class="x-ebookmaker-pageno" title="[Pg 27]"/> stream is really a part of the unconscious whose results make themselves manifest in the consciousness, as I described in the first chapter when writing about intuition; but in automatic writing the main personality is not aware of the results: the dissociated writer does not know what he has written until he reads it, and it may be as much news to him as to a bystander.

The two streams of thought flowing side by side exemplify one kind of dissociation of consciousness, and others of this kind will be described later; this type I shall call continuous dissociation, but there is another which at first sight seems quite different and of which I will give an example:—

An ex-soldier suffered from fears and depressions which made his life a misery, and an endeavour was made to find the cause in a repressed memory. His account of events was complete up to a certain time, but there his recollections ceased; then one day something touched up the hidden memory and in the presence of his doctor he went through a most dramatic scene, showing horror at falling down a dark dug-out upon the bodies of dead Germans and at subsequent experiences which had strongly affected him and whose revival produced again the same emotions as the original events. At the next interview the following dialogue took place:—

'I want you to tell me about falling down the dug-out.'

'What dug-out, sir?'

'The one you told me about last time.'

'I don't remember telling you about it.'

'Yes you do, the dug-out at....'

'No, I don't remember any dug-out at....'

There was no reason why the man should lie, and his expression of surprise and absence of other emotion seemed indicative of truth. When the doctor made the man close his eyes and thus shut out his present surroundings the memory returned with strong emotional reaction, less intense, however, than on the former occasion.

This case can be explained by regarding his repressed complex as lying in the unconscious, held there by the repugnance he felt towards it; then during the interview with the doctor it rose into consciousness and swept every other thought away. The stream of consciousness was suddenly cut off, its place being taken by this new stream with its recollections and emotions, and when the ordinary consciousness resumed its flow there was no connection between it and the dramatic episode which had interrupted, so that all memory of the episode was lost.

We can picture the repressed complex not as lying in the unconscious but as forming a dissociated stream flowing parallel with the main one, and showing its presence by producing those apparently causeless fears and depressions from which the patient suffered, till it suddenly swept aside the main stream and took its place. This alternative view shows the absence of any sharp division between the concept of the unconscious and of a dissociated consciousness, and at the same time brings this abrupt dissociation into harmony with continuous dissociation. Such a dissociation, but with less emotional contents, can persist for a long time, the subject living, as it were, the life of the dissociated stream. Then we have a man with no memory of his previous life, but whose repressed memories, desires, or troubles, forming a complex in the unconscious, have finally broken across the stream of consciousness and taken its place as a second personality. Such instances have been described[5] as 'double personalities', and to this group belong those cases in which a man is found wandering with all memory of his name or associations gone. In soldiers with repressed war memories the repression may include the whole of their war experiences, and they can tell nothing of, say, a year spent in France; here, as long as the repression continues, there is the potentiality of the outbreak of a second personality.

The story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, stripped of those portions which R. L. Stevenson introduced to make it suit his public—the bodily change and the drugs which produced it—can be read with interest as a study of the development of a dissociation, the main personality being aware of the dissociated stream but unable to control it when once the splitting-off had been accomplished.

A less fanciful story of a dissociation is given in A Tale of Two Cities, where the unfortunate Dr. Manette, having learnt shoemaking whilst a prisoner in the Bastille, insists on retaining his tools and material after he is rescued and brought to England, in times of stress secluding himself for a period and living his old life again, working at the old employment and hardly aware of the real world around him.

The source of the story might be made a subject of research by the Dickens Fellowship, for it is too accurate to be purely a fantasy of Charles Dickens, who, like all of his craft that live, was no mean psychologist. Even Dr. Manette's insistence upon retaining his tools, unaware as he was of his own reason for doing so, is consistent with what really happens when a dissociated stream influences the personality.

The different degrees of dissociation can be represented diagramatically. (See opposite page.)

It is to be noted that the dissociation may be the result of purposive action on the part of the subject, though, as will be seen in later chapters, an entirely wrong interpretation may be given to it by the person most concerned and by other people as well; or it may be the result of a repression, and in that case any interpretation given by the subject must necessarily be a wrong one, for he is ignorant of its cause on account of the mechanism of repression, or, to put it differently, if he knows the cause it is no longer repressed.