Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 56, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 March 1911 — Dual Personalities [ARTICLE]

Dual Personalities

We may accept as quite well established the fact that hallucinations, to people who hare them, are real things, and that loss of memory is a real thing, and that double personality is t real thing. Of the loss of memory many cases are familiar. One of the most curious was that of a man who had been a cork cutter in England, says the London Dally Graphic, and went out to America leaving a family behind him. He was wrecked and lost all memory of his former life. He became well to do and prosperous and it was only by ♦' accident of going over a cork cubing factory that he recovered the clue to his former personality. His thinking brain was unstirred, but that part of the brain which directs muscular action enabled him by an act of unconscious memory to cut a cork —an act which no unpracticed person could do. It waa clear then that he had once been a cork cutter, and the Institution of further Inquiries finally identified him. To return, however, to the cases of duplex personality. The first one of recorded historically is that of a youth named Sorgel, in Bavaria, who waa an epileptic, and in one of the relapses into criminal frame of mind which followed on his epileptic seizures kflled a woodcutter. He made no attempt to defend or hide his act, hut childishly explained it. He continued thqg for a week after the crime, when hi* first personality was restored to Mm. He then completely forgot all the occurrences that had preceded or followed the murder. Although this case took place nearly 100 years Ifo his judges ware convinced of his Innocence Sorgel afterward died in a lunatic asylum.

The larger number of these instances of dual personality follow on epilepsy, but one is recorded by Dr. Drewry of Virginia, 1596, of Mr. K. Mr. K., while apparently in perfect health, went to a northern town to transact some business, which he did quite ably and rationally. He then disappeared. He was given up for dead. Then, six months afterward, he was found, brought homp again, a changed man in mind and body. The six months interval was a blank to him and always remained so. He had spent them as an odd job man in a southern state. His recovery dated from the breaking down of a growth in his auditory canal, which had undoubtedly afTected his brain in a physical sense. But of the more curious canes of double personality, which did not begin and leave off suddenly, but which endured for a number of years, there are a number of instances. One was Mias Mary Reynolds, who for 15 or 1$ years had two states of existence, in one of which she was a melancholy, morbid young woman and in the other a gay, hysterical, mischievous child. The alternations, in which the child state lasted from five to six weeks, oontlnued at Intervals of varying length for 15 or 16 years, but finally ceased when she attained the age of thirty-five or thirty-six, leaving her permanently in her secondary or acquired state. The emotional opposition of the two states had, however, become gradually reduced, and the third state at which she eventually arrived was a rational state, removed from both of them. There are cases of nmltiplex personality. of which the best known Is that of the epileptic Lulso Vive, whose

different states were distinguished by different forms of paralysis, as well as by entirely different moral proclivities, and there is the curious case of Miss Beauchamp, a patient of Dr. Morton Prince, a full account of which was given in the International Congress of Psychology, Paris, in 1900. Miss Beauchamp was a neurasthenia but clever young woman, who overworked at college. She was of a morbidly conscientious and rather reserved disposition. She was hypnotised in order to try the power of suggestion, and out of one of these hypnotic trances emerged a new Mlsa Beauchamp a person entirely different, from the original Miss Beauchamp in manners, ideals, education and temperament. This new Mlsa Beauchamp was called “Sally" Beauchamp, and one of the peculiarities of her michlevous temper was a profound dislike of the “other Miss Beauchamp." The case Is too complex and too curious for complete summary here, but it presents the am axing fact that in one brain may reside the possibility of the existence of two entirely different beings, different in mind, thought, disposition, health and temper. Quite apart from any attempt to deceive on the part of such “abnormal" cases, one of the symptoms of brain injury or Incipient brain affection Is the real ability to distinguish between the real and the unreal. One of tbs authorities in London on brain recently asked a young girl who had been deceiving her parents for some years with fables as to imagined incidents and imagined acquaintances what waa the difference to her between these imaginary things and the real existence, for example, of himself and of the room where they were standing "None at all," she replied.