Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis (43 page)

Gurney's
most important contribution to our knowledge of hypnotism was his series of experiments on the automatic writing of subjects who had received post-hypnotic suggestions. For example, a subject during trance is told that he will poke the fire in six minutes after waking. On being waked he has no memory of the order, but while he is engaged in conversation his hand is placed on a planchette, which immediately writes the sentence, ‘P., you will poke the fire in six minutes.' Experiments like this, which were repeated in great variety, seem to prove that below the upper consciousness the hypnotic consciousness persists, engrossed with the suggestion and able to express itself through the involuntarily moving hand.

Gurney shares, therefore, with Janet and [Alfred] Binet, the credit of demonstrating the simultaneous existence of two different strata of consciousness, ignorant of each other, in the same person. The ‘extra-consciousness', as one may call it, can be kept on tap, as it were, by the method of automatic writing. This discovery marks a new era in experimental psychology, and it is impossible to overrate its importance.

Another important forerunner (and colleague) of Freud, in the context of a history of hypnotism, was Josef Breuer. He elaborated Janet's view that hysteria was due to earlier traumatic experiences. In his work with one of his patients, known as Anna O. (real name Bertha von Pappenheim), he regressed her back to the start of her problems to achieve a cure. His assumption, clearly, was that early traumas, long repressed into the unconscious mind, could still have an effect on us today. The case of Anna O. was written up in
Studies on Hysteria
(1895), which was co-authored by Freud.

Let's go back to fugue for a moment. If this odd thing happens only once in a lifetime, it is called ‘fugue'. But what if it recurs? What if Bourne had not become Brown just once, but time and again, for
longer and shorter periods, with exactly the same combination of amnesia and state-dependent memory? From late in the eighteenth century, psychologists began to note that the phenomenon of double consciousness could occur spontaneously and in what we would now call a more pathological form in which an individual could oscillate between a number of personalities, all of which have plausible and coherent lives, and none of which is seen as an intrusion in the sense that they all equally belong in the same body. Add to this state-dependent memory and amnesia, and you have the condition we now call MPD.

Oddly, there are no reported cases of MPD until after de Puységur's discovery of double consciousness. This might lead some to doubt the reality of the syndrome. But Adam Crabtree, a therapist and one of the better writers on human psychology, has some important remarks on this:

I believe that the discovery of magnetic sleep and the appearance of multiple personality disorder are directly related. It seems to me that in non-organic mental disturbance there are two elements: the disturbance itself and the phenomenological expression of that disturbance, the symptom language of the illness. The symptoms are a message to others telling them what is going on inside the individual. That is, the symptoms are the language of the inner disturbance. How clearly that inner disturbance will be expressed depends on the adequacy of the language available, and that in turn depends on what categories for understanding humans and the world are current in society.

Until the emergence of the alternate-consciousness paradigm the only category available to express the inner experience of an alien consciousness was possession, intrusion from the outside. With the rise of awareness of a second consciousness intrinsic to the human mind, a new symptom language became possible. Now the disordered person could express (and society could understand) the experience in a new way: it was the second consciousness acting at odds with the normal self.

This means that when Puységur discovered magnetic sleep, he contributed significantly to the form in which mental disturbance could manifest itself from then on. For he helped make
possible a symptom language through which the experience of an interior alienation of consciousness could be expressed without resorting to the notion of intrusion from the outside – in other words, without experiencing that condition as possession.

In short, there
were
cases of MPD prior to the late eighteenth century, but they were not recognized as MPD: they were seen as possession by spirits.

MPD cases tend to be oddly similar, so I shall recount just one or two famous early ones. The first ever occurred in 1789, when Eberhard Gmelin in Stuttgart had a patient calling herself Caroline Brune who alternated between two personalities, one of whom spoke French and was more vivacious, while the other was German and more modest. The most famous early case is undoubtedly that of Mary Reynolds, a quiet, shy woman who in 1811, aged thirty-six, had a fit. When she came to herself, she found she was blind and deaf, and she remained that way for some weeks before recovering her senses. Later she fell into a comatose sleep, and when she woke up, after twenty hours, she had a quite different personality – vivacious, attractive, outgoing. But she was like a young child: she could not even speak, let alone remember people, things and skills. She had to learn everything all over again. Five weeks later she woke up one morning back in her original personality. She was very upset to discover what had been going on for the previous weeks, none of which she remembered. A few weeks later she again fell into a prolonged sleep and returned, on waking up, to Mary-2, the outgoing version, which she picked up where she had left it before in terms of language skills and so on. This switching to and fro between the two states went on until 1829, when she changed permanently to Mary-2 until her death in 1854.

One of the forefathers of MPD research was Pierre Janet. Two of his female hysterical patients – Lucie and Léonie – proved to have multiple personalities. In both cases, through hypnosis, Janet found that the original cause was a childhood shock. It was precisely this kind of work that enabled him to develop the concept of ‘subconscious fixed ideas' and to show that they continue to exert an influence on conscious life too. Janet was the first to achieve cures by integrating the repressed memories into the consciousness of his
patients. Just the mere voicing of these lost memories by patients can lead straight away to the cure of a symptom. Breuer's Anna O. (who was also, incidentally, a ‘multiple', as MPD sufferers are colloquially called) could not drink water, until she remembered and described an occasion when she was shocked that a friend let her dog drink out of her glass; after that, she could drink again.

Janet, as we have seen, classified MPD as a form of hysteria, and it is true that MPD is often accompanied by some of the appalling ‘conversion symptoms', such as bleeding, headaches, spasms, paralysis and local anaesthesias, which are one of the characteristics of hysteria. Louis Vivé (born in 1863) suffered from paralysis and lack of feeling on his right side, and found it difficult to speak; Félida X., the famous patient of Azam, suffered from hyperaesthesia of the skin, haemorrhages and poor circulation.

In a long and famous book,
The Dissociation of a Personality
(1905), Boston psychiatrist Morton Prince (1854–1929) described his work with a patient known by the pseudonym ‘Miss Beauchamp'. Prince, Boris Sidis (1867–1923) and William James were the main researchers keeping hypnosis alive in the States in the early years of the twentieth century. Christine Beauchamp (real name Clara Fowler) was a modest girl who was occasionally taken over by a mischievous personality whom she called ‘Sally'. Actually, Christine had four personalities in all: what Prince called B1, the person who came to his office with headaches and insomnia; B2 was simply B1 hypnotized; B3 was Sally, and B4 was a short-tempered personality. Although at first Prince decided to try to make B4 the dominant personality, effectively eliminating B1, he eventually chose to amalgamate B1 and B4, squeezing out B3-Sally. This process of amalgamation or integration has been the therapy of choice in all MPD cases since the time of Janet and Prince.

I should stress, before going any further, that MPD is rare. Only a few hundred cases have been documented, though there is anecdotal evidence of many more. It is only psychologists such as Eugene Bliss who are heavily committed to the existence of MPD who speculate that about 10 per cent of the population may be multiples. Most people, including professional psychologists involved in the field, would regard this as a huge exaggeration – and that is assuming that they believe in the reality of MPD in the first place.

The book that really brought MPD to people's awareness in modern times was
The Three Faces of Eve
, published in 1957. It tells the story of the psychiatric treatment, by two American doctors, of a woman known as ‘Eve White'. Her real name, Christine Sizemore, was revealed in the autobiographical sequel
I'm Eve
(1977), which also shows how incomplete her earlier treatment had been, in the sense that nineteen more personalities had appeared since the end of her treatment. A further autobiographical sequel,
A Mind of My Own
, published in 1989, tells of her eventual triumph over MPD. Anyway, in
The Three Faces of Eve
she was a mousy, timid, conventional person who spontaneously manifested another personality, ‘Eve Black', who was flirtatious, coarse and mischievous – exactly the same character differences as were exhibited by Caroline Brune, Mary Reynolds and Christine Beauchamp (and by a number of other MPD victims too). Prince had used hypnosis to bring Miss Beauchamp's other personalities into existence, but Eve Black did not appear through hypnosis, although hypnosis had already been used on Eve White in the course of the therapy, and it was subsequently used as an easy way to summon Eve Black. Later, Eve Black's appearances became so normal that hypnosis was no longer necessary to summon her. At a late stage of the therapy, a third personality appeared, called ‘Jane', a mature, calm and intelligent person, who seemed to the therapists to offer hope for the future, if Jane could become the dominant personality. This in fact happened, and the new, more integrated person is called Evelyn White in the book.

Each personality had different handwriting, different brainwave patterns, different profiles arising from various psychological tests, but above all such different personalities, body languages, facial gestures and so on that it was easy for the therapists to tell which personality was in the room with them at any time. Eve White exhibited fugue states and state-dependent memory. She could remember nothing that Eve Black or Jane did, but Eve Black could remember what Eve White did, and Jane could remember all three states.

Speaking as a layman, I have some worries about this – and my
worries coincide with those of a number of professional psychologists. My basic worry is that it's all too neat. Eve White had originally entered therapy with marital problems and inexplicable headaches. Once Eve Black has emerged,
every
misdemeanour, right back to childhood, is blamed by Eve White and her husband on Eve Black, leaving Eve White lily-white. But no one is so one-dimensional; everyone does wrong sometimes, or makes mistakes. It looks as though Ms White was simply objectifying a different side of her nature into a separate personality. The fugue condition is odd: it is this that really characterizes MPD. If it were not for the amnesia and the state-dependent memory, we would clearly be faced with no more than different sides of a person's character. But perhaps it is possible for someone to be so neurotic or hysterical, or so prone to fantasies, or under such stress, that she can reify separate sides of herself successfully enough to bring about such amnesia. It has been known at least since the time of Breuer that hysterical people perform a kind of self-hypnosis on themselves, in which they can (among other things) induce amnesia for certain events. And it isn't really surprising to find amnesia in connection with the kind of radical dissociation that characterizes MPD; after all, we have known about state-dependent memory for ages.

So perhaps MPD sufferers are no more than hysterics who have chosen to blank out some parts of their lives, which then seem to be the work of a different personality, resident in the same body. This is the kind of explanation I would prefer to full-fledged MPD. I remember a difficult interview I had with my father in my early teens, after he had found a confessional notebook I had written and had confronted me with some of the material from it. I just kept saying, as an implausible defence: ‘It wasn't me. Daddy, it wasn't me', as if that would make it go away. Perhaps if I was a more neurotic type, and had kept this up, the ‘I' that had misbehaved would have begun to seem a different personality.

Another worry about MPD is that too often the alternate personalities start to appear only
after
psychotherapy begins. If there were clear evidence in a number of well-documented cases that alternate personalities had been active in someone's life before therapy, that would be different; but such evidence is conspicuously lacking. I'm not suggesting that patients deceive their therapists, or
that they are merely role-playing. With dry wit British psychologist Alan Gauld says, about Morton Prince's Miss Beauchamp: ‘The hypothesis of deceit … has therefore little to recommend it except the fact that it would make psychological science simpler if it were true.' But I am suggesting that it is possible in the therapeutic situation for a hysterical or over-imaginative patient to objectify what are no more than sides of his character, and for therapists to encourage such objectification and to ignore the possibility of spontaneous self-hypnosis.

Perhaps better known than
The Three Faces of Eve
, and certainly better written, is Flora Rheta Schreiber's
Sybil
, which was also made into a successful film. But here things seem to get really out of hand. The protagonist, named ‘Sybil Dorsett' in the book, is said to have no fewer than sixteen personalities before finally, as in the case of Eve's fourth, a seventeenth emerges to combine and reconcile the rest. The book contains dramatic descriptions of the fugue states between personalities, and the distress and isolation Sybil feels when this happens.