Page:Principles of Psychology (1890) v1.djvu/227

207 TEE RELATIONS OF MINDS TO OTHER THINGS. 207 waking slie should not see any card whose number was a multiple of three. This is the ordinary so-called ' post- hypnotic suggestion,' now well known, and for which Lucie was a well-adapted subject. Accordingly, when she was awakened and asked about the papers on her lap, she counted and said she saw those only whose number was not a multiple of 3. To the 12, 18, 9, etc., she was blind. But the harid, when the sub-conscious self was interrogated by the usual method of engrossing the upper self in another conversation, wrote that the only cards in Lucie's lap were those numbered 12, 18, 9, etc., and on being asked to pick up all the cards which were there, picked up these and let the others lie. Similarly when the sight of certain things was suggested to the sub-conscious Lucie, the normal Lucie suddenly became partially or totally blind. " What is the matter? I can't see!" the normal personage sud- denly cried out in the midst of her conversation, when M. Janet whispered to the secondary personage to make use of her eyes. The anaesthesias, paralyses, contractions and other irregularities from which hysterics suffer seem then to be due to the fact that their secondary personage has enriched itself by robbing the primary one of a func- tion which the latter ought to have retained. The curative indication is evident : get at the secondary personage, by hypnotization or in whatever other way, and make her give up the eye, the skin, the arm, or whatever the affected part may be. The normal self thereupon regains possession, sees, feels, or is able to move again. In this way M. Jules Janet easily cured the well-known subject of the Salpetriere, Wit., of all sorts of afflictions which, until he discovered the secret of her deeper trance, it had been difficult to subdue. " Cessez cette mauvaise plaisanterie," he said to the sec- ondary self — and the latter obeyed. The way in which the various personages share the stock of possible sensations between them seems to be amusingly illustrated in this young woman. When awake, her skin is insensible every- where except on a zone about the arm where she habitually wears a gold bracelet. This zone has feeling ; but in the deepest trance, when all the rest of her body feels, this par- ticular zone becomes absolutely anassthetic.