CHAPTER IV

DISSOCIATION As you sit reading this book you perhaps cross your legs or move to an easier position. Did you think, 'My leg is beginning to feel tired, I'll shift it?' Did you even know you were shifting it? Watch a friend next time he drives you in his car. If he is an expert driver he will talk to you whilst his car slips through the traffic, and handle the various gears and controls as occasion arises without apparently giving any thought to the action; moreover, if you direct his attention to what he is doing he may do it with less accuracy than before--like the billiard player who carefully studies a shot and then makes a miss-cue. It is not sufficient to call the driving automatic, though that word is often used to describe actions of this type, for it is dependent upon innumerable stimuli that reach the driver's mind through all his senses and there produce sensations and impulses which have to be translated into actions. There is much real mind-work involved, and we must regard the driving as carried on by a part of his consciousness which is temporarily apart from his main stream, the latter being devoted to your intellectual entertainment. So far as it concerns this example the splitting-off is normal. Most of us develop such capability in some way or other: the skilful pianist will talk while playing from sight a difficult passage, and the smoker carries out puffing actions by his little split-off stream whilst the main stream is solving the problem of the moment. All sorts of trivial actions are done unknown to the doer. For instance, a man whilst reading may have the habit of turning a pencil over and over and if any one gently removes the pencil he will reach out for it and continue to turn it, whilst his main stream knows nothing of the little by-play. We see that consciousness is not fully and evenly aware of all our actions; some actions with their accompanying mental process can be carried on by an independent stream and, as in the case of the pianist, the streams are of such balanced complexity that we can regard them as co-equal. Others, like turning over the pencil, are associated with such a lack of awareness that they hardly seem conscious, and if they are regarded as due to a split-off stream the stream is a very minor one. This loss of awareness can be carried further, and actions involving complicated processes can be performed without the main personality knowing of them. The easiest example by way of illustration is automatic writing, often carried out by Planchette, which is a small platform mounted on wheels and bearing a pencil whose point touches a sheet of paper. If two people, sitting opposite each other, place their finger-tips upon the platform it immediately begins to move, for unless the muscular push of one operator is absolutely balanced by that of the other the apparatus moves away from one of them; the other person straightway resists the movement and pushes in an opposite direction, and thus a see-saw motion is kept up which the operators cannot stop. The resulting scrawls on the paper may be deciphered according to fancy, but with practice a legible product is obtained; further, some people are able to concentrate the mind upon, or in other words fill the stream of consciousness with, another set of ideas by means of talking or reading, so that the automatic writing is carried on by a split-off stream of which the main stream is unaware. One person can use Planchette alone, though the experiment is oftener carried out as described above because unintended movements are more readily produced by two operators. By this trick of splitting-off, or dissociation, the operator is able to allow ideas and memories from the unconscious to come to the surface unrestrained by the cramping control of the consciousness; hence the product of the automatism is usually fantastic and imaginative, though memories are available which may be beyond the reach of the consciousness. An excellent example of this dissociation is given in _The Gate of Remembrance_, a book which I shall consider later. The view might be held that the dissociated stream is really a part of the unconscious whose results make themselves manifest in the consciousness, as I described in the first chapter when writing about intuition; but in automatic writing the main personality is not aware of the results: the dissociated writer does not know what he has written until he reads it, and it may be as much news to him as to a bystander. The two streams of thought flowing side by side exemplify one kind of dissociation of consciousness, and others of this kind will be described later; this type I shall call _continuous dissociation_, but there is another which at first sight seems quite different and of which I will give an example:-- An ex-soldier suffered from fears and depressions which made his life a misery, and an endeavour was made to find the cause in a repressed memory. His account of events was complete up to a certain time, but there his recollections ceased; then one day something touched up the hidden memory and in the presence of his doctor he went through a most dramatic scene, showing horror at falling down a dark dug-out upon the bodies of dead Germans and at subsequent experiences which had strongly affected him and whose revival produced again the same emotions as the original events. At the next interview the following dialogue took place:-- 'I want you to tell me about falling down the dug-out.' 'What dug-out, sir?' 'The one you told me about last time.' 'I don't remember telling you about it.' 'Yes you do, the dug-out at....' 'No, I don't remember any dug-out at....' There was no reason why the man should lie, and his expression of surprise and absence of other emotion seemed indicative of truth. When the doctor made the man close his eyes and thus shut out his present surroundings the memory returned with strong emotional reaction, less intense, however, than on the former occasion. This case can be explained by regarding his repressed complex as lying in the unconscious, held there by the repugnance he felt towards it; then during the interview with the doctor it rose into consciousness and swept every other thought away. The stream of consciousness was suddenly cut off, its place being taken by this new stream with its recollections and emotions, and when the ordinary consciousness resumed its flow there was no connection between it and the dramatic episode which had interrupted, so that all memory of the episode was lost. We can picture the repressed complex not as lying in the unconscious but as forming a dissociated stream flowing parallel with the main one, and showing its presence by producing those apparently causeless fears and depressions from which the patient suffered, till it suddenly swept aside the main stream and took its place. This alternative view shows the absence of any sharp division between the concept of the unconscious and of a dissociated consciousness, and at the same time brings this _abrupt dissociation_ into harmony with continuous dissociation. Such a dissociation, but with less emotional contents, can persist for a long time, the subject living, as it were, the life of the dissociated stream. Then we have a man with no memory of his previous life, but whose repressed memories, desires, or troubles, forming a complex in the unconscious, have finally broken across the stream of consciousness and taken its place as a second personality. Such instances have been described[5] as 'double personalities', and to this group belong those cases in which a man is found wandering with all memory of his name or associations gone. In soldiers with repressed war memories the repression may include the whole of their war experiences, and they can tell nothing of, say, a year spent in France; here, as long as the repression continues, there is the potentiality of the outbreak of a second personality. [Footnote 5: See the _Psychology of Insanity_.] The story of _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_, stripped of those portions which R. L. Stevenson introduced to make it suit his public--the bodily change and the drugs which produced it--can be read with interest as a study of the development of a dissociation, the main personality being aware of the dissociated stream but unable to control it when once the splitting-off had been accomplished. A less fanciful story of a dissociation is given in _A Tale of Two Cities_, where the unfortunate Dr. Manette, having learnt shoemaking whilst a prisoner in the Bastille, insists on retaining his tools and material after he is rescued and brought to England, in times of stress secluding himself for a period and living his old life again, working at the old employment and hardly aware of the real world around him. The source of the story might be made a subject of research by the Dickens Fellowship, for it is too accurate to be purely a fantasy of Charles Dickens, who, like all of his craft that live, was no mean psychologist. Even Dr. Manette's insistence upon retaining his tools, unaware as he was of his own reason for doing so, is consistent with what really happens when a dissociated stream influences the personality. The different degrees of dissociation can be represented diagramatically. (See opposite page.) It is to be noted that the dissociation may be the result of purposive action on the part of the subject, though, as will be seen in later chapters, an entirely wrong interpretation may be given to it by the person most concerned and by other people as well; or it may be the result of a repression, and in that case any interpretation given by the subject must necessarily be a wrong one, for he is ignorant of its cause on account of the mechanism of repression, or, to put it differently, if he knows the cause it is no longer repressed. [Illustration: Two streams of equal value and under the same control. Examples: The pianist and the motor-car driver. _A normal phenomenon_, but linked to the next class by cases of absent-mindedness.] [Illustration: Two streams, one being the ordinary stream of consciousness and the other a stream not under the control of the main personality, which is concerned only with the ordinary stream. Examples: automatic writing, water-divining and hysteria (see Chapter VIII). _Continuous dissociation._] [Illustration: A continuous dissociation with a sudden irruption of the dissociated into the main stream, completely replacing it for a period. Examples: The case of the ex-soldier and those of double personality; also somnambulisms and spiritualist trances. _Abrupt dissociation._] Once again I will emphasise the difficulty of drawing a line between normal and abnormal. My boy guide referred to in Chapter I was as near normal as could be, though the means by which he kept his course might be described as a product of dissociation. If he had been imaginative and I credulous he could have foisted upon me a supernatural explanation of his powers and taken his place with clairvoyants and water-diviners. But there are manifestations of distinctly abnormal character to explain which is the object of this book, and for the people producing these manifestations I propose the name of Dissociates, since dissociation is the key to the understanding of the phenomena they present. The logic-tight compartments previously described are to be regarded as partial dissociations to which we are all liable, the partitions being unrecognised by their owner and the contents kept apart from the modifying influences of the main personality. Hence when the onlooker becomes aware of the presence of such a dissociation he does not judge the contents of the compartment by the same standard that he applies to the person as a whole. There is nothing fresh in this point of view, which is admitted when virulent political opponents can be good friends by each ignoring the dissociated prejudices of the other, or in everyday life when in some circles the discussion of political or religious subjects is avoided for the sake of good fellowship. Extreme dissociation by reason of a logic-tight compartment is shown in that kind of insanity in which the sufferer behaves as an ordinary being with ordinary actions and ideas except for the influence of a systematised delusion (generally persecutory or grandiose) of most irrational type which is impregnable to explanation or argument. On all other points the man is sane, and the purely mental origin of the disease is suggested by his remaining in good health and without mental deterioration apart from the delusional system, in this respect differing greatly from the sufferers from most other forms of insanity. Some psychiatrists claim to have traced the delusions back to repressions that took place in early life.[6] [Footnote 6: For a fuller account of dissociation I would refer the reader to _The Psychology of Insanity_, by Dr. Bernard Hart, to which I am indebted for the form of some of my ideas. (Cambridge University Press.)]