Adventurings in the Psychical Part 15

This is no fanciful theory. It is the solidest kind of fact, repeatedly tested and verified. Time and again, patients p.r.o.nounced incurable by competent physicians have been taken in hand by the psychopathologists and, once their disease has been definitely traced to some dissociation, have been restored to perfect health.

For the matter of that, of course, the same thing has been done to some extent by Christian Science healers and other irregular pract.i.tioners of "mental medicine." But the difference between all of these and the psychopathologists is just this--that the former apply the healing power of suggestion to all sorts of diseases, and without any adequate understanding of its laws and limitations, whereas the psychopathologists recognize that it is only one of several valuable medical methods, and that it is legitimately applicable only to certain maladies.

Experience has taught them, too, that even within its proper sphere of usefulness it often is of therapeutic value only after a searching scientific examination of the patient's subconsciousness has brought to light the particular dissociated states which have to be corrected before a cure can be wrought.

Nevertheless, the range of maladies susceptible of cure by psychopathological processes is marvelously wide, and it is no exaggeration to say that the discovery of the influence exercised by the subconscious in the causation of disease is one of the most vitally significant ever made in the history of medicine.

The truth of this may readily be shown by citing a few cases ill.u.s.trating some of the manifold ways in which dissociation works havoc in the human organism, and the extreme ingenuity displayed by the skilled psychopathologist in overcoming its ravages.

There was brought one day to the Parisian hospital of the Salpetriere, the world's greatest center of psychopathological investigation, a woman of forty, designated in the medical record of her case by the name of Justine. She was accompanied by her husband, who explained that he wished Doctor Janet to examine her because he feared that she had become insane. And, in fact, she presented the aspect of a veritable maniac.

Her jet-black hair was flowing loosely over her shoulders, her eyes were fixed and glaring, her hands trembling, the muscles of her neck twitching, and she constantly made the most horrible grimaces. When Doctor Janet gently sought to question her, she buried her face in her hands, and cried:

"Oh, it is terrible to live thus! I am afraid, I am so afraid!"

"And of what, pray, are you afraid?" the physician asked.

"I am afraid of cholera."

"Is that all you are afraid of?"

"But surely it is quite enough."

Doctor Janet turned for an explanation to her husband, who shook his head despairingly, as he replied in an undertone:

"This is the way she has been for years, doctor, only lately she has grown much worse. She will scarcely eat anything, for fear of catching cholera. It is difficult to persuade her to stir from the house. She seems to think the air is full of cholera germs. She sees cholera in everything. Tell me, doctor, is my poor Justine mad? Must we be separated, she and I? Is it that she will have to spend the rest of her life in an asylum?"

"Leave her here a few days," said Doctor Janet, "and I can tell you better then."

Psychopathologists have invented some delicate tests for discriminating infallibly between true organic insanity, which in the present state of medical knowledge is quite incurable, and functional mental troubles due to dissociation. Applying these, Doctor Janet soon reached the conclusion that Justine was not really insane, and that her "phobia,"

or irrational fear, was due to some forgotten shock connected with the disease cholera.

But, closely though he questioned her, she could recall nothing of the sort. He then decided to try the effect of hypnotizing her, for, as all psychopathologists are aware, hypnotism, when it is possible to use it, is an unrivaled agency for recovering lost memories. Put into the hypnotic state, patients easily remember incidents in their past of which they have no conscious recollection when in the normal, waking state. It was thus with Justine, who proved to be most hypnotizable.

"I want you," Doctor Janet told her, after she had pa.s.sed into deep hypnosis, "to try to remember whether at any time in your life you saw a person suffering from cholera, or one who had died from cholera."

"Why, certainly I did," she promptly replied, shuddering violently.

"When was it?"

"When I was a little girl--fifteen years old."

"Tell me the circ.u.mstances."

"My mother was very poor. She had to take all sorts of work. Sometimes she nursed sick people, and when they died she got them ready for burial. Once two people in our neighborhood died from cholera, and I helped her with the corpses. They made a frightful sight--one of them, at all events. It was the body of a man, naked, and all blue and green.

Oh, frightful, frightful! What if I should catch the cholera? I shall catch it, I know I shall! Nothing can save me!"

Her voice rose in a shriek of terror, and Doctor Janet hastened to de-hypnotize her.

The situation was now perfectly clear to him. Evidently the sight of the corpse, "naked, and all blue and green," had so profoundly affected the impressionable girl as to cause a severe dissociation whereby all memory of the shocking episode had been blotted out of her consciousness, only to be subconsciously remembered in most minute detail.

To bring about a cure, to free her from the obsessing dread of cholera, it was necessary to remove the gruesome subconscious memory image, and Doctor Janet essayed to do this through suggestions given to her when she was again hypnotized.

"You will no longer think of this," he kept a.s.suring her. "You will forget it, absolutely, permanently."

Day after day, for weeks, he hypnotized her, and reiterated similar commands. But she continued to be afflicted with her irrational fear, and it finally became certain that her subconscious recollection of the phobia-causing scene of twenty-five years before was too deeply rooted to be destroyed by direct attack. Instead, however, of abandoning the task as hopeless, Doctor Janet, with a shrewdness born of long experience, made a clever change in tactics.

"You insist," he said to the hypnotized Justine, "that you cannot help seeing in your mind's eye the corpse of the man who died. Very well, I have no objection to that. But hereafter you must see it decently clothed. So when it next appears to you, you will see it wearing a bright blue-and-green uniform, the uniform of a foreign military officer."

Happily, this suggestion "took," and Doctor Janet followed up his advantage by suggesting that the subconscious memory image which she regarded as that of a corpse was, in reality, the image of a living man.

This suggestion likewise being successful, he set about getting rid of the idea "cholera," and its dire implications. Hypnotizing the patient as usual, he demanded:

"What is this 'cholera' that troubles you so much? Do you not understand that it is only the name of the fine gentleman in blue and green, whom you see marching up and down? He is a Chinese general, and his name is Cho Le Ra. Bear that well in mind."

Quite evidently there was nothing to inspire dread in the image of a picturesque Chinese officer, General Cho Le Ra. Little by little, as this artificial conception obtained firmer lodgment in Justine's subconsciousness, the baneful idea which it was intended to supplant faded away, and with its fading the abnormal fear diminished, until at length it entirely disappeared, greatly to her joy and the warm grat.i.tude of her devoted husband.[39]

[39] This case and a number of other instances of forgotten terrors giving rise to disease-symptoms are discussed in detail in Doctor Janet's "Nevroses et Idees Fixes."

Other psychopathologists, following Doctor Janet's lead, have similarly used this method of subst.i.tuting one subconscious idea for another.

Doctor John E. Donley, a well-known neurologist of Providence, Rhode Island, and one of the few psychopathologists whom the United States has yet produced, was once consulted by a young man of thirty-two, who said to him:

"Doctor Donley, I hear you have been very successful in handling people troubled with foolish notions. I'm bothered with as foolish a notion as any one could possibly imagine. I simply can't bear to ride in a street-car with an odd number. Even-numbered cars give me no trouble at all, but if an odd-numbered car comes along, I've got to let it pa.s.s, no matter how great my hurry. My friends laugh at me, but I tell you it's no laughing matter. The thing has got on my nerves so that it is unbearable."

"How long have you been suffering in this way?" asked Doctor Donley.

"For years. Just when it began I can't remember.

"Is it only odd-numbered cars that affect you? How about odd-numbered houses, for instance?"

"No, no," answered the young man, "it isn't odd numbers in general. That doesn't bother me a bit. It's just when they're painted on street-cars."

"H'm," said Doctor Donley. "Ever been in a street-car accident?"

"Never."

"Ever seen one?"

"Not that I remember."

"You are quite sure as to that?"

"Quite."

"Have you any objection to my hypnotizing you?"

"Not in the least, if it is likely to do me any good."

In another ten minutes the problem was solved. Doctor Donley from the outset had felt confident that the young man's phobia must be connected in some way with a street-car accident, and so it proved. Fourteen years earlier, when walking along the street, he had seen a car strike and seriously injure a child who unexpectedly came from behind a wagon. He had noticed at the time that the car bore the number two hundred and thirteen, and he remembered thinking to himself: "There is always bad luck in thirteen." The sight of the accident gave him a marked emotional shock, which, he said, upset him for several days.

All of this had long since pa.s.sed from his waking memory, but was distinctly recalled during hypnosis. It was clear to Doctor Donley that the case was one of dissociation, and that the exciting cause of the young man's unreasonable dread of odd-numbered cars was based on a painfully vivid subconscious memory image of the consciously forgotten tragedy. Also, it was evident that before the dread could be overcome the distressing memory image would have to be eradicated.