Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory by Ian Hacking

Author:Ian Hacking [Hacking, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 1998-08-02T16:00:00+00:00

He took some of Warlomont’s terminology. Even his first tryout for the name of Félida’s illness—doublement de la vie—was taken straight from Warlomont. Azam spoke of Félida’s alters as her first and second states, using for the latter the terms état second and condition seconde. I remarked that most readers would have encountered the expression “double consciousness” only as it was going out of use, in Breuer and Freud’s Studies in Hysteria. The same is true of condition seconde and état second, the names taken over by Azam. They became standard in French psychiatry for another two decades. Thus this other humble person, Louise Lateau, left her mark on psychiatry.

Félida was always a very sick woman. I find it remarkable that she got on with her life. She may have been the great teacher of Taine and Ribot, but psychology and psychiatry did not help her at all. Born in 1843, she became a seamstress at an early age. The family was poor; her father, a seaman, had drowned. When Azam saw her at the age of fifteen, she was, in her normal state, intelligent, sad, morose; she spoke little, worked hard, and seemed to have little emotional life. She was an extreme hysteric. In her normal state she had no sensations of taste. She had the globus, the lump experienced in the throat before a hysterical attack. Many parts of her body were anesthetic. Her visual field was restricted. After the least emotion she had convulsions in which she did not completely lose consciousness. She bled from the mouth when she was asleep. Azam declined to go on listing symptoms that “are so well known. Suffice to say that with Félida the [diagnosis of] hysteria is certain, and that the singular features that she presents depend on this overall illness.” Félida set the pace. Every French multiple was a florid hysteric.

When Azam first encountered Félida, she would experience fierce pain in the temples and fall into a state of extreme fatigue, almost like sleep. This lasted ten minutes. She would then appear to wake up and would enter her condition seconde. This lasted a few hours, when she would again have a brief trance and return to her ordinary state. This happened every five or six days. In her second state she greeted people around her, smiled, exuded gaiety; she would say a few words and continue, for example, with her sewing, humming as she did so. She would do household chores, go shopping, pay visits, and she had the good cheer of a healthy young woman of her age. After her second brief trance, she woke up in her normal state and had no memory of what had happened, or of anything she had learned in her second state. Her family had to bring her up to date. During this early period the attacks became more and more frequent, and the second state lasted longer and longer.

She had a sweetheart. She was made pregnant in her second state, and in that state she enjoyed being pregnant.

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