Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/82

70 of touch, pain and temperature and all those sensations from the muscles and joints which make one aware of the position of one's limbs, so that, as she herself said, she "lost her legs in bed." Her other sensations were normal. She was subject to frightful hystero-epileptic convulsions which came on every day and lasted about five hours. During them she seemed delirious and talked constantly about men hidden behind curtains, but could not make intelligible what it was that troubled her. Her memory was good on the whole, but she never recalled anything that happened during these attacks, nor could she remember ever having had the sensations which she had lost.

When hypnotized, she was extremely suggestible, performed posthypnotic suggestions with fatal precision, but never seemed conscious of what she was doing. For example, she would carry her hands above her head in obedience to such a suggestion and yet stoutly maintain that they were in her lap. The same results could be got without hypnotizing her by simply distracting her attention. Some one would engage her in lively conversation while Prof. Janet whispered a command in her ear; the command would be obeyed, but Lucie would profess ignorance both of the command and of its execution. After a while the mere tone of command produced the same effect. Lucie would hear all that Prof. Janet said to her before and after the command, but the command itself was unheard by her, although invariably obeyed.

The significant feature of these experiments is that commands not heard by Lucie were obeyed by her body. In like manner, suggestions given through the sense of touch, which Lucie had wholly lost, were obeyed. If Prof. Janet clinched her fist, it would strike out and her face would assume an angry expression; if he carried her fingers to her lips, the lips smiled and the fingers threw kisses. Signals of the most complex kind were obeyed in the same way. She was told to perform a posthypnotic suggestion when Prof. Janet had clapped his hands twelve times. He then clapped his hands five times gently and at a distance from her while she was talking with some one else; he asked her what he had been doing and she could not tell him. He clapped his hands again and asked what that was. A handclap, she said. After waiting until her attention was again distracted he clapped them six times more, and the suggestion was obeyed. Lucie could remember having heard only one of the claps, but all twelve were in some way counted. He varied this experiment in many ways, but always with the same result.

Believing, then, that mental states really existed in Lucie's head, so to speak, of which she knew nothing, Prof. Janet next endeavored to get them more fully expressed than was possible in gestures and obedience. Since all talking was done by Lucie,