THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF. 387 



patient, a thing so stereotyped as to seem automatic, and 

 doubts liave even been expressed as to whether any con- 

 sciousness exists whilst it lasts. When, however, the 

 patient Lucie's tactile sensibility came back in the deeper 

 trance, she explained the origin of her hysteric crisis in a 

 great fright which she had had when a child, on a day 

 when certain men, hid behind the curtains, had jumped out 

 upon her ; she told how she went through this scene again 

 in all her crises ; she told of her sleep-walking fits through 

 the house when a child, and how for several months she 

 had been shut in a dark room because of a disorder of the 

 eyes. All these were things of which she recollected no- 

 thing when awake, because they were records of experiences 

 mainly of motion and of touch. 



But M. Janet's subject Leonie is interesting, and 

 shows best how with the sensibilities and motor impulses 

 the memories and character will change. 



"This woman, whose life sounds more like an improbable romance 

 than a genuine history, has had attacks of natural somnambulism since 

 the age of three years. She has been hypnotized constantly by all sorts 

 of persons from the age of sixteen upwards, and she is now forty-five. 

 Whilst her normal life developed in one way in the midst of her poor 

 country surroundings, her second life was passed in drawing-rooms and 

 doctors' offices, and naturally took an entirely different direction. To- 

 day, when in her normal state, this poor peasant woman is a serious 

 and rather sad person, calm and slow, very mild with every one, and 

 extremely timid : to look at her one would never suspect the personage 

 which she contains. But hardly is she put to sleep hypnotically when 

 a metamorphosis occurs. Her face is no longer the same. She keeps 

 her eyes closed, it is true, but the acuteness of her other senses supplies 

 their place. She is gay, noisy, restless, sometimes insupportably so. 

 She remains good-natured, but has acquired a singular tendency to irony 

 and sharp jesting. Nothing is more curious than to hear her after a 

 sitting when she has received a visit from strangers who wished to see 

 her asleep. She gives a word-portrait of them, apes their manners, 

 pretends to know their little ridiculous aspects and passions, and for 

 each invents a romance. To this character must be added the posses- 

 sion of an enormous number of recollections, whose existence she does 

 not even suspect when awake, for her amnesia is then complete. . . . 

 She refuses the name of Leonie and takes that of Leontine (Leonie 2) 

 to which her first magnetizers had accustomed her. ' That good woman 

 is not myself,' she says, ' she is too stupid! ' To herself, Leontine or 

 Leonie 2, she attributes all the sensations and all the actions, in a word 

 all the conscious experiences which she has undergone in somnamhulism. 



