386 PSYCHOLOGY. 



by the various doctors of tluit iustitutiou without any of 

 them having happened to awaken this very peculiar indi- 

 viduality.* 



With the return of all the sensibilities in the deeper 

 trance, these subjects turned, as it were, into normal 

 persons. Their memories in particular grew more exten- 

 sive, and hereupon M. Janet spins a theoretic generaliza- 

 tion. When a certain kind of sensation, he says, is abol- 

 ished in an hysteric patient, there is also abolished along with 

 it all recollection of past sensations of that kind. If, for ex- 

 ample, hearing be the anaesthetic sense, the patient becomes 

 unable even to imagine sounds and voices, and has to 

 speak (when speech is still possible) by means of motor or 

 articulatory cues. If the motor sense be abolished, the pa- 

 tient must wall the movements of his limbs hj first defining 

 them to his mind in visual terms, and must innervate his 

 voice by premonitory ideas of the way in which the words 

 are going to sound. The practical consequences of this 

 law would be great, for all experiences belonging to a 

 sphere of sensibility which afterwards became anaesthetic, 

 as, for example, touch, would have been stored away and 

 remembered in tactile terms, and w^ould be incontinently 

 forgotten as soon as the cutaneous and muscular sensibility 

 should come to be cut out in the course of disease. 

 Memory of them would be restored again, on the 

 other hand, so soon as the sense of touch came back. 

 Now, in the h3-steric subjects on whom M. Janet experi- 

 mented, touch did come back in the state of trance. Tiie 

 result was that all sorts of memories, absent in the ordinary 

 condition, came back too, and they could then go back and 

 explain the origin of many otherwise inexplicable things in 

 their life. One stage in the great convulsive crisis of hys- 

 tGro-ej)ilepsy, for example, is what French writers call the 

 phase des attitudes passionelles, in wdiich the patient, without 

 speaking or giving any account of herself, will go through 

 the outward movements of fear, anger, or some other emo- 

 tional state of mind. Usually this phase is, with each 



* See the interesting account by M. J. Janet in the Revue Scientifique, 

 May 19. 1888. 



