Then one day, after several years of treatment, there appeared yet
another personality, who knew nothing about Miss Beauchamp or Sally
either, and only knew what Miss Beauchamp had known up to some years
before. Miss Beauchamp had a college education, and wrote and spoke
French; Sally knew no French, and tried in vain to learn it; the new
personality did not have a college education at all. Nevertheless,
after long experiment, the story of which is as fascinating as any novel
you ever read, Dr. Prince discovered that this was the real Miss
Beauchamp; the others were "split off" personalities. He traced the
cause to a severe mental shock, and succeeded in the end in combining
the first Miss Beauchamp with the last, and in suppressing the obstinate
and wanton Sally. As you read this story, you watch him mentally
murdering a human being; "Sally" clamors pitifully for life, but he
condemns her to death, and relentlessly executes his sentence. It is a
"movie" thriller with a happy ending, and I should think it would make
disconcerting reading to persons who believe that each of us is one
immortal soul, or "has" one immortal soul, and is responsible for it to
a personal God.
There is never any end to the problems of these multiple personalities,
and each case is a test of the judgment and ingenuity of the specialist.
He will try to make one personality "stick," and will fail, and will
have to accept another, or a combination of two. In one case, he found
that he could not get the right personality to "stick" except under
hypnosis, so he decided to leave the man in a mild state of trance, and
the new personality lived all the rest of its life in that condition. If
you wish to know more about this subject you can find books in any
well-equipped library. I mention one, "The Riddle of Personality," by H.
Addington Bruce, because it contains in the appendix an excellent list
of the literature of the subconscious in all its many aspects.
There is another, and most fascinating method of exploring this
underworld of the mind, and that is the study of dreams. Some fifteen
years ago a psychotherapist in New York told me about the discoveries of
a physician in Vienna, and gave me some pamphlets, written in very
difficult and technical German. Since then this Professor Freud has been
translated, and has become a fad, and the absurdities of his followers
make one a little apologetic for him. But we do not give up Jesus
because of the torturers and bigots who call themselves Christians, and
in the same way we have no right to blame Freud for all the absurdities
of the psychoanalysts.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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