BOOKS.
M. BINET'S "ALTERATIONS OF PERSONALITY."
THIS is a most remarkable book by one of the greatest of the French physiological psychologists. It is the book of a very acute and very cautions experimenter who has followed closely all the curious investigations of the French in-
quiries into hysteria and all the amazing results which have been produced by what are called " suggestions " to the subconscious personality hidden underneath the normal personality of hysterical patients, and supposed to be hidden under every one's normal personality,—though without the hysterical temperament this subconscious personality is not often developed. Indeed it may fairly be questioned whether the mere fact that such a very different sub- conscious personality can be elicited, is not in itself evidence of some hysterical stratum in the mind. But startling as are the facts on which M. Binet builds up his rationale of all these morbid phenomena, his in- ferences from these facts are more startling still. His general inference is that when these singular, and often all but incredible, changes of personality take place in the character, manner, and general demeanour of the patients whom be and his many colleagues have studied, the beginning of the whole process has arisen in a break-up of the natural personality into fragments,—what he calls its " disaggrega- tion," or falling asunder into separate elements, through the looseness of the cohesion which made the original character,— and that the secondary process of the regrouping of these separate elements into two or more quite different characters, all of which may at separate times speak through the lips and wholly revolutionise the expression of the same countenance and bodily bearing, is due to almost accidental circum- stances (like the combinations and permutations of the fragments in a kaleidoscope), of which one of the most important determining causes is the arbitrary external sug- gestion of the psychological experimenter. First of all, he takes pains to show how comparatively capricious the con- ditions affecting the use of even the senses may be in the case of a hysterical patient, how, for instance, such a patient having the full use of his eyes in his ordinary state may entirely lose the use of them in one of his abnormal states, and yet, even while that state lasts, may recover their use but only in subordination to a sense which has remained active while his power of sight was in abeyance; for example, the sense of touch, to which alone in this ab- normal condition he had trusted for his guidance until it proved inadequate to guide him, when the use of the eyes seemed brought back solely for the purpose of reinforcing the sense of touch :—
"We were once at the end of a corridor, before a closed door. F— passed his hands over this door, found the knob, seized it, and wished to open the door, but it resisted his efforts. He sought the lock and then the key but did not find it. He then passed his fingers over the screws which held the lock, tried to seize them and make them turn, and finally attempted to break the lock. AU this series of actions testified to certain mental movements in retation • Alterations of Personality. By Alfred Binet, Director of the Lsboratory of Physiological Psychology et the Sorbonne. Fai.is. Translated by Helen Green Ba,dwin. With Notes and Preface by J. Mark Baldwin. Professor in Princeton University. London : Chapman and Hall. to the objects before him. He was about to leave the door, and turned in another direction, when I placed before his eyes a bunch of seven or eight keys. He did not see them. so I shook them noisily at his ear. He did not hear them. I put them in his hand ; he seized them immediately, and tried them, one after the other, in the keyhole, without finding one that fitted. He then left the place and went into a patient's room, taking on his way several objects with which he filled his pockets, and came to a little table that answered the purpose of a writing desk in the room. He passed his hands over this table and found it was empty. While feeling it he came across the knob of a drawer with which he opened the drawer and took a pen. Instantly this pen awoke in him the idea of writing, for he immediately rummaged in the drawer, drew out several sheets of paper, then an inkstand, and placed them on the table. Then he took a chair and began a, letter, in which he recommended himself to his general for his good conduct and his courage, and asked him to remember him when bestowing the medals for service. This letter was written very incorrectly, but it was similar in expression and spelling to what we had seen him do in his normal state. The experiment in which we had taken unconscious part led us forthwith to investi- gate to what degree the sense of sight co-operated to accomplish the result. The facility with which he traced the characters and followed the lines of the paper left no doubt of the use of vision in his writing ; but to make the proof irrevocable, we placed at different times a thick plate of sheet-iron between his eyes and the hand with which he was writing, so that all the visual rays were intercepted. He did not immediately stop the line he had commenced, but traced a few more words; they were written, however, almost illegibly, with the downward strokes running into one another. Then he stopped without showing vexation or impatience. When the obstacle was taken away he resumed the unfinished line and went on. The sense of sight was then Ia full operation, and necessary for his spontaneous writing. It was easy for us to apply a second proof no less conclusive ; while the patient was writing we substituted water for the ink he was using. The first time that he dipped his pen in it enough in remained on it to make his writing still visible; but the second time the pen traced invisible characters, and he noticed it at once. He stopped, wiped the end of his pen, rubbed it on the sleeve of his coat, and again tried to write, with the same results. Then followed a new examination of his pen. He looked more closely than he did the first time, making a new and ineffectual effort. But he did not for an instant think of looking in the inkstand for the difficulty. His thought was incapable of spontaneity, and his sight, normal for the paper and the pen which he held in his hand, was useless with respect to the inkstand, which did not come into his thought. This second experiment confirms the first. Each shows us that sight really exists, but it seems to us that another fact follows, i.e., that the field of vision was exclusive and confined within a circle quite singular to this patient ; that the sense of sight was roused only by touch, and that his use of it was confined entirely to the objects with which he was actually in contact by touch."
(pp. 51-53.)
All this occurs in the course of a long quotation from M. Mesnet's .De l'Automatisme describing the case of a sergeant wounded in the battle of Bazeilles, near Sedan,—a wound which ultimately produced all these morbid phenomena. But this is only one of a great many illustrations of the tendency of the consciousness, as M. Binet believes, to break up into fragments, sometimes of the most capricious kind, the use of the sight in this case being, apparently arbitrarily, quite subordinated to the sense of touch, and obliterated except where the sense of touch made demands upon it. In like manner M. Binet holds that some strata of the moral character are apt to flake off from other strata of the same character, and to furnish materials for the building up of a new and quite different character, which may be determined, according to M. Binet, partly by the arbitrary choice of the psychological experimenter. We will give the general view at which M. Binet has arrived in a short and very graphic passage at the end of his book :— " The personality of our subjects of observation and experiment seems to me like a complicated and frail building, of which the least accident might overthrow a part ; and the stones that have fallen away from the mass become—and this is a very curious thing —the point of departure for a new structure which rises rapidly by the side of the old. This last feature, without being peculiar to hysteria, or even present with all hysterical patients, is neverthe- less very characteristic of all our cases. We must not, however, exaggerate the part that the subconscious person plays, and apply the conclusions of the foregoing studies to normal life indiscrimi- nately. The original fact, as I said, is by no means the secondary personalities. It arises from a disaggregation of psychological elements. It is only after the event, and often artificially by suggestion, that these scattered elements are organised into new personalities. This second period of the phenomenon is distinct and independent of the first, and probably much less frequent, especially with normal individuals. I can not admit that all the states that occur within us without our being conscious of them belong to other personages, and that, for example, when we look at an object the vague sensations by which other objects are con- veyed to us in indirect vision are monopolized by secondary per- sonalities, which are in a way crouching behirul our personal consciousness. These indistinct sensations remain,in my opinion,
simply scattered. To sum up briefly, three principal propositions seemed established by the facts : 1. Elements that enter normally into the constitution of our ego may fall into a state of disaggre- gation. 2. A consciousness never ceases to accompany these elements, although the ego loses consciousness of it. 3. Some- times, under exceptional condition., pathological or experimental, these elements are organized into secondary personalities."
(pp. 347.48-) But now what does this figure of speech termed " dis- aggregation," or falling asunder, of consciousness really denote ? It denotes apparently that a man ceases to have
the control which he once had over his own mind and faculties, that he cannot judge when he needs judgment, or recollect when he needs his memory, or repress his anger when he feels it ; that his various actions are
not submitted to any adequate central revision, that he is not a whole, as it were, but a casual assortment of
mental scraps and fragments of which the physical organi- sation is the only secure bond. But is not this a charac- teristics that belong more or less to all of us ? Even the most perfectly governed nature has its moments of absent- mindedness, or what M. Binet calls "distraction." Sir
Walter Scott had not the least memory of the novel he had written in great pain of body, The Bride of Lammer- moor, and read it as if it bad been written by somebody else. Even Napoleon could lose his head. Even Goethe could forget himself and play the fool with the Duke of Weimer in the market-place of that small capital. No doubt M. Binet would assent cordially, and say that that is part of his case, and that it proves that the capacity for the " disaggregation " of our faculties is to be found in all of us, though only the hysterical show it in any startling form. That may be quite true ; but does that show, as M. Binet evidently supposes, that the personality itself is complex and goes to pieces ? He holds that what we call our mind, our intellect, "is a group of internal events, very numerous and very varied, and that the unity of our
psychical being should not be sought elsewhere than in the arrangement, the synthesis,—in a word, the co-ordination, —of all these incidents." Indeed, he contends that a new per- sonality may be made by arbitrarily choosing any odd com- binations of mental qualities as the foundation of a fresh individuality. He treats the changes of personality of which the French physiologists have found so many instances among their hysterical patients, as quite typical, though perhaps rather more unstable than average examples, of the mode in which all our personalities are formed,—namely, by the "synthesis" or "co-ordination" of all the internal inci- dents of a particular life. So that it would be untrue for anybody to say, was born in York or Edinburgh,' since what ought to be said The scaffolding of the synthesis of incidents which now make up me was first run up in York or London.' Now would that really be a truer mode of speech ? And is any one's present personality as essentially different from his former per- sonality twenty years ago, as the house that has had two wings built out and a porch put in, is from the cottage from which that house was enlarged ? To us the statement is simply incredible, almost nonsensical. If there were no central core of personality, except that given by the various addi- tions of internal incidents of which M. Binet speaks, the per- sonality would be as fluctuating as the pile of stones thrown one by one upon a cairn, or the accidental crowd of creepers which cover a tropical tree. Can any one doubt that there is much more, not much less, personality in a man than in a tree ? and yet if all the aggregated internal incidents in a
man's life constitute his personality, that personality is much more accidental than the tree which grows only from a special germ, a germ whiek more or less moulds all the inci- dents to which it is exposed, to its own type. Is not the aggregation of "internal incidents" in a child of four and a man of forty, so enormously different, as to make it absurd to call them by the same name, if there is no real
thread of identity at the foundation ? As to the processes which M. Binet calls " disaggregation," the personality penetrates them all. There is as much personality in an old man whose memory is more than half gone, and who is dying of old age, as there is in an imperious child or a pas- sionate youth. Whatever may be true, it is not true that personality is formed by the aggregation of a multitude of experiences. It is the personality which aggregates them, not the aggregation which forms the personality. What may be the explanation of the changing personalitie& which are to be found in many hysterical patients,—personali. ties so different that the patient himself treats them as different beings,—it would be very rash to pretend to judge. It is premature to form a theory even, on the data given in such curious volumes as this, or those from which M. Binet has borrowed many of his examples. But he would have to. study these cases far more deeply than he has studied them, to show that the new personalities are constructed out of the- ruins of the original personality which had collapsed under the undermining influence of a sort of moral thy-rot. To our mind, little as there may be to say for the spiritualist theory of possession, even that would be less intrinsically improbable than to imagine that some of the loose elements of any character could first fly off from it, and then combine (as hydrogen and oxygen combine to form water) to constitute a new personality equal to the task of sustaining for long periods the kind of dramatic unity which average human characters sustain in the living world. Nevertheless, M. Binet's book is a mass of singular evidence and acute comment, bearing on a very mysterious and fascinating problem.
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