self. This is so common a phe- 

 nomenon that I need not quote illustrations. More interesting 

 are those cases in which certain portions of a person's memory 

 are abolished and restored at varying intervals, especially when 

 illusory memories and other delusions are commingled with the 

 memories that remain. In such cases we get true modifications of 

 the patient's personality. One of the best known of these cases is 

 that of Ansel Bourne.* 



Mr. Bourne lived in a village near Providence, R. I. On Janu- 

 ary 17, 1887, he went to Providence, drew five hundred and fifty- 

 one dollars with which to pay for a farm he intended to buy, and 

 then disappeared. About two weeks later he appeared in Norris- 

 town. Pa., styling himself A. J. Brown, rented a room, divided it 

 in two by curtains, lived and slept in the rear room, and opened a 

 little shop in the front for the sale of toys, confectionery, notions, 

 etc. During the six weeks he lived there no one noted anything 

 unusual in his demeanor. 



"On the morning of Monday, March 14th, about five o'clock, he 



* This account is abridged from Dr. Richard Hodgson's paper, A Case of Double Per- 

 sonality, in The Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. vii, pp. 221-257. 



