Before Memory
MULTIPLE PERSONALITY has been specifically Western, peculiar to the industrialized world, and consistently diagnosed in only this or that region and then only for a few decades at a time. It may nevertheless be a local manifestation of something universal: trance. People go into trance states in almost every society. We must be cautious about that, because “trance” is a Western word, a European concept used by anthropologists. From the Arctic Circle to the Cape of Good Hope, travelers encounter what seems to them to be similar behavior. Maybe “trance” is itself only a symptom of how Western eyes see the world. What trance “is,” or whether there is indeed one human universal behavior or state to be classified as trance, is an entirely open question. On the other hand, perhaps it is not just a human but a mammalian trait. I. P. Pavlov’s student F. A. Völgyesi seems to have hypnotized most of the mammals and has photographs to show it. Maybe trance goes further down the scale of evolution. Völgyesi has photographs of a hypnotized praying mantis, although one wonders if there was a touch of anthropomorphism there; he chose to hypnotize a praying insect.1
I suggest that “trance” may be as seen by Western eyes, but it may be more specific than that: as seen by speakers of English. The French medical name for trance was extase—which in that context did not strictly mean “ecstasy,” as some translators of old medical texts have supposed. But of course it still connotes a more exalted state than the comparatively neutral English word “trance.” Although French has an old word transe, it took over a word trance or transe from English, initially for the trance of mediums, who were in the first instance American or English. French anthropologists now tend to use this word for describing what Anglos call trance. German has taken on the word Trance, but the term used in medicine has often been, literally, deep unconsciousness. Trance, in short, may be a very parochial notion indeed.
Both DSM-IV and ICD-10 have sections on trance. ICD-10 of 1992 has “Trance and Possession Disorders.” DSM-IV more cautiously has “Dissociative Trance Disorder” listed as a topic for further study but has not declared it to be “disorder.” The definitions do not cover any trance whatsoever, but only trances not used in religious practices—as if “religious” were a clean cross-cultural concept. We see that cultural imperialism is not dead, even if it is now conducted by psychiatrists rather than missionaries. Anyone who thinks otherwise should reflect that DSM-IV and ICD-10 were issued in 1994 and 1992 respectively, and have the imprimatur of Washington and Geneva. Instead of seeing Western dissociative disorders as a local and specific form of trance, they suggest that trance is a subtype of a Western illness, dissociative disorders. Worse, they turn central and meaningful parts of other civilizations into pathologies. This is not done innocently. David Spiegel, chair of the committee that recommended the dissociative disorders entries for DSM-IV, justified the addition of trance with the assertion that although we in the West have multiple personality, most of the rest of the world has trance.2 This is true. But it is not a ground for making trance a disorder on a par with what has hitherto been a very unusual and peculiarly Western mental illness, dissociative disorders. The dissociative disorders were conceptualized as part of what, in chapter 15, I call memoro-politics. The concept of trance has nothing inherently to do with memory.
Hypnotism is one of the phenomena that Western culture tends to group under trance: the hypnotized person is said to be in a trance state. Hypnotism seems to be the one form of trance that can be subjected to experimental investigation. It is easy to hypnotize people, although some are more easily hypnotized than others. But hypnotism has usually been relegated to the status of a scientific “curiosity,” if not a “marvel.” Scientific curiosities are topics whose existence is acknowledged by scientists, but about which they can do nothing. The Brownian motion of molecules was a curiosity for a century. It was well known. When it was fashionable for nineteenth-century country houses to keep microscopes, one showed one’s guests the latest insect from the Amazon—and the Brownian motion. The photoelectric effect was a more recherché curiosity for eighty years. These effects were scientific because they could be observed with a certain amount of instrumentation; they were curiosities because they were isolated phenomena that fit no vision of the world. Hypnotism is a curiosity, more often seen on the stage than in the psychology laboratory. To use an old but honest word, common in seventeenth-century science but not used today, hypnotism is something of a marvel.
One way to silence a topic of research is to treat it as a curiosity or turn it into a marvel. Science abhors a marvel, not because marvels are vacuous, empty of meaning, but because they are too full of meaning, of hints, of feeling. Marvels are meanings out of control. You can expel a topic from science by making it a marvel. Conversely, if you are forced to look a marvel in the face, the thing to do is to bring it into the laboratory. There it will languish and die until the laboratory itself is cast out of science. Then it will become a marvel again, but it has been somehow rendered less potent because it has been declined a laboratory niche. That has been the fate of psychical research, or parapsychology.
Philosophers like to talk about “the aims of science.” Usually science has no self-conscious aims, but if ever there was a time that Science acted with concerted Aim, it was in the two commissions that worked in 1785 to determine the validity of animal magnetism, the predecessor of hypnotism. One commission was established by the Academy of Medicine in Paris, while the other was a royal commission over which Lavoisier presided, and which numbered Benjamin Franklin among its five commissioners. Mesmer had proposed a new theoretical entity, the magnetic fluid: he had laboratory practice; he had cures. He had all the trappings of science. But it was determined that there was no substance to his claims. Mesmerism was consigned to the level of popular marvel, where it played a significant role in underground antiestablishment movements leading up to 1789.3
By 1840 James Braid was trying to restore animal magnetism to science. He abandoned all talk of the fluid and renamed the practice neurhypnology or “scientific hypnotism.”4 But scientific it never became. It did briefly flourish in France at the time of Charcot and la grande hystérie, starting in 1878. By 1892 Pierre Janet was propounding a general therapeutics of hypnotism for restoring past memories and then resolving them. Freud first followed in Charcot’s footsteps, but then renounced hypnotism and developed other techniques for getting in touch with memories. Psychoanalysis has remained true to Freud, particularly in France during the dominance of Lacan, where hypnotism was the greatest taboo of all. America, always more attuned to popular movements and ill-disposed to authority, has been much more eclectic about hypnotism. Yet remarkably little in the way of research funds from the overall budgets for research psychology is dedicated to hypnotism or trance.
Anthropologists are fascinated by the subject, but although they say a great deal about trance behavior and its social roles, their discipline does not have the tools for studying the physiology of trance. They can tell us what initiation procedures are used to encourage trance in suitable people. They can tell us which drugs or medicines may help. For example, the people of Mayotte, Malagasy-speakers who live on a small island in the Indian Ocean, are Muslims. Hence they cannot touch alcohol. Certain festivities connected with trance and “spirit possession” begin with the participants consuming lots of cheap French perfume—mostly alcohol.5 Is the phenomenon of trance in Mayotte the same as shamanism in northern Canada? Anthropologists use the same word for both, and also for hypnotism; let us suppose they are right to do so. Under that supposition, the phenomenology of multiple personality has evolved within the general category of trance.
Western industrial society has no place for trance except in leisure or marginalized activities. We have psychic mediums. We have meditation. We have prayer, and we use music, both privately and en masse, to produce states that, when observed in other cultures, may be called trance. But these activities are not allowed to get in the way of the manufacturing and service industries. Perhaps on the old assembly lines workers did achieve a trance state, but the anthropologists don’t call it that, and men were fired on account of it. In contrast, Haida weavers, in the Queen Charlotte Islands off the coast of British Columbia, regularly went into trance states in the course of their repetitive, rhythmic duties, and this was a much venerated condition, making the material woven acquire a certain blessed quality.
To get a sense of the range of trancelike states in the modern world, consider the fashionable attention deficit disorder of childhood. The summer camp section of the New York Times Magazine is full of advertisements for camps that specialize in children with ADD. Cynics, not denying that some children have real problems, suggest that many children who once were allowed to daydream and were treated with tolerant amusement are now shunted off to the therapist in winter and to camp in summer. Trancelike conditions continue to be further pathologized; the future for absentminded professors is grim. The one place in modern America that trance states are socially approved is in commuters driving to and from work. Eco-reformers inveigh about the wastage of gasoline as they see endless commuter highways clogged with steel. They cannot understand why people will not carpool or use public transport. One reason is clear: trancelike states, with a private program of your own type of music or chatter, can be very nice. Even the pathologizers mentioned in chapter 7, who prove by tests that car-driving-dissociation is at one end of a line that ends in multiple personality, allow that dissociation while commuting is benign.
Trance had been declared a potential disorder, alongside multiple personality. A reverse account is waiting to be given, one that sees multiple personality as one way to use or abuse the ability to go into a trance. Our ignorance about trance, and our wish to make it pathological, probably means that we colonize our own past, destroying traces of the original inhabitants. That is, we read multiple personality into other uses of trance, those that appeared in earlier European societies, and find it very hard to see them as they were seen then, not as precursors of multiple personality disorder, inadequately diagnosed, but as cultural uses of trance with their own integrity.
Why do we marginalize trance? It is not only because we demand constant attention to the wheels of industry. Our exclusion of trancelike behavior seems to have preceded industrialization, even if it was less rigid in earlier times. West European and American societies are by and large examples of what Mary Douglas has called enterprise cultures.6 They are characterized by extremely high levels of individual responsibility and correspondingly great opportunities for individuals. You can succeed, but you can also fail and be abandoned by an enterprise society. That is very different from a hierarchical society, in which every person has a place. There you may become the lowest among people of your station, but there is no intelligible way of dropping out or being discarded, short of death.
Douglas applies her analysis to the Western idea of a person, using John Locke’s theory of personal identity as an example. Locke thought that there were distinctions to be made because there are really two concepts of identity. He chose the word “person” for what he called a forensic concept, having to do with memory and responsibility. He chose the word “man” for a concept based in part on bodily continuity. Douglas argues, in a way that I find compelling, that Locke’s notion of the person as forensic and as linked by chains of memory and responsibility is a characteristic of the enterprise culture. It involves a very different conception of selfhood than what she found in African communities with which she has worked. There people are happy to have four selves, and although trance is not a major part of their life, it has a respected role to play.
Locke’s forensic person is a relatively new figure who arises from new practices of commerce, law, property, and trade. Yet he is not altogether new, for as Locke himself makes plain, the forensic person has a role in the divine plan, thereby harking back to an earlier Christian conception according to which our destiny is eternal bliss or damnation. There will be a resurrection of the body, so that the same man (that is, the same bodily man or woman) will be found in the hereafter. However, the reward or punishment is prepared for the same person.
This spiritual force of Locke’s forensic concept of the person takes us at least as far back as the High Middle Ages, the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The French historian Alain Bourreau has recently argued that “sleepers” were a significant phenomenon during that period.7 These appear to be individuals who went into some sort of trance state, analogous to what was later called somnambulism. The sleepers were significant not because they were plentiful (we do not know) but because they created an intellectual, metaphysical, and virtually theological problem. Sleepers perform acts, often violent or at least forbidden, that are different in character and style from what they do in their waking lives. When they come to, after a sleeping episode, they have at most a confused awareness of what they have done. Yet their actions looked just like intentional actions. Hence, in the metaphysics of the day, a soul must have been acting. But what soul?
Thomists firmly insisted that there was but one soul per body. In scholastic psychology, the soul was the “substantial form” of the person. There was, Bourreau informs us, an anti-Thomist minority which held that a person, such as a sleeper, might have two substantial forms, one for each state. This was important for responsibility. Although sleepers seem not to have been considered in the civil law, they did receive attention in the canon law. A text of 1313 states that if a sleeper kills a man, he cannot be barred (in his normal state) from priestly functions on the grounds that he has committed a crime. The minority lost. Thus sleepers were marginalized; they became pathological. Insisting on only one substantial form per person ensures a clear delineation of forensic responsibility, both before earthly tribunals and at the Last Judgment.
Once marginalized by Establishment philosophy, the idea of the sleeper was outside jurisprudence. Bourreau argues that the idea of the sleeper with a second substantial form reemerged at the beginning of the witch craze and served as part of its underpinnings. According to Bourreau the suspect behavior that allowed the accusation of sorcery was typically the behavior of a sleeper. Bourreau’s analysis reminds us that large parts of Western culture have been suppressed, even in the West. The sleepers may have manifested a certain kind of trance state, but the meaning of that state can be understood only in its own context. It is altogether simplistic to conjecture that sleepers were multiples. It is slightly less simplistic to see late-twentieth-century multiples and late-twelfth-century sleepers as two different cultural manifestations of a more universal human potentiality for trance. To call them cultural manifestations is not to question their reality. Sleepers were real. Multiples are real. Trance is not more real than the conditions of multiple personality or “sleeping,” because reality does not come in degrees. Trance is simply a more general concept, covering many more kinds of unusual behavior. And to repeat, it may not be a lasting concept, for we may decide that there simply is no commonality to what we generously call trance states.
When we pass from sleepers to more recent times, it is easy to see somnambulism as a precursor of multiple personality. I have myself described some somnambules from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and shown how in the English-speaking world somnambulism merged into what was called double consciousness.8 Nowadays somnambulism means sleepwalking, which of course is what it is, etymologically speaking. But most of us have a very limited view of sleepwalking. We have the comic-strip picture of the boy in his pajamas with his arms straight out and eyes closed, bumping into things, or not. We are more familiar with people who talk in their sleep. Somnambulism, in the old use of the term, covered any form of behavior that resembled waking behavior but was done while “asleep” or “in a trance.” The entry “Somnambulisme” in Diderot’s Encyclopédie (1765–1766) includes the statement that people who suffer from somnambulism are “plunged into a profound sleep, but walk, speak, write, and carry out different actions, as if they were wide awake, and sometimes with even more intelligence and precision.”9 Eugène Azam, who after 1875 was physician to the most famous French multiple, Félida, described her second state as “total somnambulism.”10 By that he meant that she had all her faculties, all her wits about her; she was walking, chatting, sewing, loving, quarreling. She was in an alter state that she had entered by going through a trance-like switch. Azam identified that alter state with the phenomenon of somnambulism.
Alan Gauld’s truly encyclopedic History of Hypnotism rightly keeps animal magnetism distinct from hypnotism. He maintains the distinction even in his bibliography, which has about 850 items for animal magnetism and 1,250 for hypnotism.11 He takes seriously the possibility that two different kinds of things, each with its own cultural meanings, are involved. Yet despite the break, effected in part by the work and teaching of James Braid, there was a common terminology, that of somnambulism. Both the magnetized and the hypnotic states were called provoked or artificial somnambulism, as opposed to natural somnambulism. Gauld scrupulously considers whether provoked and natural somnambulism can be regarded, from a physiological point of view, as the same type of state. He very much doubts it. Culturally and scientifically they were seen as the same, just as today we can group both as examples of what the anthropologists call trance states.
The pairing of somnambulism and hypnotism deeply affected the future course of multiple personality. Advocates of multiple personality are very nervous about any connections with hypnotism—and quite rightly, because hypnotism is a curiosity, a marvel, and hence marginalized. To make plain that I am not trying to slander multiplicity by tagging it with hypnotism, it will be useful to quote at length a perceptive historical observation by Adam Crabtree. He is a clinical psychologist, whose practice includes much work with multiplicity. His philosophical book Multiple Man was a pioneering and innovative work in the field. He is no foe of multiple personality. In his most recent book he writes that
the discovery of magnetic sleep and the appearance of multiple personality are directly related…. In non-organic mental illness there are two elements: the disturbance itself, and the phenomenological expression of that disturbance, the symptom language of the illness…. Until the emergence of the alternate consciousness paradigm the only category to express the inner experience of an alien consciousness was that of possession, intrusion from the outside. With the rise of awareness of a second consciousness intrinsic to the human mind, a new symptom-language became possible. Now the victim could express (and society could understand) the experience in a new way…. This means that when Puységur discovered magnetic sleep, he contributed significantly to the form in which mental disturbance could manifest itself from then on.12
I would enter only one crucial caveat. Crabtree implies that there is one experience to be expressed, one that is expressed in a variety of symptom languages. That is, there is a sort of pure inner experience, prior to any description or social environment, that one just has. I cannot separate experience and expression as readily as Crabtree. His historical claim, as opposed to his ontological one, is along the right lines. In fact I would like to extend his idea of the symptom language. There were two symptom languages of precursors to multiple personality. One was primarily Continental, the language of spontaneous somnambulism, and strongly connected with the language of artificial somnambulism. The other symptom language, primarily British and American, was the language of double consciousness, which was largely separated from animal magnetism and hypnotism. This is particularly important because there is virtually no interest in memory within the symptom language of double consciousness.
Thus I discourage the tendency among enthusiasts for multiple personality to run all examples together. They occur, after all, in entirely different social and medical traditions; they have not only different names but also different meanings for the various concerned parties—observers, reporters, readers, the general public of different social classes, and, I hazard, the afflicted people themselves. Just as Gauld did not automatically identify animal magnetism with hypnotism, or the somnambulism in provoked somnambulism with that in spontaneous somnambulism, I will use old names such as “double consciousness.”
In 1816 Mary Reynolds was described as “a very extraordinary case of double consciousness, in a woman.” She has become the best-known English-speaking multiple of the nineteenth century. The very name “double consciousness” is rich in implications. Double means two, so we do not expect more than two alternative states—certainly not the seventeen or a hundred personality fragments current today. But the word “consciousness” is even more powerful, because it is passive. There is no suggestion of action or interaction, no hint of a rounded personality. In fact Mary Reynolds did have two strikingly different personalities, however we understand that word. The first brief account of her was titled “A Double Consciousness, or a Duality of Person in the same Individual,” but “duality of person” did not catch on.13 Double consciousness did, and it became the diagnostic category, in English, for most of the nineteenth century. It is an essential part of what Crabtree calls the symptom language.
French writers had no such diagnostic category except ones framed in terms of somnambulism. They took over the English expression quite late in the century, rendering it in the French expression double conscience (conscience translates “consciousness,” not the English “conscience”). They also moved on to new labels, such as alternating personality and doubling of the personality. Breuer and Freud famously asserted “that the splitting of consciousness which is so striking in the classical cases under the form of double conscience is present to a rudimentary degree in every hysteria, and that a tendency to such a dissociation, and with it the emergence of abnormal states of consciousness (which we shall bring together under the term ‘hypnoid’) is the basic phenomenon of this neurosis.”14
Mary Reynolds is not the oldest candidate for the earliest modern multiple personality. Two are known from 1791: a European one was well described by Henri Ellenberger, an American one by Eric Carlson. Those two authors between them supply excellent sources for subsequent multiples, and Michael Kenny has provided remarkable biographies of American nineteenth-century multiples in their social settings.15 Alan Gauld argues that although Ellenberger’s 1791 example has now become canonical in the multiple literature, one finds very similar accounts, mostly in the German-speaking world, rather earlier.16 I shall not repeat any of their findings, which have now been augmented by the major new books of Alan Gauld and Adam Crabtree. I wish instead briefly to indicate the prototype for double consciousness. I have in large measure done so already, by quoting Eugen Bleuler’s description of alternating personality, in chapter 9.
There was just as great a variety of cases covered by the label double consciousness as one finds today covered by multiple personality. We have seen that the search is on today for male multiples and for children with multiple personality. In earlier times we have no problem. Men are reported. There is a girl of eleven and a half, Mary Porter, who was treated in 1836. Her physician observed that “the cases of double consciousness, hitherto published, have mostly occurred in young females in whom the uterine functions were disturbed or, if in the male sex, where the nervous system has been weakened by excesses, terror, or other cerebral excitement.”17 That certainly sounds like boys who have had traumatic experiences. Recently advocates of multiplicity have thought that eating disorders may be manifestations of multiple personality. The anorexic has a persecutor alter who prevents her from eating. The bulimic patient binge-eats only in an alter state. There is a clear report of a nineteenth-century bulimic boy in just such terms.18 But just as there is an unmistakable prototype for the multiple during the 1980s, as presented in chapter 2 above, so there is a very distinct prototype for double consciousness. This is not the occasion to describe endless cases and distill a prototype. Instead two long quotations, separated by a quarter of a century, will do the job.
One comes from a physiology textbook by Herbert Mayo that was to become a standard reference for some decades.19 Mayo was a magnetizer, author of On the Truths Contained in Popular Superstitions with an Account of Mesmerism. Mayo’s young woman had an attractive feature not often noticed in reports of double consciousness or its successor disorders. She had a sense of humor.
This young lady has two distinct states of existence: during the time that the fit is on her, which varies from a few hours to a few days, she is occasionally merry and in spirits, occasionally she appears in pain, and rolls about in uneasiness, but in general she seems so much herself that a stranger coming into the room would not remark anything extraordinary. She amuses herself with reading and working, sometimes plays on the piano better than at other times, knows everybody, and converses rationally, and makes very accurate observations on what she has seen and read. The fit leaves her suddenly and then she forgets everything that has passed during it and imagines that she has been asleep, and sometimes that she has dreamt of any circumstance that made a vivid impression on her. During one of these fits she was reading one of Miss Edgeworth’s tales and had in the morning been reading one of them to her mother; she went for a few minutes to the window and suddenly exclaimed, “Mamma, I am quite well, my headache is gone”: returning to the table she took up the open volume which she had been reading five minutes before, and said “what book is this,” she turned over the leaves, looked at the frontispiece and replaced it on the table; seven or eight hours after, when the fit returned, she asked for the book, went on at the very paragraph where she had left off, and remembered every circumstance of the narrative; and so it is always, as she reads one set of books during one state and another during the other. She seems conscious of her state, for she said one day, “Mamma, this is a novel, but I may safely read it: it will not hurt my morals for when I am well I shall not remember a word of it.”
This is very much the prototype of double consciousness. The literature is full of young women who switch from the docile to the daring, from the melancholy to the merry. Most of them come from the sedate parlor of a comfortable but not extravagant family. Notice that they do what they are supposed to be accomplished at better than in their normal state. For this young lady, that means the piano. Mary Reynolds had the same general features. Michael Kenny suggests that in general the young women implicitly switched in order to act out a rebellious life that they could not get away with in the normal course of events. This aspect of the disorder is not peculiar to women. Eric Carlson’s case of 1791 has much the same form. A Mr. Miller was a young man in Springfield, Massachusetts, son of a military man, who switched and undertook high jinks. Just as women were better at “what they were supposed to be good at,” so was Mr. Miller. In a man’s case, virtuosity would not be expressed on a parlor piano. Male prowess was called for; he ought to become something of an athlete. And so he did—he had “more agility” in his somnambulistic state.20
My second example is from a discussion of personal identity by a well-known expert on mental illness, J. Crichton Browne. After reviewing many of the canonical cases from the literature he concluded with a new one taken from his father’s casebook.
J. H——, about two years ago, was affected with hysteria, previous to a great constitutional change. The symptoms noticed were of globus and spasmodic flexure of the fingers. The phenomena which now exist followed this state, and were not modified by the establishment of the constitutional change alluded to. For many hours each day the patient is in what may be called her normal condition; for nearly an equal number she is in an abnormal state. She has no recollection during the one what passes or what she has done, or acquired, or suffered, during the other. There is no tie or connection between the two periods. The somnambulic state is ushered in by a yawn, a sensation of globus, and the dropping of the eyelids, which remain half-closed during its continuance, but do not obstruct vision. It generally passes away by the ejection of a mouthful of phlegm. Between these two acts, the yawn and the eructation, the woman is vivacious, more mirthful than when herself, knits, reads, sings, converses with relatives and acquaintances, and is said to display greater shrewdness than at other times. Her letters are better in composition and penmanship than she can produce when awake or in her natural state. This may be called her state of clairvoyance. When aroused, she has no recollection whatever of anything that has taken place. She has forgotten the persons she has seen, the songs she has learned, the books she has read, and if she resumes reading it is at the place at which she stopped when in her natural condition. When she reads in her abnormal state the same thing happens. The development of the fit is generally sudden and unexpected, but occasionally it is determined by noise or the movement of articles in the room, such as the fall of a poker or an alteration in the position of the chair. Her bodily health is perfect; all her functions are regular and vigorous. She has lately complained of headache after the cessation of the somnambulism, and upon one occasion she described the pain as confined to one side of her head.21
I have deliberately chosen two quotations that say the woman “forgets,” “has forgotten,” or “has no recollection.” The authors quite naturally use the language of forgetting. But it is of little significance, and other authors use other terms, such as “has no awareness” or “does not know” what was done in the alter state. Memory was simply not problematic in the symptom language of double consciousness. There is a remarkable proof of this. These and other physicians tell us that the woman does not remember, in her normal state, what happened during her trance or somnambulistic state. But they do not inquire whether, in her abnormal state, she knows all about the normal one. In Mayo’s case I infer that she does know about her normal state. She at least knows that when she comes out of her fit, she will not remember the novel she reads when under the influence of the fit.
Accounts of Mary Reynolds make plain that she has what the French were later to call “two-way amnesia.” That is, neither state knew what happened in the other state. French authors contrasted this to their own prototypical cases, in which there was just one-way amnesia. The British and American writers were so indifferent to questions of memory that they did not even bother to say whether the forgetting went both ways, or only one way. What then were they interested in, aside from the sheer curiosity value of these cases? They were fascinated by the character switch. The following words are regularly used to describe the altered state: lively, vivacious, pert, gay, mirthful, impudent, mischievous, forward, passionate, and vindictive. Those words are at the core of the prototype of double consciousness.
Another concern of the British doctors was to show that alters did not have extraordinary sensory powers. The French literature of somnambulism, being so intimately linked to mesmerism and then on to the occult, had many stories of abnormal perception. It began innocently enough, with the observation that somnambules got around just fine in the dark. Then they were able to read and write in the dark, and in no time at all could see at a distance, or into the future. That is the origin of our word “clairvoyance” for psychic abilities to tell the future. The British physicians, mostly products of the Edinburgh medical school with its strong tradition of Scottish empirical and so-called commonsense philosophy, did not believe such ideas for a moment. Early in the century they were at pains to refute them. When Crichton Browne speaks of the “clairvoyant” state of J. H. he means simply her trance state, with no suggestion of heightened sensory powers. But there was a corresponding fascination, among the British doctors, with the increase in ability, at piano or agility, at Greek or penmanship, that their patients exhibited. There were further interests—for example, in the connection, if any, of double consciousness with the dual hemispheres of the brain.22 These male physicians saw chiefly female cases of double consciousness and treated them in a gendered way. They described their patients in terms of hysteria, although not the florid, Charcotian hysteria I shall describe in the next chapter. They noticed that their young female patients lost their second consciousness when their menstrual periods began, and hence connected the illness with “uterine” disorder.23
Memory and forgetting were simply unimportant to what was known, in the English-speaking world, as double consciousness. This is an absolutely fundamental contrast with the French cases after 1875. The chief reason for this is that memory had not yet become an object of scientific knowledge. That is my radical thesis that will be increasingly confirmed in the following chapters. But there was also a parochial reason. British and American double consciousness was not, in general, connected with animal magnetism or hypnotism. It is true that Herbert Mayo, author of my first version of the prototype of double consciousness, was a magnetizer, but he does not appear to have hypnotized his patient on this occasion. Double consciousness fascinated foes of hypnotism. Thus the longtime editor of the British medical journal The Lancet, Thomas Wakley, was so antagonistic to hypnotism that its finest historian, Alan Gauld, in a rare display of irritation, calls him “the egregious Wakley.” Yet in 1843 Wakley was making a plea for the study of double consciousness in order to reduce metaphysical dogmatism about personal identity.24
Unlike their British counterparts, Continental students of magnetism or hypnotism paid keener attention to memory. It had early been noted that subjects awakened from a hypnotic trance did not remember what had happened. The connection with spontaneous, or nervous, or hysterical, somnambulism (as doubling was variously called in France at the time) is particularly clear in a report published in 1823, by J.-F.-A. Bertrand. He described a prepubertal girl of thirteen or fourteen years of age. She had four states that he classified as follows: (1) magnetic somnambulism, (2) nocturnal somnambulism, viz. during ordinary sleep, (3) nervous or hysteric somnambulism, and (4) waking somnambulism. These were one-way amnesic in order, as listed; that is, (1) recalled all four states, while state (2) recalled states (2), (3), and (4). The waking state (4) knew nothing of the other three states.25
The French animal magnetizers did not have much to say about memory in general. Their theoretical project was to understand the magnetic fluid, not memory. But at least memory was present to them. The symptom language of spontaneous somnambulism included memory because of its connection with provoked somnambulism, otherwise known as animal magnetism. The symptom language of double consciousness made only passing reference to memory, perhaps because it was largely cut off from the literature of magnetism and hypnotism.
I shall not describe the French prototype for spontaneous somnambulism because it had relatively little effect on the French wave of multiple personality after 1875. Partly because hypnotism had been so discredited in medical circles before its revival by Charcot in 1878, earlier French prototypes were ignored, and French authors referred to British or American works, not those in their own language. I must mention one case, however, because it has recently assumed some prominence: Despine’s Estelle, treated in 1836. As quoted in chapter 3, Kluft has stated that before he learned of other American workers in the field, Despine had been his teacher. Hence Despine is worth attending to today, as mentor of one of today’s most influential students of multiple personality. Despine also serves as a fairly typical example of the doctors (whom he himself cites in abundance) who treated spontaneous somnambulism by the use of animal magnetism.
Estelle L’Hardy was eleven and a half years old when she came to the attention of C.H.A. Despine in 1836. By coincidence, she was an exact contemporary of the above-mentioned Mary Porter, treated in the same year in London. Both girls got better after they entered puberty. Mary’s doctor thought that the problem was one of the onset of puberty, and although he describes his treatment, he makes no claims for its efficacy. Nature took its course. The story of Estelle is radically different, for her physician was a great magnetizer and the medical inspector at the fashionable spa in Aix-le-Savoie.26 The spa was filled with a great many persons, mostly women, with remarkable ailments. Edward Shorter, the highly critical historian of psychosomatic illnesses, notes that Despine had already, in 1822, described a woman with six distinct states, one of which was “an incomplete magnetic state which gave the patient an interior feeling of second existence.” Having examined the goings-on in such spas, Shorter writes that “the context of Estelle’s multiple personality disorder was therefore the theater of florid magnetism and catalepsy then prevailing in Aix. Many of the other patients were producing bizarre symptoms; it must have seemed to an intelligent young girl rather the order of the day that she bring forth some of her own.”27
Catherine Fine, past president of the ISSMP&D, sees things quite differently.28 Despine, in her reading of his text, was a brilliant clinician, precursor of the modern understanding and treatment of multiple personality. The diary of Estelle’s mother shows that the girl communicated with a heavenly host of angels—no shortage of alters there. At a more day-to-day level she went into trances; she had crises during sleep and terrible somatic symptoms of paraplegia, anesthesia, hyperesthesia, and more. She did alternate between her ordinary state and her crisis (état de crise). In crisis she was able to swim in ice water, whereas in her ordinary state she was paralyzed and complained constantly of cold, thanks to the hyperesthesia of her back. Under hypnosis she was fine.
Evidently theory determines not only how we see the world and disease today, but how we interpret old texts. Shorter, fierce skeptic about psychosomatic diseases, finds L’Hardy almost indistinguishable from innumerable other cases of the day that he has read. Fine, a psychologist in the forefront of research on multiple personality, reading a single text, thinks that Despine was a remarkable healer. Perhaps one could agree with Fine and yet still, after a careful reading of materials, see Estelle L’Hardy as a spoiled brat from Switzerland who loved publicity, manipulated the self-indulgent community of a French spa, and took advantage of the fashionable charlatan who was medical inspector there. She certainly had her minutes of fame in 1836 (crowds turned out to watch her, in paralysis or trance, being transported through the mountains in a basket on her way to the spa) or 1837 (she starred in the local newspapers when she went home). None of this means that she was not a multiple; plenty of multiples are show-offs.
No matter how we interpret this case, it was of almost no immediate importance to the history or symptom language of multiple personality. Estelle was quickly forgotten and remained almost unknown until rediscovered by Janet in the early 1890s. Yet she may have had a delayed effect. In 1919 Janet confided that “at the time I was studying complete somnambulism”—what Azam called total somnambulism—“I was not yet acquainted with Charles Despine’s book, and did not read it until much later…. Although there was no direct influence exercised by Despine’s record of Estelle, it is possible that Despine’s book had an influence on my work, in an indirect way.” This is because Janet’s most famous early patient, who made his reputation, was one Léonie, who had been in the hands of magnetizers, off and on, for what seems like forever. She was under the care of a Dr. Perrier before she was brought, in 1885, to Le Havre for Janet to study. “Despine’s book was certainly known to Perrier of Caen, who quotes it in his records…. It is likely enough that Perrier had induced such states [of complete somnambulism] in her, and had made them habitual to her.”29 Interestingly, what Janet emphasized after his first reading of Despine was that his study of Estelle was “one of the first and most remarkable descriptions of the mental state of a hysterical.”30 He referred to her a total of eleven times in different parts of that work, always to illustrate the somatic accompaniments of hysteria (the so-called conversion symptoms). As we shall see, the most important feature of French multiples after 1875 was that they had florid hysterical symptoms. That was the historically important way in which Estelle is a precursor of French multiples, post-1875.