172 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 



The movement of thought is always towards system and unity. 

 Thought abhors hard-and-fast distinctions. Thought is baffled by cases 

 of multiple personality because they are so different from the ordinary 

 cases of everyday life. If we can build a bridge between one group of 

 cases and the other, then we may feel that we are likely to have not only 

 a more satisfying but a true explanation of the situation. 



We must therefore approach the question of dissociation from the 

 normal side — as manifested in a relatively normal mind. No mind is 

 completely normal, since no mind completely solves its problems from 

 day to day, and it is the failure to solve mental problems which is one 

 of the general causes of the symptoms of psycho-neurosis and mental 

 disease. Dissociation and multiple personality are not to be contrasted 

 with association and mental unity. Pathological dissociation should be 

 contrasted with the dissociationist processes of the normal mind. It 

 should be regarded as a failure of the normal process of dissociation. 



The unity of the normal mind, although it is there from the beginning, 

 is a striving towards a more and more complete association ; it constitutes 

 an urge to a greater and greater degree of completeness of systematisation 

 and inclusiveness, but it is never really complete. In the most normal 

 mind there is a falling away from complete unity. There is in the activity 

 of this unitary mind not only a normal process of disjunction or dis- 

 sociation, but also a certain degree of abnormal dissociation. In cases of 

 multiple personality this abnormal dissociation has become so pronounced 

 as to be apparent to the whole world. The process of deep analysis 

 or psycho-analysis fails to reveal cases of thorough-going multiplicity, 

 and the reason is that the process itself is a process of unification. As the 

 individual is being analysed, the failures of adaptation in his past life are 

 cleared up, so that his mind is enabled to work more and more normally. 

 Analysis is not a good term for this process. It is more than analysis, it 

 is a process of self-revelation or autognosis. The individual learns to know 

 himself better, and in the process of analysis there is actual development 

 of the mind going on. There is a development in the direction of the 

 normal and the unitary. Any dissociation that is encouraged by the 

 method is a normal dissociation, not an abnormal dissociation. It is 

 only another expression of the same truth when we say that repressions 

 are overcome in the process of analysis, because repressions are patho- 

 logical dissociations — dissociations that are not complete and not 

 thorough going. 



In contrast with this process of autognosis, the process of hypnotic 

 investigation carries with it a tendency to abnormal dissociation. A 

 person who is easily hypnotised is a person who is already, to some extent, 

 dissociated ; in hypnotising him we take a wedge, as it were, and drive 

 it into his mind and split him up still more. No wonder the results give 

 us an appearance of dissociation ; but it would be very dangerous for us 

 to take these results at their face value and draw inferences from them 

 as to the structure of the normal mind, or even of the mind of the person 

 we have been experimenting with. This general line of criticism seems 

 valid as against such a theory as that of Prof. W. McDougall in the last 

 chapter of his ' Outline of Abnormal Psychology,' in which he works 

 out a theory of the Self as a system of monads which form a hierarchy, 

 in which there is one dominant monad, the conscious self, and a whole 



