Then one day, after several years of treatment, there appeared yet another personality, who knew nothing about Miss Beauchamp
or Sally either, and only knew what Miss Beauchamp had known up to some years before. Miss Beauchamp had a college education, and wrote and spoke French; Sally knew no French, and tried in vain to learn it; the new personality did not have a college education at all. Nevertheless, after long experiment, the story of which is as fascinating as any novel you ever read, Dr. Prince discovered that this was the real Miss Beauchamp; the others were "split off " personalities. He traced the cause to a severe mental shock, and succeeded in the end in combining the first Miss Beauchamp with the last, and in suppressing the obstinate and wanton Sally. As you read this story, you watch him mentally murdering a human being; "Sally" clamors pitifully for life, but he condemns her to death, and relentlessly executes his sentence. It is a "movie" thriller with a happy ending, and I should think it would make disconcert-
ing reading to persons who believe that each of us is one immortal soul, or "has" one immortal soul, and is responsible for it to a personal God.
There is never any end to the problems of these multiple personalities, and each case is a test of the judgment and ingenuity of the specialist. He will try to make one personality "stick," and will fail, and will have to accept another, or a combination of two. In one case, he found that he could not get the right personality to "stick" except under hypnosis, so he decided to leave the man in a mild state of trance, and the new personality lived all the rest of its life in that condition. If you wish to know more about this subject you can find books in any well-equipped library. I mention one, "The Riddle of Personality," by H. Addington Bruce, because it contains in the appendix an excellent list of the literature of the subconscious in all its many aspects.
There is another, and most fascinating method of exploring this underworld of the mind, and that is the study of dreams. Some fifteen years ago a psychotherapist in New York told me about the discoveries of a physician in Vienna, and gave me some pamphlets, written in very difficult and technical German. Since then this Professor Freud has been translated, and has become a fad, and the absurdities of his followers make one a little apologetic for him. But we do not give up Jesus because of the torturers and bigots who call themselves Christians, and in the same way we have no right to blame Freud for all the absurdities of the psychoanalysts.
Probably there never was a time in human history when there were not people who interpreted dreams, and you can still buy "dream books" for twenty-five cents, and learn that a white horse means that you are going to get a letter from your sweetheart tomorrow; then you can buy another dream book, telling you that a white horse means there is going to be a death in your family within the
year. Naturally this prejudices thinking people against dream analysis; yet, dreams are facts, and every fact has its cause, and if you dream about a white horse, there must assuredly be some reason for your dreaming this particular thing. Of course we know that if you eat mince-pie and welsh-rabbit at midnight, you will dream about something terrible; but will it be snakes, or will it be a railroad wreck, or will it be white horses trampling over you? Obviously, it may be a million different unpleasant things; and what is it that picks out this or that from the infinite store of your memory, and brings it into the region of half-consciousness which we call the dream?
Professor Freud's discovery is in brief that the dream is a wish-fulfillment. Our instincts present to our consciousness a great mass
of impulses and desires, and among these the consciousness selects what it pleases, and represses and refuses to recognize or to
act upon the others. But maybe these decisions are not altogether satisfactory to the subconsciousness. The mind of the body is in rebellion against the mind--shall we say of reason, or shall we say of society? The mind of society, otherwise known as the moral law, says that you shall be a good little boy, and shall go to school and learn what you are told, and on Sunday go to church and sit very still through a long sermon; whereas, the body of a boy would rather be a savage, hunting birds' nests and scalping enemies and exploring magic caves full of precious jewels. So the subconsciousness of the boy, balked and miserable, awaits its time, and finds its satisfaction when the boy is asleep and his moral censor has relaxed its control.
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This dream mind is not a logical and orderly thing like the conscious mind; it is not business-like and civilized, it does not deal in abstractions. It is far more interested in things than in words; it does not present us with formulas, but with pictures, and with stories of weird and wonderful happenings. It is like the mind of the race, which we study in legends and religions. It does not tell us that the sun is a mass of incandescent hydrogen gas, so and so many miles in diameter; it tells us that the sun is a cosmic hero who slays the black dragon of night. So the mind of our body presents us with innumerable pictures and symbols, exactly such as we find in poetry. There may be, and frequently is, dispute as to just what a poet meant by this or that particular image, but if we read all the work of any particular poet, we get a certain impression of that poet's individuality. If he is always talking about the perfume of women's hair and the gleam of the white flesh of nymphs in the thickets, we are not left in doubt as to what is wrong with this poet. And just so, when the expert sets to work to examine all the dreams that any one person can remember, day after day, sooner or later the expert observes that these dreams hover continually about one particular subject; and by questioning the person, he can find out what is the secret which is troubling the person, perhaps without the person himself being aware of it. Of course there are many people who like nothing so much as to talk about themselves; and many are spending their time and their money on the latest fad of being "psyched," who would, in any properly organized world, be put to work at hoeing weeds or washing their own clothes. Nevertheless, it is a fact that there are real mental disorders in the world, and innumerable honest and earnest people who have something the matter with them which they do not understand. Here is one way by which the conscientious investigator can find out what the trouble is, and make it clear to them, and by establishing harmony between their conscious and their subconscious minds, can many times put them in the way of health and happiness.
Through psychoanalysis we are enabled to understand the "split" personality and its cause. We discover that almost everyone has more or less rudimentary forms of multiple personality hidden within him; made out of desires and traits which he does not like, or which the world forces him to drive into the deeps of his being. These may be evil impulses, of sex or violence; they may be
the most noble altruisms, or artistic yearnings, ridiculous things in a world of "hustle." A quite normal man or woman may keep a separate self, apart from the world, living a Jekyll life of business propriety and a Hyde life of religious or musical ecstasy. Or again, the repressed impulses may integrate themselves in the unconscious, and you may have genius or lunacy or both--"great wits to madness near allied." The modern knowledge on such dark mysteries you may find in Hart's "The Psychology of Insanity." CHAPTER XIV
THE PROBLEM OF IMMORTALITY
(Discusses the survival of personality from the moral point of view: that is, have we any claim upon life, entitling us to live forever?) As we explore the deeps of the subconsciousness, our own and other people's, we find ourselves confronting the strange question: Is it all our own mind, and that of other living people, or are we by any chance dealing with the minds of those who are dead? A great many earnest people, and some very learned people, are fully convinced that the latter is the case, and we have now to consider their arguments.
When I was a little boy I used to read and hear ghost stories, and would shudder over them; but I was given to understand that all this was just imagination, I must not take ghosts seriously, any