J.— PSYCHOLOGY. 173 



number of subsidiary monads that are, in a normal mind, adequately 

 subordinated to the chief monad and are in relation to the chief monad 

 through telepathy 2 ; but in a case of multiple personality one of these 

 subsidiary monads may break loose and become insubordinate. This is 

 an ingenious theory, and it may be true, but in the present state of our 

 knowledge it would seem to be a case of explaining obscurum per obscurius. 

 Telepathy may be a fact, but it is something about whose conditions we 

 know next to nothing, and therefore not very suitable to take as a funda- 

 mental factor in an explanation of the working of the mind. 



The mind can act at different levels on different occasions and under 

 different circumstances. In many of the classical cases of multiple 

 personality, the subsidiary personalities represent" a regression to more 

 juvenile forms of behaviour and of ethical valuation. This is clearly 

 apparent in ' Sally Beauchamp ' of the Miss Beauchamp case, and in the 

 ' B ' personality of the ' B.C.A.' case (Morton Prince). Such mani- 

 festations are not accurately described as ' split-off ' personalities. 

 Indeed, any spatial metaphor is inappropriate. In other cases the 

 tendency to dramatisation, natural to the human mind, may play an 

 important part. Mutually incompatible ideas of character may be 

 simultaneously or alternately aimed at, and identifications in early life, 

 based on love and admiration for relatives, &c, may introduce incompati- 

 bilities which reveal themselves under circumstances of stress in later 

 years as the grounds of pathological dissociation. 



As regards the problem of the removal of pathological mental dis- 

 sociation in hysterical patients, much was learnt from the wide range of 

 cases dealt with during the war. While treating shell-shock cases in 

 the field in France, I found that a large proportion of the cases showed a 

 more or less extensive amnesia for events that had occurred immediately 

 after the shell explosion. These patients were easily hypnotised, and 

 under light hypnosis the lost memories could be immediately restored. 

 But I soon discovered that if I recalled at the same time the terrifying 

 emotion that had originally belonged to these experiences, there was a 

 tendency for the accompanying hysterical symptoms — deafness, mutism, 

 tremors, paralysis, contractures, &c. — to disappear spontaneously, without 

 the necessity of giving explicit suggestions to this end. The more com- 

 plete I made the working-off of the emotion, or the ' ab-reaction,' to use 

 Breuer's original term, the more complete was the recovery. In cases 

 seen by me previously in England, I had also restored lost memories by 

 light hypnosis, but had not produced intense emotional revival and had 

 not seen collateral symptoms disappear. But again, towards the end of 

 the war, I was seeing more chronic cases in Scotland, and then found that 

 amnesias of longer standing could be cleared up with accompanying 

 ab-reaction of the emotion of fear ; and that with the ab-reaction there 

 was observable that tendency for the collateral symptoms to disappear 

 at the same time, such as I had observed so frequently in France. 



These are observed facts, and I endeavoured to show in a paper in 

 the British Medical Journal some years ago 3 that they could be explained 

 in terms of a theory of reassociation. The amnesic patients fresh from 



- Unlike the monads of Leibniz, which ' have no windows,' and are in a relation 

 of pre-established harmony. 



s « Hypnotism, Suggestion, and Dissociation,' British Medical Journal, June 14, 1919. 



