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.)]