Authors: Frank Tallis
As the nineteenth century progressed, enough cases were reported to discriminate between different manifestations of multiple personality. For example, in some cases two personalities each knew about the other whereas in other cases both personalities were mutually amnesic (i.e. ignorant of each other’s existence). The relationship between personalities could also be asymmetric – with only one being amnesic of the other. Finally, a number of cases were known to have several sub-personalities: a community of identities in which each sub-personality might have complete, partial, or no knowledge of every other sub-personality; thus, personality A might be fully aware of B, partially aware of C, and completely ignorant of D, Whereas personality D might be fully aware of A, partially aware of B, and completely ignorant of C. And so on.
These findings had enormous implications for the evolving model of the human mind. Whereas initially one horizontal division had been proposed, to separate upper and lower regions (conscious and unconscious), it now seemed that a multiplicity of divisions was possible. An almost infinite number of complete and partial partitions could be erected, enabling the mind to accomplish endless permutations of self-deception. In the latter half of the nineteenth century two distinct models of the mind became consolidated under the banners of
dipsychism
and
polypsycbism.
Advocates of dipsychism believed in the double ego – the presence of a secondary personality, largely concealed in the unconscious. The most contentious issue surrounding dipsychism concerned whether the hidden mind received information exclusively through the gateway of consciousness or whether information could arrive by other pathways. In the former model, the hidden mind was organised around forgotten information and trace perceptual experiences; but in the latter, it was suggested that the hidden mind might develop from more exotic material – the most likely source being mystical in nature (such as the romantic world soul).
Polypsychism was an altogether more complicated idea. Advocates of this approach viewed the human psyche as a community of lesser minds, whose operation was co-ordinated by a master (or executive) mind. The arrangement might be compared to a classical orchestra. Each of the individual sections – for example, strings, wind, or brass – can function independently; however, they are usually united under the conductor’s baton. In polypsychism, lesser minds can function independently like the sections of an orchestra. They possess a specialist repertoire (unique memories and unconscious regions); however, these lesser minds usually work together under the watchful eye of the master mind. This overseeing mind – the conductor – is the identity we recognise as ourselves when we introspect. Obviously, polypsychism provided the best account of complex multiple-personality cases. Extending the orchestral analogy, the conductor might be temporarily indisposed, allowing the first violin to leap on to the podium and turn an orchestral concert into a string concert. Needless to say, the heads of the other sections might also be capable of hijacking the programme in much the same way.
Eventually scientific investigators concluded that spiritualist phenomena could be explained entirely within the frameworks offered by either dipsychism or polypsychism. For example, the physician Théodore Flournoy undertook a five-year study of the medium Helen Smith. His results were published in
From India to the Planet Mars: A Study of a Case of Somnambulism with GIosso-lalia
(1900). Flournoy concluded that Helen Smith’s revelations were merely ‘romances of the subliminal imagination’, derived largely from forgotten sources (for example, books read as a child). He subsequently coined the term
cryptomnesia
to describe the phenomenon, Flournoy also concluded that Helen Smith’s spirit guide, Leopold, was merely an unconscious sub-personality.
Romanticism had established an intellectual climate which favoured the recognition of unconscious mental activity. Subsequently, hypnotism, phenomena associated with spiritualism, and reports of multiple personality, reinforced the view that any model of mind that failed to acknowledge the unconscious must be incomplete. Indeed, the concept of unconscious mental activity had become an essential explanatory vehicle – at least for those who professed a scientific outlook; however, new ideas about the mind did not respect the boundary between art and science, and throughout the nineteenth century many literary works appeared which were distinctly ‘psychological’.
Mesmerism inspired an entire genre. In addition to numerous lesser writers, giants such as Balzac, Dumas, Poe, Browning, and de Maupassant all wrote works featuring mesmerism. This tradition culminated with the publication of George du Manner’s
Trilby
(1894), a novel in which the eponymous heroine enjoys a brilliant (but ultimately doomed) singing career, under the hypnotic influence of her wicked mentor Svengali.
Yet more interesting are those works that seem to be inspired by the concept of split personality. In James Hogg’s
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a justified Sinner
(1S24), the anti-hero Robert Wringhitn meets a sinister stranger called Gil-Martin, who represents Satan, but may equally represent Wringhim’s own dark side. A few decades later, Hans Christian Andersen wrote an enigmatic fairy story called TTie
Shadow
(1847), in which a scholar becomes separated from his shadow. When the shadow returns, they exchange roles, which proves fatal for the scholar. A similar theme emerges in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s early novel
The Double
(1845): Mr Golyadkin, a government clerk, encounters a pernicious doppelganger whose actual existence is never properly established and who may be the embodiment of everything the ‘real’ Mr Golyadkin hates (and fears) about himself.
The definitive novel of this genre is, of course, Robert Louis Stevenson’s much celebrated
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
(1886). By using drugs, Jekyll liberates his dark side, which surfaces as the repellent Mr Hyde in whose person Jekyll commits acts of brutality and murder. Yet even this masterpiece was not the final word. Very late in the nineteenth century the theme of dipsychism was still being explored in literature. As, for example, in Oscar Wilde’s
The Picture of Dorian Gray
(1891) – the tale of a beautiful young man who does not age while his portrait is ravaged by time and the consequences of a decadent lifestyle.
Clearly, the ‘psychological’ novels of the nineteenth century preserve the romantic tradition: the human mind is fathomless and the unconscious a secret chamber. Unlocking the unconscious can release elemental forces, some of which can assume identities. Thus, we are provided with a new demonology – sanctioned by science. And the new demons of the unconscious, like their hellish counterparts, are just as capable of taking control. The unconscious is the source of everything imaginable, but, in a world where anything can be imagined, to open the sluice gates of the unconscious is always potentially dangerous. By the late nineteenth century the unconscious had become like Pandora’s box – something fascinating but something to be handled with care. Something that merited a plethora of cautionary tales.
This rather disconcerting view of the unconscious also emerges in the philosophical works of Friedrich Nietzsche, whose writings appeared at roughly the same time as several of the literary masterpieces cited above. Friedrich Nietzsche (a man whose public image has suffered unfairly because of friendship with Wagner and the indiscriminate approval of Nazi ‘intellectuals’), viewed man as a self-deceiving creature with compromised insight, largely ruled by a chaotic, primitive unconscious – a maelstrom of confused thoughts, feelings, and instincts.
Throughout the nineteenth century many ‘scientific’ commentaries on the unconscious were still steeped in the romantic tradition; however, at the same time, another approach to the unconscious was also beginning to develop. A cooler approach. Less grandiose and less ‘literary’. By contemporary standards, more recognisably scientific.
In 1786 the physician and physicist Luigi Galvani produced muscular contractions in a frog by prodding its nerves with a pair of scissors during an electrical storm. This discovery initiated a programme of research which eventually resulted in the publication of
Commentary on the Effect of Electricity on Muscular Motion
(1791). In this work, Galvani proposed that muscle contraction was produced by an electrical ‘fluid’ that originated in the brain and flowed through the nervous system.
From earliest times animation has always been associated with spirit forces and the soul. In De
Anima,
Aristotle discusses how the soul enables animals to move, by releasing
pneuma
(or spirit) which runs through the body. By getting a frog’s leg to twitch with metal probes and pieces of wire, Galvani was seizing control of a process that had hitherto been strongly associated with the divine. It was God who permitted animals to move, by equipping them not only with the means, but also the will to do so.
It was assumed that ‘animals’ – from insects to domestic pets – exercised a form of choice; early descriptions of animal behaviour are full of charming, anthropomorphic observations that reflect this view. For example, the diarist John Evelyn was moved to write the following on Italian hunting spiders:
I have beheld them instructing their young ones how to hunt, which they would sometimes discipline for not well observing. But when any of the old ones did (as sometimes) miss a leap, they would run out of the field, and hide them in their crannies, as ashamed, and haply not be seen abroad for four or five hours after.
Galvani had produced movement without volition, A physical demonstration of’unconscious’ action.
The word ‘reflex’ was introduced into biology by the neurologist Marshall Hall and was used to describe the ‘automatic’ or involuntary response of a muscle, or group of muscles, to a given stimulus; however, a number of physiologists and neurologists began to consider the possibility that certain mental phenomena might be analogous to automatic reflexes. For example, involuntary memory (as exemplified by the common and frustrating experiences of being unable to remember a fact or name which at a later date effortlessly pops into awareness). Thomas Laycock (a professor of medicine at Edinburgh) suggested that such phenomena reflected the ‘reflex function of the brain’, while a contemporary rival, the physiologist Benjamin Carpenter, referred to these phenomena as ‘unconscious cerebration’.
In 1876, Carpenter observed that volition seems to play a very minor role in the execution of even the most simple behaviours – which are largely automatic. For example, numerous muscles must be activated and organised for an individual to produce a single musical note or syllable. Achieving the exact configuration is a complex task. Yet this is routinely accomplished without any mental effort:
We simply conceive the tone or syllable we wish to utter and say to our automatic self, do this and the well trained automaton executes it. What we will is not to throw this or that muscle into action, but to produce a certain preconceived result.
A few years earlier, in 1874, the great Victorian populariser of science Thomas Henry Huxley also considered the modest role ofvolition in initiating actions, although he reached an altogether more dramatic conclusion. In his article ‘On the hypothesis that animals are automata’, he argued that all animals - including man – depend largely on automatic processes to function. Somewhat controversially, he insisted:
The feeling we call volition is not the cause of the voluntary act, but simply the symbol in consciousness of the stage of the brain which is the immediate cause of the act. Like the steam whistle which signals but doesn’t cause the starting of the locomotive.
So, consciousness was an epiphenomenon – insubstantial, illusory. Meanwhile, down below, in the mind’s engine room, a machinery comprised of automatic associations and neural reflexes was generating cognition, emotion, and complex actions. With Carpenter and Huxley we begin to see the emergence of an extraordinary post-industrial unconscious, populated not by exotic spirit guides, poetic apparitions, and evil sub-personalities -but by robots.
For those who subscribed to the view that most of human behaviour was produced by automatic processes, the obedience of hypnotic subjects was now readily understood. With the power ofvolition anaesthetised, the will of the hypnotist became a kind of surrogate will. The human body was like an empty carriage, with a new occupant in the driver’s seat.
The concept of automatic and unconscious processes in the brain was also employed to explain certain features of visual perception. For example, how is it that we know when objects are moving away from us? The physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz suggested that initially, to make sense of the world, human beings must learn rules. For example, ‘The size of an object’s image varies inversely with its distance from the eye’. Subsequently, if an individual perceives a ball getting smaller, then it follows that the ball is receding; however, most people are not aware of engaging in laborious syllogisms to work out the direction of a ball during a game of tennis. Helmholtz suggested that the basic rules of perception are so well learned they operate automatically. Thus, we understand the visual environment with the help of a process Helmholtz called
unconscious inference.
Clearly, the unconscious, as understood by the likes of Carpenter, Huxley, and Helmholtz, was a rather different unconscious from that as understood by De Quincey, Carus, or Flournoy. The romantic conception of the unconscious was many things, but principally it was an independent agency -within the mind. It could create great works of art, conjure visions in the sensory apparatus, or organise itself around an identity. This other, cooler version of the unconscious was much more ‘mechanistic’. It was almost as though the Enlightenment table clock had made a comeback. But this time, the mind didn’t only operate
like
a clock, the mind was actually
generated
by a clock. Beneath the awareness threshold, impersonal and disinterested processes – processes that worked like clockwork or neural reflexes – were responsible for recollection, perception, and action. This new group of theorists seemed to be suggesting that Pandora’s box contained no intelligence, no wise agencies – merely brain circuits that twitched insensibly, like frog’s legs prodded with wire. Could they possibly be right? It would be almost a hundred years before this kind of thinking was given the serious consideration it properly deserved.