Part 5 (2/2)
Of similar import is the ingenious observation that hysterical anaesthesia rarely leads to any accident to the limb;--differing in this respect, for instance, from the true and profound anaesthesia of syringomyelitis, in which burns and bruises frequently result from the patient's forgetfulness of the part affected. There is usually, in fact, a supervision--a _subliminal_ supervision--exercised over the hysteric's limbs. Part of her personality is still alive to the danger, and modifies her movements, unknown to her supraliminal self.
This curious point, I may remark in pa.s.sing, well ill.u.s.trates the kind of action which I attribute to the subliminal self in many phases of life. Thus it is that the hypnotised subject is prevented (as I hold) from committing a real as opposed to a fict.i.tious crime; thus it is that fresh ideas are suggested to the man of genius; thus it is--I will even say--that in some cases monitory hallucinations are generated, which save the supraliminal self from some sudden danger.
I pa.s.s on to another peculiarity of hysterical anaesthesiae;--also in my eyes of deep significance. The anaesthetic belts or patches do not always, or even generally, correspond with true anatomical areas, such as would be affected by the actual lesion of any given nerve. They follow arbitrary arrangements;--sometimes corresponding to rough popular notions of divisions of the body,--sometimes seeming to reflect a merely childish caprice.
In these cases what is only a silly fancy seems to produce an effect which is not merely fanciful;--which is objective, measurable, and capable of causing long and serious disablement. This result, however, is quite accordant with my view of what I have termed the _hypnotic stratum_ of the personality. I hold, as our coming discussion of hypnotism will more fully explain, that the region into which the hypnotic suggestion gives us access is one of strangely mingled strength and weakness;--of a faculty at once more potent and less coherent than that of waking hours. I think that in these cases we get at the subliminal self only somewhat in the same sense as we get at the supraliminal self when the ”highest-level centres” are for the time inoperative (as in a dream) and only ”middle-level centres” are left to follow their own devices without inhibition or co-ordination. I hold that this is the explanation of the strange contrasts which hypnosis makes familiar to us--the combination of profound power over the organism with childish readiness to obey the merest whims of the hypnotiser. The intelligence which thus responds is in my view only a fragmentary intelligence; it is a dreamlike sc.r.a.p of the subliminal self, functioning apart from that self's central and profounder control.
What happens in hypnotism in obedience to the hypnotiser's caprice happens in hysteria in obedience to the caprice of the hypnotic stratum itself. Some middle-level centre of the subliminal self (to express a difficult idea by the nearest phrase I can find) gets the notion that there is an ”anaesthetic bracelet,” say, round the left wrist;--and lo, this straight-way is so; and the hysteric loses supraliminal sensation in this fantastic belt. That the notion does not originate in the hysteric's supraliminal self is proved by the fact that the patient is generally unaware of the existence of the bracelet until the physician discovers it. Nor is it a chance combination;--even were there such a thing as chance. It is a dream of the hypnotic stratum;--an incoherent self-suggestion starting from and affecting a region below the reach of conscious will. Such cases are most instructive; for they begin to show us divisions of the human body based not upon local innervation but upon ideation (however incoherent);--upon intellectual conceptions like ”a bracelet,” ”a cross,”--applied though these conceptions may be with dreamlike futility.
In this view, then, we regard the fragments of perceptive power over which the hysteric has lost control as being by no means really extinguished, but rather as existing immediately beneath the threshold, in the custody, so to say, of a dreamlike or hypnotic stratum of the subliminal self, which has selected them for reasons sometimes explicable as the result of past suggestions, sometimes to us inexplicable. If this be so, we may expect that the same kind of suggestions which originally cut off these perceptions from the main body of perception may stimulate them again to action either below or above the conscious threshold.
We have already, indeed, seen reason to suppose that the submerged perceptions are still at work, when Dr. Janet pointed out how rare a thing it was that any accident or injury followed upon hysterical loss of feeling in the limbs. A still more curious ill.u.s.tration is afforded by the condition of the field of vision in a hysteric. It often happens that the field of vision is much reduced, so that the hysteric, when tested with the perimeter, can discern only objects almost directly in front of the eye. But if an object which happens to be particularly exciting to the hypnotic stratum--for instance the hypnotiser's finger, used often as a signal for trance--is advanced into that part of the hysteric's normal visual field of which she has apparently lost all consciousness, there will often be an instant subliminal perception,--shown by the fact that the subject promptly falls into trance.
In such cases the action of the submerged perceptions, while provoked by very shallow artifices, continues definitely _subliminal_. The patient _herself_, as we say, does not know why she does not burn her anaesthetic limbs, or why she suddenly falls into a trance while being subjected to optical tests.
But it is equally easy to devise experiments which shall call these submerged sensations up again into supraliminal consciousness. A hysteric has lost sensation in one arm: Dr. Janet tells her that there is a caterpillar on that arm, and the reinforcement of attention thus generated brings back the sensibility.
These hysterical anaesthesiae, it may be added here, may be not only very definite but very profound. Just as the reality,--though also the impermanence,--of the hysterical retrenchment of field of vision of which I have been speaking can be shown by optical experiments beyond the patient's comprehension, so the reality of some profound organic hysterical insensibilities is sometimes shown by the progress of independent disease. A certain patient feels no hunger or thirst: this indifference might be simulated for a time, but her ignorance of severe inflammation of the bladder is easily recognisable as real. Throw her into hypnosis and her sensibilities return. The disease is for the first time felt, and the patient screams with pain. This result well ill.u.s.trates one main effect of hypnosis, viz., to bring the organism into a more normal state. The deep organic anaesthesia of this patient was dangerously abnormal; the missing sensibility had first to be restored, although it might be desirable afterwards to remove the painful elements in that sensibility again, under, so to say, a wiser and deeper control.
What has been said of hysterical defects of sensation might be repeated for motor defects. There, too, the powers of which the supraliminal self has lost control continue to act in obedience to subliminal promptings.
The hysteric who squeezes the dynamometer like a weak child can exert great muscular force under the influence of emotion.
Very numerous are the cases which might be cited to give a notion of dissolutive hysterical processes, as now observed with closer insight than formerly, in certain great hospitals. But, nevertheless, these hospital observations do not exhaust what has recently been learnt of hysteria. Dealing almost exclusively with a certain cla.s.s of patients, they leave almost untouched another group, smaller, indeed, but equally instructive for our study.
Hysteria is no doubt a disease, but it is by no means on that account an indication of initial weakness of mind, any more than an Arctic explorer's frost-bite is an indication of bad circulation. Disease is a function of two variables: power of resistance and strength of injurious stimulus. In the case of hysteria, as in the case of frost-bite, the inborn power of resistance may be unusually great, and yet the stimulus may be so excessive that that power may be overcome. Arctic explorers have generally, of course, been among the most robust of men. And with some hysterics there is an even closer connection between initial strength and destructive malady. For it has often happened that the very feelings which we regard as characteristically civilised, characteristically honourable, have reached a pitch of vividness and delicacy which exposes their owners to shocks such as the selfish clown can never know. It would be a great mistake to suppose that all psychical upsets are due to vanity, to anger, to terror, to s.e.xual pa.s.sion. The instincts of personal cleanliness and of feminine modesty are responsible for many a breakdown of a sensitive, but not a relatively _feeble_ organisation. The love of one's fellow-creatures and the love of G.o.d are responsible for many more. And why should it not be so? There exist for many men and women stimuli far stronger than self-esteem or bodily desires. Human life rests more and more upon ideas and emotions whose relation to the conservation of the race or of the individual is indirect and obscure. Feelings which may once have been utilitarian have developed wholly out of proportion to any advantage which they can gain for their possessor in the struggle for life. The dangers which are now most shudderingly felt are often no real risks to life or fortune. The aims most ardently pursued are often worse than useless for man regarded as a mere over-runner of the earth.
There is thus real psychological danger in fixing our conception of human character too low. Some essential lessons of a complex perturbation of personality are apt to be missed if we begin with the conviction that there is nothing before us but a study of decay. As I have more than once found need to maintain, it is his steady advance, and not his occasional regression, which makes the chief concern of man.
To this side of the study of hysteria Drs. Breuer and Freud have made valuable contribution. Drawing their patients not from hospital wards, but from private practice, they have had the good fortune to encounter, and the penetration to understand, some remarkable cases where unselfish but powerful pa.s.sions have proved too much for the equilibrium of minds previously well-fortified both by principle and by education.[11]
”Wax to receive and marble to retain”; such, as we all have felt, is the human mind in moments of excitement which transcend its resistant powers. This may be for good or for evil, may tend to that radical change in ethical standpoint which is called _conversion_, or to the mere setting-up of some hysterical disability. Who shall say how far we desire to be susceptible to stimulus? Most rash would it be to a.s.sign any fixed limit, or to cla.s.s as inferior those whose main difference from ourselves may be that they feel sincerely and pa.s.sionately what we feel torpidly, or perhaps only affect to feel. ”The term degenerate,”
says Dr. Milne Bramwell, ”is applied so freely and widely by some modern authors that one cannot help concluding that they rank as such all who do not conform to some primitive, savage type, possessing an imperfectly developed nervous system.” Our ”degenerates” may sometimes be in truth _progenerate_; and their perturbation may mask an evolution which we or our children needs must traverse when they have shown the way.
Let us pause for a moment and consider what is here implied. We are getting here among the _hysteriques qui menent le monde_. We have advanced, that is to say, from the region of _idees fixes_ of a paltry or morbid type to the region of _idees fixes_ which in themselves are reasonable and honourable, and which become morbid only on account of their relative intensity. Here is the debateable ground between hysteria and genius. The kind of genius which we approach here is not, indeed, the purely intellectual form. Rather it is the ”moral genius,” the ”genius of sanct.i.ty,” or that ”possession” by some altruistic idea which lies at the root of so many heroic lives.
The hagiology of all religions offers endless examples of this type.
That man would hardly be regarded as a great saint whose conduct seemed completely reasonable to the ma.s.s of mankind. The saint in consequence is apt to be set unduly apart, whether for veneration or for ridicule.
He is regarded either as inspired or as morbid; when in reality all that his mode of life shows is that certain _idees fixes_, in themselves of no unworthy kind, have obtained such dominance that their impulsive action may take and retake, as accident wills, the step between the sublime and the ridiculous.
Martyrs, missionaries, crusaders, nihilists,--enthusiasts of any kind who are swayed by impulses largely below the threshold of ordinary consciousness,--these men bring to bear on human affairs a force more concentrated and at higher tension than deliberate reason can generate.
They are virtually carrying out self-suggestions which have acquired the permanence of _idees fixes_. Their fixed ideas, however, are not so isolated, so encysted as those of true hysterics. Although more deeply and immutably rooted than their ideas on other matters, these subliminal convictions are worked in with the products of supraliminal reason, and of course can only thus be made effective over other minds. A deep subliminal horror, generated, say, by the sight of some loathsome cruelty, must not only prompt hallucinations,--as it might do in the hysteric and has often done in the reformer as well,--it must also, if it is to work out its mission of reform, be held clearly before the supraliminal reason, and must learn to express itself in writing or speech adapted to influence ordinary minds.
We may now pa.s.s from the first to the second of the categories of disintegration of personality suggested at the beginning of this chapter. The cases which I have thus far discussed have been mainly cases of _isolation_ of elements of personality. We have not dealt as yet with _secondary personalities_ as such. There is, however, a close connection between these two cla.s.ses. There are cases, for example, where a kind of secondary state at times intervenes--a sort of bewilderment arising from confluent _idees fixes_ and overrunning the whole personality. This new state is often preceded or accompanied by something of somnambulic change. It is this new feature of which we have here a first hint which seems to me of sufficient importance for the diagnosis of my second cla.s.s of psychical disintegrations. This second cla.s.s starts from sleep-wakings of all kinds, and includes all stages of alternation of personality, from brief somnambulisms up to those permanent and thorough changes which deserve the name of dimorphisms.
We are making here a transition somewhat resembling the transition from isolated bodily injuries to those subtler changes of diathesis which change of climate or of nutrition may induce. Something has happened which makes the organism react to all stimuli in a new way. Our best starting-point for the study of these secondary states lies among the phenomena of _dream_.
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