Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/580

576 Professor Pierce's thoughtful contribution to the Garman Commemorative Volume, the extreme cases of splitting that attract so much forensic attention under the names of double or alternating personality, are psychologically continuous with divisions of personality that are quite usual and normal. We sometimes think of systematic amnesia as the criterion of a real alternation of personality. The lives of many normal persons, however, are so ordered that they at various times make a total change of environment to another to which they are equally accustomed, but with practically no associative links between them. In such cases the abandoned mode of life may be lost sight of with truly hysterical completeness, and its most common passages require distinct effort for recall. The differences between these normal alternations of personality and those of hysteria are simply that the latter are more independent of environmental change, less subject to voluntary control, and in that the associations from the other personality or association system are more difficult of recall, they are more complete alternations. The pathological condition simply brings about the fuller working out of a tendency that in some degree is common to all of us, though never quantitatively measured.

The same is true of those splittings of personality where we do not have two or more associative systems alternating, but running side by side, and contending for expression in action; as in some reported hysterical automatisms, where the patient is said to write answers to one set of questions, and answer another by mouth. It has been remarked that all of us are a little hysterical, and it is again true that all of us are a little schizophrenic. Every one carries about with him numerous systems of likes and dislikes, attractions and counter-attractions, impulses and counter-impulses. Some of these favor the social adaptations of the personality, and others are in truly Mephistophelian opposition to it. The discipline of the former and the control of the latter are the balance of the personality. The lack of these qualities, with the conspicuous preservation of other mental functions, gives us some of the most striking features of dementia præcox. Here we observe that certain egocentric, sometimes formulated as autoerotic, tendencies, that all persons have in some degree, acquired a markedly independent organization, and crush the objective, social instincts of normal personality; covering it with hallucinatory insult, picturing to the mind's eye offensive scenes, preventing the personality from doing as it would, forcing it to think and do things which are hateful. The acutest mental suffering that occurs seems to ensue when the main personality attempts the unequal contest against them; sentiment can paint a lurid picture of its tortures in the death-grip of the destroying "complex." But as a rule these trends gain the mastery without the struggle; and we see simply the general failure of reaction to external things that gives us the apparent apathy of these cases.