228 P8YCH0L0GT. in conversation with a third party, her anaesthetic hand would write simple answers to questions whispered to her by himself. " Do you hear?" he asked. " No,"" was the uncon- sciously written reply. "But to answer you must hear." " Yes, quite so." "Then how do you manage?" "I don't know." " There must be some one who hears me." " Yes." " Who ?" " Someone other than Lucie." " Ah ! another per- son. Shall we give her a name ?" " No." " Yes, it will be more convenient." " Well, Adrienne, then." " Once bap- tized, the subconscious personage," M. Janet continues, " grows more definitely outlined and displays better her psychological characters. In particular she shows us that she is conscious of the feelings excluded from the conscious- ness of the primary or normal personage. She it is who tells us that I am pinching the arm or touching the little finger in which Lucie for so long has had no tactile sensa- tions." * In other cases the adoption of the name by the second- ary self is more spontaneous. I have seen a number of incipient automatic writers and mediums as yet imperfectly ' developed,' who immediately and of their own accord write and speak in the name of departed spirits. These may be public characters, as Mozart, Faraday, or real per- sons formerly known to the subject, or altogether imagi- nary beings. Without prejudicing the question of real ' spirit- control ' in the more developed sorts of trance- utterance, I incline to think that these (often deplorably unintelligent) rudimentary utterances are the work of an inferior fraction of the subject's own natural mind, set free from control by the rest, and working after a set pattern fixed by the prejudices of the social environment. In a spiritualistic community we get optimistic messages, whilst in an ignorant Catholic village the secondary personage calls itself by the name of a demon, and profi'ers blas- phemies and obscenities, instead of telling us how happy it is in the summer-land. f
- L' Automatisme Psychologique, p. 318.
f Cf . A. Constans : Relation sur une Epidemie d'hystero-demonopathie en 1861. 2me ed. Paris, 1863. — Chiap e Franzolini: L'Epidemia d'istero- demonopatie in Verzegnis. Reggio, 1879. — See also J. Kerner's little work : Nachriclit von dem Vorkommen des Besessenseins. 1836.
