Part 15 (1/2)

This is no fanciful theory It is the solidest kind of fact, repeatedly tested and verified Tiain, patients pronounced incurable by competent physicians have been taken in hand by the psychopathologists and, once their disease has been definitely traced to some dissociation, have been restored to perfect health

For thehas been done to soular practitioners of ”mental medicine” But the difference between all of these and the psychopathologists is just this--that the forestion to all sorts of diseases, and without any adequate understanding of its laws and linize that it is only one of several valuable itimately applicable only to certain ht them, too, that even within its proper sphere of usefulness it often is of therapeutic value only after a searching scientific exaht the particular dissociated states which have to be corrected before a cure can be wrought

Nevertheless, the range of ical processes is eration to say that the discovery of the influence exercised by the subconscious in the causation of disease is one of the nificant ever made in the history of medicine

The truth of thissome of the manifold ways in which dissociation works havoc in the huenuity displayed by the skilled psychopathologist in overcoht one day to the Parisian hospital of the Salpetriere, the world's greatest center of psychopathological investigation, a wonated in the medical record of her case by the name of Justine She was accompanied by her husband, who explained that he wished Doctor Janet to examine her because he feared that she had become insane And, in fact, she presented the aspect of a veritableloosely over her shoulders, her eyes were fixed and glaring, her hands tre, and she constantly ht to question her, she buried her face in her hands, and cried:

”Oh, it is terrible to live thus! I am afraid, I am so afraid!”

”And of what, pray, are you afraid?” the physician asked

”I am afraid of cholera”

”Is that all you are afraid of?”

”But surely it is quite enough”

Doctor Janet turned for an explanation to her husband, who shook his head despairingly, as he replied in an undertone:

”This is the way she has been for years, doctor, only lately she has grown , for fear of catching cholera It is difficult to persuade her to stir froer Tell me, doctor, is my poor Justine mad? Must we be separated, she and I? Is it that she will have to spend the rest of her life in an asylum?”

”Leave her here a few days,” said Doctor Janet, ”and I can tell you better then”

Psychopathologists have invented so infallibly between true organic insanity, which in the present state of e is quite incurable, and functionalthese, Doctor Janet soon reached the conclusion that Justine was not really insane, and that her ”phobia,”

or irrational fear, was due to sootten shock connected with the disease cholera

But, closely though he questioned her, she could recall nothing of the sort He then decided to try the effect of hypnotizing her, for, as all psychopathologists are aware, hypnotisency for recovering lost memories Put into the hypnotic state, patients easily remember incidents in their past of which they have no conscious recollection when in the nor state It was thus with Justine, who proved to be most hypnotizable

”I want you,” Doctor Janet told her, after she had passed into deep hypnosis, ”to try to remember whether at any ti from cholera, or one who had died from cholera”

”Why, certainly I did,” she pro violently

”When was it?”

”When I was a little girl--fifteen years old”

”Tell me the circumstances”

”My mother was very poor She had to take all sorts of work Soot thehborhood died frohtful sight--one of them, at all events It was the body of a htful! What if I should catch the cholera? I shall catch it, I know I shall! Nothing can save me!”

Her voice rose in a shriek of terror, and Doctor Janet hastened to de-hypnotize her