170 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 



because he has not only to accept, but also to neglect or reject, and this 

 neglecting or rejecting involves dissociation, just as acceptance involves 

 association. 



As regards dissociation in pathological cases, the writers of the last 

 generation thought of this in terms of associationist psychology, and in 

 the doctrine of Prof. Pierre Janet one finds that standpoint still apparent. 

 In his description of cases of hysteria and multiple personality, he implies 

 a general background of explanation, according to which personality may 

 be regarded as a synthesis of mental presentations some of which can be 

 split off from the main mass. This view is similar to the colonial view of 

 personality which we find in the writings of Ribot. But if we remind 

 ourselves of the fact that experience involves an act of experiencing, we 

 see that the situation is rather different. The power of recall is an 

 essential aspect of conscious memory. On the other hand, unconscious 

 memories are unconscious or latent mental activities directed towards 

 past events. They are not passive, but involve a certain amount of 

 mental energy. And so we pass from Pierre Janet's theory to the theory 

 of Prof. Sigmund Freud, and we find that the dissociation which is taken 

 as a fact in Janet's theory is explained in Freud's theory in terms of 

 mental conflict and repression. These memories become inaccessible to 

 the individual because the mental tendencies corresponding to them are 

 in conflict with other tendencies of the individual and incompatible with 

 his more fundamental interests. So they are extruded by an active 

 process of repression — they are barred from consciousness. 



That process of repression and extrusion, though pathological in these 

 cases, need not be necessarily so. We must not look upon extrusion itself 

 as essentially pathological. It is because we have restricted the word 

 dissociation so much to the pathological side that we find it so incom- 

 prehensible to us. It is because we have thought too much in terms of 

 mental unity that cases of multiple personality seem to be inexplicable. 

 Actually the most normal mind is a multiplicity. We are all many selves. 

 We have to face the world from many different angles. We have many 

 different interests. Interests in the most normal mind may conflict and 

 be incompatible with one another. And it is a condition of mental 

 health that such conflict can be resolved by elimination or by a higher 

 synthesis. What makes the dissociation of multiple personality 

 pathological is that the elimination is not complete — that dissociation in 

 normal mental activity is a successful rejection, and that dissociation in a 

 pathological case is unsuccessful — is an incomplete and therefore an 

 unsuccessful rejection. A tendency that is pathologically repressed is, as 

 it were, rejected and accepted at the same time — rejected by clear con- 

 sciousness, but still clung to by the mind. 



It is misleading to look upon the problem of mental dissociation and 

 multiple personality as something standing by itself, as if we understood 

 mental unity and were perplexed by the appearance of multiplicity. 

 Multiplicity is an aspect of the normal mind, just as much as unity is, and 

 unity needs explaining just as much as multiplicity does. Those two 

 problems must be solved together, and kept in relation to one another 

 all through. 



Many of the classical cases of multiple personality are fully explained 



