762 ABNORMAL PSYCHOLOGY 



consciousness, extra-conscious, concomitant, or better, dissociated, 

 are more exact terms. Now being dissociated from our personal 

 consciousness, we are ignorant of them. Our knowledge of the 

 existence of such dissociated mental states is largely derived from 

 a study of pathological , and artificially induced conditions, where 

 their presence can be positively and accurately determined. The 

 researches of recent years have proved very conclusively not only 

 that the mind may be split in two in such a way that certain groups 

 of ideas may be dissociated from the main consciousness, but that 

 a number of these dissociated states may become synthesized 

 among themselves, and that in this way is formed a second conscious- 

 ness capable of a certain amount of activity. This activity may be 

 manifested contemporaneously with that of our personal conscious- 

 ness. There is then a doubling of consciousness. The mind becomes 

 dual. Thus in the subject of disintegrated personality just referred 

 to, known as "The Misses Beauchamp," a secondary group of dis- 

 sociated states has existed for many years contemporaneously with 

 the personal consciousness. These secondary states are so extensive 

 and are so well organized into a personality that I have been able 

 to obtain an autobiography of the subconscious life of this concomi- 

 tant personality, disclosing a mental life which claims to have run 

 along side by side with, but unknown to, the personal self from child- 

 hood to the present day. The subject is twenty-eight years of age. 

 Similar though less extensive manifestations of a double life are 

 common as phenomena of hysteria. In the automatic writing and 

 speech of mediums and of psychological experiment, in the dowsing- 

 rod, in so-called post-hypnotic phenomena, and in the automatic acts 

 of artificial and spontaneous abstraction, we have the same mani- 

 festations of the splitting of the mind and the formation of an extra- 

 conscious self of which the personal consciousness is ignorant. The 

 dissociated states may or may not take on contemporaneous activity. 

 If they do so, the secondary phenomena thus produced are called 

 automatisms, as they occur outside the cognition of the personal self. 

 They form the subconscious fixed ideas of hysteria now so well 

 known. When the dissociated ideas include the kinesthetic and 

 sensory spheres we have hysterical paralyses and anesthesias. At 

 times these dissociated ideas break out in insurrections, kick up 

 didos, and turn our peaceful mental arrangements topsy-turvy. We 

 then have the hysterical attack. 



Now allowing for such differences of opinion as have been already 

 stated, there still seems to be a tacit acquiescence on the part of 

 many psychologists in the theory that in normal healthy minds 

 similar dissociated ideas of greater or less complexity have their 

 place and play a well-regulated part in the mental economy. In 

 other words, according to this theory, the normal mind is not a unity 



