The Hidden Self by William James

Author:William James [James, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Good Press
Published: 2021-04-11T00:00:00+00:00

M. Janet observed similar acts in a man in alcoholic delirium. While the doctor was questioning him, M. Janet made him, by whispered suggestion, walk, sit, kneel, and even lie down on his face on the floor, he all the while believing himself to be standing beside his bed. Such bizarreries sound incredible until one has seen their like. Long ago, without understanding it, I myself saw a small example of the way in which a person’s knowledge may be shared by the two selves. A young woman, who had been writing automatically, was sitting with a pencil in her hand, trying to recall, at my request, the name of a gentleman whom she had once seen. She could only recollect the first syllable. Her hand, meanwhile, without her knowledge, wrote down the last two syllables. In a perfectly healthy young man who can write with the planchette, I lately found the hand to be entirely anæsthetic during the writing act. I could prick it severely without the subject knowing the fact. The planchette, however, accused me in strong terms of hurting the hand. Pricks on the other (non-writing) hand, meanwhile, which awakened strong protest from the young man’s vocal organs, were denied to exist by the self which made the planchette go.

We get exactly similar results in post-hypnotic suggestion. It is a familiar fact that certain subjects, when told during a trance to perform an act or to experience an hallucination after waking, will, when the time comes, obey the command. How is the command registered? How is its performance so accurately timed? These problems were long a mystery, for the primary personality remembers nothing of the trance or the suggestion, and will often trump up an improvised pretext for yielding to the unaccountable impulse which comes over him so suddenly, and which he cannot resist. Edmund Gurney was the first to discover, by means of automatic writing, that the secondary self was awake, keeping its attention constantly fixed on the command and watching for the signal of its execution. Certain trance-subjects, who were also automatic writers, when roused from trance and put to the planchette—not knowing then what they wrote, and having their upper attention fully engrossed by reading aloud, talking, or solving problems in mental arithmetic—would inscribe the orders they had received, together with notes relative to the time elapsed and the time yet to run before the execution. It is therefore to no “automatism,” in the mechanical sense, that such acts are due: a self presides over them, a split-off, limited, and buried, but yet a fully conscious self. More than this, the buried self often comes to the surface and drives out the other self while the acts are performing. In other words, the subject lapses into trance again when the moment arrives for execution, and has no subsequent recollection of the act which he has done. Gurney and Beaunis established this fact, which has since been verified on a large scale; and Gurney also showed that the patient became suggestible again during the brief time of the performance.

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