Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/85

Rh could not be distracted, and only laughed at Prof. Janet's attempts to give her suggestions. This new synthesis lasted only about twenty minutes; it was followed by a deep sleep of about fifteen minutes, and then Lucie awoke in her former condition.

At first, as I have said, Adrienne showed little spontaneity, but as time went on she acquired memories and developed more character. Once she got angry with Prof. Janet, and for some time all the tokens that showed her presence—automatic writing, catalepsy, and suggestibility—disappeared. When she was reconciled they came back again.

Adrienne existed after her first creation about six weeks. Then Prof. Janet undertook to cure Lucie by suggesting against her hysterical symptoms; little by little they disappeared, and with them Adrienne faded out of existence. "At last," says Prof. Janet, "one day I called upon Adrienne—it was Lucie that replied, laughing a good deal and asking whom I called Adrienne. A few days later the hypnotic sleep, which had ceased to be interesting, entirely disappeared, and it was found impossible to get Lucie asleep by any means."

For eight months Lucie was quite well. Then she had a relapse and Adrienne reappeared. For five days she remained evocable and then disappeared for the last time.

Since that time Prof. Janet has verified with many other patients the conclusions which he reached in the case of Lucie, and most of them have been confirmed in greater or less degree by other investigators in France, Austria, England, and America. But Lucie remains the best illustration of apparently simultaneous "double personality" that has yet been described.

We can not be too cautious in trying to picture to ourselves what the condition of this secondary system which called itself Adrienne really was, just as we can not be too cautious in trying to picture to ourselves the minds of the lower animals. It is much easier to say what Adrienne was not than what she was.

She was not a continuously existing, self-conscious being. She did not exist, in all probability, before Prof. Janet questioned the hand about the writer's name. She did not exist after Prof. Janet had left Lucie. No one but he could evoke Adrienne. Whenever he came into Lucie's presence a marked change came over her—she lost her vivacity, appeared subdued, almost timid, and then Adrienne could be elicited. It would seem that Prof. Janet was like a great magnet about which these dissociated subconscious elements gathered in a sort of dream self, but in his absence they again relapsed into their former incoherent condition.

What were they, then? Can we form any conception of what this "amorphous mind" is like?