For instance, one of four cards is made invisible to a hypnotised person by suggestion; he thereupon names the other three. A pencil is placed in his hand with the instruction to write down all the cards lying there; he correctly adds the fourth one.[1]
In the aura of his hystero-epileptic attacks a patient of Janet’s[2] invariably had a vision of a conflagration, and whenever he saw an open fire he had an attack; indeed, the sight of a lighted match was sufficient to bring about an attack. The patient’s visual field on the left side was limited to 30°, the right eye was shut. The left eye was fixed in the middle of a perimeter whilst a lighted match was held at 80°. The hystero-epileptic attack took place immediately. Despite the extensive amnesia in many cases of double consciousness, the patients’ behaviour does not correspond to the degree of their ignorance, but it seems rather as if a deeper instinct guided their actions in accordance with their former knowledge. Not only this relatively slight amnesic dissociation, but the severe amnesia of the epileptic twilight-state, formerly regarded as irreparabile damnum, does not suffice to cut the inmost threads which bind the ego-complex in the twilightstate to the normal ego. In one case the content of the twilight- state could be grafted on to the waking ego-complex.[3]
Making use of these experiments for our case, we obtain the helpful hypothesis that the layers of the unconscious beyond reach of the dissociation endeavour to present the unity of automatic personality. This endeavour is shattered in the deeper-seated and more elemental disturbance of the hysterical attack,[4] which prevents a more complete synthesis by the tacking on of associations which are to a certain extent the most original individual property of supraliminal personality. As the Ivenes dream emerged it was fitted on to the figures accidentally in the field of vision, and henceforth remains associated with them.
- ↑ Dessoir, “Das Doppel-Ich,” II. Aufl., 1896, p. 29.
- ↑ Janet, “L’anesthésie hystérique,” Arch. d’Neur., 69, 1892.
- ↑ Graeter, Zeit. f. Hypnotismus, VIII., p. 129.
- ↑ The hysterical attack is not a purely psychical process. By the psychic processes only a pre-formed mechanism is set free, which has nothing to do with psychic processes in and for itself (Karplus, Jahr. f. Psych., XVII.).
