My present opinion is that the theory of repression offers the only explanation of many cases of hysteria. This applies particularly to those cases where the symptoms represent a permanent state of embarrassment or fear, such as stammers and tremors, and to the unreasonable fears and impulses, the phobias and obsessions, of the war-strained soldier. As an example I will quote a case of a soldier who had an impulse to attack any single companion, which was cured by bringing into consciousness the repressed memory of a gruesome hand-to-hand fight in which he killed his opponent. The repression was so complete that after its first revival under hypnosis it was 'forgotten' again and again at subsequent interviews in the waking state. This example illustrates Freud's 'tendency to displace affects.' Therepressed complex contained within itself the impulse to fight; this 'affect' reached consciousness and an object had to be found for it, the object being the single companion of the patient.
As regards those hysterias in which the secondary function is conspicuous, I incline to the 'Will to Power' theory, and add to it the 'repression of the consciousness of deceit.' To illustrate this, let us trace the growth of a case of hysteria. Imagine a girl who is 'misunderstood', who has her round of daily tasks and feels that she was meant for higher things, that she ought to be loved and obeyed instead of being subject to the will of others. To no one can she tell her thoughts and troubles, sympathy is denied her, and she sees no hope of satisfying her desires or changing her position in the world.
Or imagine another type, the pampered girl who has never had to face a trouble or unpleasant task and has come to regard her own wishes as the supreme law, until at last the time comes when some desire, some wish that she cannot or will not face and conquer, remains ungratified. She feels the need to express her feelings, to obtain that sympathy that she thinks she deserves.
In either case there comes the hysterical manifestation, and here I will quote from Jung[16]:—
'But, the astonished reader asks, what is supposed to be the use of the neurosis? What does it effect? Whoever has had a pronounced case of neurosis in his immediateenvironment knows all that can be "effected" by a neurosis. In fact there is altogether no better means of tyrannising over a whole household than by a striking neurosis. Heart attacks, choking fits, convulsions of all kinds achieve enormous effects, that can hardly be surpassed. Picture the fountains of pity let loose, the sublime anxiety of the dear kind parents, the hurried running to and fro of the servants, the incessant sounding of the call of the telephone, the hasty arrival of the physicians, the delicacy of the diagnosis, the detailed examinations, the lengthy courses of treatment, the considerable expense: and there in the midst of all the uproar, lies the innocent sufferer to whom the household is even overflowingly grateful, when he has recovered from the "spasms".'
'But, the astonished reader asks, what is supposed to be the use of the neurosis? What does it effect? Whoever has had a pronounced case of neurosis in his immediateenvironment knows all that can be "effected" by a neurosis. In fact there is altogether no better means of tyrannising over a whole household than by a striking neurosis. Heart attacks, choking fits, convulsions of all kinds achieve enormous effects, that can hardly be surpassed. Picture the fountains of pity let loose, the sublime anxiety of the dear kind parents, the hurried running to and fro of the servants, the incessant sounding of the call of the telephone, the hasty arrival of the physicians, the delicacy of the diagnosis, the detailed examinations, the lengthy courses of treatment, the considerable expense: and there in the midst of all the uproar, lies the innocent sufferer to whom the household is even overflowingly grateful, when he has recovered from the "spasms".'
But the end is not always thus. There are victims of hysteria whose symptoms continue for months or years, till cure seems impossible, although, as I have said before in this chapter, there is present in the consciousness a strong desire for recovery. Let us imagine the patient complaining of severe pain in one foot: the sympathising friends tend her with care and affection, the doctor suspects the early stage of some bone disease, and, as is the fate of so many practitioners, he is urged by the friends to say 'what is the matter.' Then the supposed disease receives a name, muscular action pulls the foot into an abnormal position, deformity appears, and if the true nature of the disease is now discovered not only the patient but the friends and family need the most careful treatment.
What has been happening all this time in the mind of the patient? We will assume that sheknew at the beginning that her pains were fictitious; what course is now open to her if she wishes to end the deceit when her friends, by their pardonable credulity, have allowed themselves to be deceived and her troubles have been accepted by the doctor as real? Her pride or self-respect prevents open confession, and in her ignorance of the course of the supposed disease she thinks an unexpected recovery will reveal the fraud. Here are the materials for another mental conflict, and her alternatives are:—
1. To solve the conflict by confession or recovery, and I have shown the difficulties of this course.
2. To build a logic-tight compartment; to say, for example, 'They have never given me a chance, and now I am quite right in imposing upon them as long as I can.' But her feelings concerning right and wrong are probably too strong to maintain this attitude indefinitely.
3. To repress the consciousness of deceit and maintain her symptoms as the price of her peace of mind.
This last course is followed, and the patient is now a Dissociate. In the dissociated stream are:—
1. The original desires which led to the manifestation of disease—the desire for sympathy, the desire to have her own way, the 'Will to Power.'
2. The knowledge of deceit.
3. The mechanism for maintaining the symptoms—the pains, the paralysis or contracture.
This stream is now independent of the main personality and out of its control; as far as the patient knows her pains are real, her deformity is a disease, and whoever doubts it is not only ignorant but cruel. We can now understand the capriciousness of the hysteric, her moods and contrary ways. On the one side is a mind with ordinary motives, and on the other is the split-off portion containing the complexes catalogued above. If the reader thinks this conception brings us back to the old one of demoniacal possession I will admit that the only difference lies in the definition of the demon.
The description of this imagined case will perhaps be acceptable to those who believe in the connection between hysteria and malingering. This connection I at one time emphasised, and I still believe that in some cases the repression of a knowledge of deceit plays an important part in the development of the disease. But motives are derived more or less from the unconscious, and when the unconscious elements predominate we approach the condition in which there has never existed any consciousness of deceit. The case of the soldier with an obsession to attack his companion does not admit of the hypothesis of a stage in which the symptom was due to a conscious desire to any end: but his repression might have shown itself, let us suppose, in a paralysis of his legs as a symbol of exhaustion or terror. Then we should have a hysteria in which there had never been any deceit complex, though in the absenceof knowledge of the workings of the patient's mind a firm believer in the 'Will to Power' theory might attribute the origin of the condition to a definite desire to escape the strain of war.
I can now state that some of the results of conflict between desire and reality form a graduated series, beginning at cases of conscious simulation, then passing on to those of hysteria with repression of the knowledge of deceit, and ending with cases where deceit has never existed; but no one theory explains satisfactorily the origin of all cases of hysteria.
It is difficult to understand those cases in which the hysteric inflicts injuries upon him or herself; the individual who thrusts needles into his body and comes to hospital again and again to have them removed is a curious but not very uncommon object. An ophthalmic surgeon of my acquaintance had a patient who placed irritants under the lid of one eye till the sight was lost and the organ was removed, and the process was begun on the remaining eye before the trick was discovered. Such things occur in the history of malingering, and what the consciousness can do the dissociated stream is equally capable of doing: the only difficulty is the very practical one of believing that the patient can carry out the necessary action without being fully aware of what is happening, unless we assume an abrupt dissociation with the main personality temporarily abolished.
Certain hypnotic experiments throw light upon this difficulty, which also occurs in connectionwith some spiritualist phenomena. It has for long been disputed whether mental processes can produce bleeding into the skin or blisters upon it. Such bleedings were the 'stigmata' representing the marks of the Crucifixion, that have been described as appearing upon the bodies of religious devotees, and they have been thought to be real and due in some way to auto-suggestion.
Hysterical subjects often show the production of raised wheals if the skin is lightly stroked with the finger-nail or the head of a needle; one can write a word upon the skin and watch it become visible. This is purely a circulatory phenomenon, but experiments have been made under hypnosis in which the skin is touched with a pencil and the subject is told that he is being burnt and that a blister will follow. Success has been claimed for this experiment, but one source of error is hard to exclude. If a blister appears the next day, and the subject is known to be an honest man with no end to gain by cooking the experiment, an observer might be inclined to accept the result as due to the direct influence of suggestion; but the subject is, by the terms of the experiment, in a state of dissociation, and in the dissociated personality exists the suggestion that a blister should appear. In addition there exists the desire to carry out the wishes of the hypnotist, and since this is out of the control of the main personality whose honesty is accepted as sufficient guarantee against fraud he must nevertheless be regarded as willing and eager to produce a blister.
Milne Bramwell[17]quotes a case in which suggestion, under stringent conditions, apparently produced blistering: the subject's arm was then enveloped in bandages in which sheets of paper were incorporated, and after further suggestion and a night's rest it was found that, although the subject had been watched continually, she had succeeded in penetrating the bandages with a hair-pin. A further experiment, in which the arm was enveloped in plaster of Paris bandage, gave a negative result. This experiment is very valuable; it does not disprove the possibility of producing blisters by suggestion, but it does prove that if we judge the Dissociate by ordinary standards we expose ourselves to victimisation. If I were the subject of such an experiment I should certainly require that every precaution should be taken to prevent me from producing a blister by mechanical means.
Now let us consider the signs of the disease. In the chapter on suggestion I showed that in a limb paralysed by hysteria the loss of sensitiveness, the so-called hysterical anæsthesia, resulted from a desire on the part of the patient that the doctor should find what he was looking for, and this desire I called receptivity. The receptivity is at first necessary to keep up the deception, for the patient does not know the symptoms of the simulated disease, and must always be on the alert to pick up hints. When dissociation occurs, the receptivity finds its place in the split-off stream,forming part of the mechanism for keeping up the symptoms; but having passed out of the control of the main personality it tends to become exaggerated and misdirected.
Hence the hysteric becomes very suggestible and all kinds of fantastic symptoms may be produced. If the resistance to recovery is not great then suggestion may even remove symptoms, just as it created them; and if we now turn back to Babinski's definition we shall find that it fits into our theories, although it concerns itself with only a restricted view of the subject.
Since one object of the dissociated stream is to maintain the symptoms, it follows that any method that will remove them may abolish the dissociation, though still leaving the patient with those desires and conflicts, conscious or unconscious, which preceded their appearance and which form the so-called 'hysterical predisposition'. This explains the success which has followed the employment of exorcism, Christian Science, nasty drugs, cold water, electric shocks, persuasion, or rest cures; and to this list, I hasten to admit, some people would add treatment according to the method of bringing repressions into the light of consciousness.
I have tried to make clear the subject of hysteria for the following reasons: There is at the present day no school of believers desirous of attributing supernatural causes to the disease, and therefore I am spared the task of attacking a mass of credulity; and, further, the mental processes areidentical with those shown in other phenomena concerning which credulity is still powerful. I can now proceed to show how the theory of dissociation explains the production of the spuriously supernatural by the apparently honest.
There are certain parlour tricks which have an attractive flavour of the occult and sometimes form an introduction to it. Most of us have seen children mystified by a thought-reading performance depending upon a more or less obvious code, but sometimes we are treated to one which is more genuine.
The procedure is something like this: One person goes out of the room and the others decide that on his return he shall perform an action such as unlacing a shoe or pushing on the hands of a clock to a certain hour. Then he returns and, according to arrangement, may be blindfolded or not, and one of the party may or may not place a hand upon his shoulder; the audience next 'concentrate their minds' upon what the performer is to do, whilst he 'makes his mind a blank'.
Sometimes success follows, and the result is taken as proof of 'thought-reading'.
Now let us examine the process in the light of what we have assumed in previous chapters. To make the mind a blank, if it means anything, means to cut off the stream of consciousness, and we straightway have our old friend a dissociation.The performer is then in a state resembling hypnosis, and, as we have seen before, in hypnosis the senses may be abnormally sharpened. This sharpness, together with the receptivity of the subject, makes him ready to pick up the faintest signs, and in the case where the hand of a second person, also concentrating his mind on the desired action and therefore to a certain extent dissociated, is placed upon his shoulder, there are easily conveyed enough pressure-signs to indicate when he is going right or wrong.
When there is no actual contact other indications than touch are not lacking. The passing expressions of pleasure or disappointment on the faces of the audience, the sigh of relief when a wrong step is retraced, the glances at the object to be handled, are all picked up by the dissociated stream whilst the main personality of the subject is for the time almost obliterated. We must bear in mind that all the audience are concentrating their minds, that concentration of mind upon an action is likely to be followed by movements corresponding to the action, and that no one is watching his neighbour or suspects any such unconscious indications.
The thought-reading is not performed without prolonged pauses, the subject making several halting steps before the right one is taken. It reminds one of the manner in which the medium feels his way to the thoughts of his victims.
Domestic blindfolding is not very efficient, and may be of use to the subject by allowing him tolook without the direction of his glances being noticed.
So this thought-reading is reduced to the children's game of 'Hot and Cold', but instead of fully conscious people producing and receiving sounds we have a group of 'concentrated' (that is, partly dissociated) streams sending out indications to be picked up by a hypersensitive dissociated stream.
The subject is often exhausted by his efforts, and the performance is not likely to be of benefit to any one who misinterprets it. The human mind contains enough errors without producing a voluntary dissociation further to deceive its owner.
There is one well-known experiment the significance of which is generally missed. If the reader is not familiar with it let him follow these directions and he will probably find that he is possessed of some amount of so-called hypnotic power. Having procured a weight fastened to a short cord (a heavy watch with its chain will serve), direct a friend to sit in a chair and, resting his elbows upon his knees, to hold the cord by the fingers of both hands so that the weight is suspended between his separated knees. Let him keep his eyes upon the weight and assure him that it will begin to swing from knee to knee. The weight, at first indecisively wobbling, will soon take on the swing you describe, which will gradually increase in amplitude. I have heard people ascribe this motion to 'magnetic power'—blessed words that mean nothing, but serve to give anappearance of reason to an explanation that should satisfy no one.
The real cause of the motion is shown if you experiment with a fresh subject, who must know nothing of the first trial. Ask him to hold the weight in the same manner but, standing in front of him, tell him the weight will swing towards you (that is, at right angles to its swing in the first experiment). If you show sufficient assurance you will probably succeed in both experiments, but your chance of success is less than that of the man who has seen the trick and accepts the 'magnetic' explanation, for his belief in the physical cause of the phenomenon will give him a natural assurance which is lacking in one who realises that the weight swings in a certain direction because the agent is made to believe that it will.
It is plain that your friend swings the weight himself, but he is unaware of two factors: He knows nothing of his own muscular action and nothing of his own mental processes which have produced that action; hence this experiment must be placed among the automatisms like table-turning and water-divining. One is prepared to find that the trick has its place among the mechanical adjuncts of spiritualism: it was used in ancient times as a means of divination, and is used by mediums of to-day when they tap out spirit revelations with a gold ring suspended in a glass tumbler.
If intelligent people like your friends can be made to believe that the weight is moved by some extraneous force, it can be understood that thetrained medium, full of a belief in the supernatural, finds it an easy task to let the unconscious have possession of his or her muscular actions and spell out memories and fantasies which one is asked to accept as evidence of spirit control.
Planchette (described in Chapter IV) finds a place in the family circle, sometimes with the result that a single hit becomes a tradition after all the other stuff has faded from memory. A friend, who told me that he saw Planchette predict truly the month in which the Boer War ended, admitted that his family had toyed with the instrument night after night, but he failed to remember any other results. I must add that he never believed in the thing, but, nevertheless, the one lucky shot was remembered.
Table-turning is another half-way house between the parlour trick and the full-blown occult. Several people sit round a light table with their hands placed upon it, and, after due 'concentration of mind', aided often by a dim light, the table begins to move and the spirits are at work. Then a sort of Morse code is invented to communicate with the spirit entities, and the revelations begin.
Here I will quote from page 219 ofRaymond, that widely-circulated book by Sir Oliver Lodge:—
'During the half-hour ... I had felt every now and then a curious tingling in my hands and fingers, and then a much stronger drawing sort of feeling through my hands and arms, which caused the table to have a strange intermittent trembling sort of feeling, though it was not a movement ofthewholetable.... Nearly every time I felt these queer movements Lady Lodge asked, "Did you move, Woodie?" ... Lady Lodge said it must be due to nerves or muscles, or something of the sort.'
Compare this with the feelings of the water-diviner (Chapter V):—
'The muscles of the arm become contracted when the bodily magnetism is affected by the presence of water.... I suppose it must have something to do with the composition of the blood and nerve cells.'
Or with those of a hysteric who, previously relieved from mutism, was again struck dumb during a thunderstorm: ... 'I felt the electricity passing all over my body; it made all my muscles quiver and then went out at my finger-tips.'
No one can deny the reality of these feelings, as feelings, but in the first instance they are due to spirits, and in the next to water, and only in the case of the man known to be sick in mind is the real explanation likely to be accepted by the subject. They are all products of imagination, suggestion, self-deceit, or dissociation—call it what you please if you understand that the feelings have their origin in the mind of the subject and are not due to any external cause.
But in the first two examples they are associated with muscular movements which, we must believe, are carried out unknown to the doers and hence have their source in a dissociated stream. As usual, once the dissociation is established, there isno limit to its manifestations. Picture three or four Dissociates at work at a table, all bent upon producing signs of the marvellous, all blind to the mechanism at work, and with the hypersensitiveness of the dissociated stream ready to draw on the memories of the unconscious.
Mixed with this is the possibility of more elaborate deceit: when the hands of all are raised from the table their knees may still be under it; and if the knees are clear of it a blackened lath concealed up a sleeve can still work miracles.
This is taking us beyond the purely domestic, but there is no difference between the after-dinner tilting of the table for amusement and the same thing done at a séance—the mechanism is the same, but one is treated as a jest whilst the other is something worse. We see again the typical series with simple trickery at one end and reason-destroying dissociation at the other.
Palmistry seems too absurd to be discussed, but it is another half-way house. That the lines of Life, or Love, or what-not, are to be found on the palms of dead-born babies and of monkeys should be enough to stop the cult; but handbooks of palmistry seem to profit their publishers, and the palmists and clairvoyants flourish. The girl who buys a handbook and amuses her friends by reading their hands is comparatively harmless, though even she, becoming shrewd to note when she hits the mark, is likely to develop an unconscious receptivity and drift into fraud.
Crystal-gazing is a form of mediumism admirablyfitted to give play both to trickery and dissociation. Used by the medium to 'see as in a glass darkly' and gain time for the help of his or her receptivity, it also allows of the induction of a self-hypnosis, the memories or fancies from the unconscious showing themselves as visions in the crystal.
Table-turning is easily first among the ways of giving rein to the unconscious. It has the advantage of allowing several people to play the same game at once, and further of allowing one Dissociate to work the miracle, whilst no one, not even the Dissociate himself, knows who is doing it. This is illustrated inThe New Revelation, p. 19, where Sir Arthur says: 'Some one, then, was moving the table; I thought it was they. They probably thought that I did it.'
The Gate of Remembrance[18]gives an illustration of tapping the unconscious and producing results that seem astonishing.
Two gentlemen, Mr. F. B. Bond and his friend J. A. I., had devoted years of study to the archæology of Glastonbury, exploring every available source of information in history or tradition and thinking hard and often about the Edgar Chapel, a part of the Abbey whose site was undetermined. After this preparatory storing up of memories and thoughts in the unconscious, they proceeded to tap them. I quote from page 18:—
'What was clear enough was the need of somehow switching off the mere logical machinery of the brain which is for ever at work combining themore superficial and obvious things written on the pages of memory, and by its dominant activity excluding that which a more contemplative element in the mind would seek to revive from the half-obliterated traces below.'
Recognising an old friend, we are not surprised to find that automatic writing was the means employed to switch off the main stream of consciousness and produce a dissociation.
I find myself more in accord with the writer than reviews had led me to expect, for he disclaims 'the action of discarnate intelligences from the outside upon the physical or nervous organisation of the sitters' (p. 19).
The automatic writing is apparently controlled by Richard Bere, Johannes, and other influences which would be welcomed by spiritualists as 'objective entities'; but the writer gives his opinion regarding Johannes (p. 50) as follows: 'Whether we are dealing with a singularly vivid imaginative picture or with the personality of a man no one can really decide.'
Here I must differ and claim to have decided, for myself at least, that no personality other than that of the actual writer was concerned. The record of hysterical phenomena contains so many similar 'personalities' that I find no reason to call in the supernatural to account for this one. If a natural explanation is available we must not appeal to the supernatural; I am sure that F. B. B. is not unacquainted with Occam's razor—miracles must not be unnecessarily multiplied.
Since the writer does not stress the supernatural, and allows me to credit to his unconscious the poetical imaginings produced in the script and the 'veridical passages' concerning the discoveries of the Edgar Chapel, I have no need to criticise them, especially as he is scrupulous in giving credit to the conscious predictions of others when they hit the mark.
The book is a record of an experiment—successful from the psychological point of view—carried out by two Dissociates whoknew what they were doing; the dissociated streams were entirely out of their control, and although I must, from the psychological standpoint, class the experiment with the other dissociations described in this book, yet it is far from my purpose to class the experimenters with 'Feda' and others of her kind.
The earlier chapters of this book were written before I readThe Gate of Remembrance, but whoever reads the conclusion in the latter book will find many opinions in agreement with those in my chapter on the unconscious.
Table-turning, water-divining, automatic writing, thought-reading, and the use of the pendulum are examples of a psychological automatism in which the agent is conscious neither of the muscular movements concerned nor, what is more important, of the mental processes producing them.
They can be cultivated to provide amazing results in tapping the memories of the unconscious, and if the agents remain in ignorance of their true mechanism a systematised delusion is built up and accepted as proof of the supernatural.
Just as any one believing all actions to be the result of fully conscious motives may regard the hysteric as a simple fraud, so he may dismiss the medium and the clairvoyant in the same easy way and consider the matter settled. But we find men in positions which lend authority not only vouching for the honesty of the medium but sometimes taking an active part in the production of the phenomena for which the explanation of fraud is regarded as sufficient; as a result this explanation fails to convince and we meet many people who believe there must be 'something in it'. So there is: there is the same graduated series, from the simple cheat to the complete Dissociate, that we saw in the consideration of hysteria, but in addition there is a fervent desire to believe, and the Dissociate, instead of being regarded as a victim of disease, is treated as a person gifted with supernatural powers.
Let me describe my first experience of a medium. Friends had told me of his gifts and had met my incredulity with 'How do you explain this?' followed by some story of supernatural revelation. I could not explain, but accepted an invitation tomeet the miracle-worker and, perhaps, be converted. His method of demonstrating communication with the spirit world was to sit in a meditative attitude with one hand before his eyes, whilst watching between his slightly separated fingers the assembled believers so as to note the effect of his revelations, which were apparently presented to him by the spirits in two forms. Descriptions of the spirit world came through freely, one might call them fluent but incoherent, whilst revelations such as my friends had promised came in a halting and uncertain trickle. The enthusiastic accounts had not prepared me for such a poor show. I had pictured him saying something like—'Your grandmother's name was Georgina; she died at the age of seventy-two, after an illness lasting three days; she was a good horsewoman and disliked Mr. Gladstone'. Instead of this the procedure was: 'I hear a name, is it George? (No bite)—Georgina? (a look of intelligence)—you have a friend named Georgina—a young girl—no, not a young girl, she was older, a relative, yes, a relative'—and so on. Finally Georgina is discovered to be a grandmother of one of those present, and is described sufficiently well to be recognised as the grandmother on the father's side, though, curiously, Georgina was the name of the maternal grandmother. What could be more convincing? Of course spirit communication is difficult and such a mistake only proves the genuineness of the article; but the description of the grandmother was built up on certain characteristics of the father, who was present, and thesource was obvious to any one not blinded by the desire to believe.
One incident shows that the medium had received some education in the superficial signs of disease. An elderly lady with a rather puffy face, which had raised in me a suspicion of kidney disease, was told by him: 'It is strange, but Imusttell you for your own sake. You have trouble with your kidneys.' He was wrong and so was I, but if events had proved us right the credit would have been his.
Then my turn came and the spirits told about my own disposition, which I had unfortunately revealed by a single observation before the real business began, and the exulting glances of the audience told me the first score had gone to the medium. Then more intimate stuff came through; names were presented and I nibbled at one: 'Yes, I know him', with a stress on the 'I'. More revelations—he was my enemy (here a nod from me), I had suspected it for a long time, but right would conquer, and I must not fear. Then a relative came into the play, and a look of sadness drew forth the surprising news that she was dead but her spirit was watching over me. Next came the phrase, heard once before in the séance, 'I see a far-off land', and the believers brightened up again. Quick came the news, 'You have been abroad,' and I couldn't deny it.
Thus the game went on; when a hint could be picked up it was used at once or later, to be cast back as a spirit revelation. As the game developedI gave hints in plenty, whilst my friends showed their joy at seeing a sceptic receive convincing proofs of the spirit powers.
The séance being ended, my first task was to persuade the believers that the revelations vouchsafed to me bore little relation to the truth; 'But you said they were true.' 'Yes, and they were not.' 'Then you were really telling lies.' 'Yes, and he believed them and so did the spirits.' 'Well, of course, if you deceive the spirits like that how can you expect the truth in return?' So the rationalisations went on and the logic-tight compartments were protected from injury.
In this show we see a fine example of receptivity, like that of the hysteric who watches the doctor to learn what symptoms he expects to find; and just as the doctor may suggest absurd symptoms and find them present, so I was able to suggest falsehoods and have them reflected as revelations. But the believer would never do that; he is eager to fit every phrase to some fact within his knowledge, those that cannot be so fitted being forgotten as soon as the next lucky shot occurs, and in his eagerness he helps along the medium and provides him with more material.
Lest it may be thought that this experience is not typical, I will use the light given by it to examine some of the spirit news given inRaymond.
But we must first understand who are thedramatis personæof a séance. Since the time ofthe Witch of En-dor the expert medium has had a familiar spirit which speaks through him to this world and at the same time is in contact with the spirit world. The psychological explanation, if the medium is a true Dissociate and not a conscious fraud, is that the results of the dissociated stream are perceived by its owner as something of external origin. In the same way a lunatic whose dissociated stream produces voices will project them externally and believe them to be warnings or commands from an outside source; the table-turners, water-diviners, and watch-swingers follow the same reasoning, though their results are purely motor; and when ideas come up from the cut-off stream the individual cannot recognise them as mental products of his own, but feels impelled to credit them to another personality. I am reminded of a charming little girl whose one desire was to please her parents but who often gave way to the mischievous tendencies of a healthy child; whenever that happened she produced an imaginary 'Naughty John' who broke toys and cut off little girls' hair. That is how the dissociated medium proceeds: unable to rate at their proper value the ideas which present themselves, he invents a familiar spirit who serves as their ostensible origin. The familiar thus called into being can draw upon the unconscious of the medium for the material to build up fantasies about another world. The spirits of the dead are part of these fantasies, so that we finally have the medium, the medium's split-off personality,often with a name of its own, and the spirit that meets the demand of the moment.
The secondary personalities in Sir Oliver's mediums are Feda and Moonstone, and in the dialogue Feda tells what Raymond is doing or saying, occasionally carrying on asides of her own. All this seems very complicated, but an explanation is necessary in order to understand what follows.
The medium (or, in this case, Feda) tells Sir Oliver Lodge (see pp. 250et seq.), 'It's a browny-coloured earth, not nice green, but sandy-coloured ground. As Feda looks at the land, the ground rises sharp at the back. Must have been made to rise, it sticks up in the air.... The raised up land is at the back of the tent, well set back. It doesn't give an even sticking up, but it goes right along, with bits sticking up and bits lower down.' Of this the scientific Sir Oliver says: 'The description of the scenery showed plainly that it was Woolacombe sands that was meant.' The reader will have no difficulty in fitting this description to any sands he likes, but the believer wants it to be Woolacombe, and Woolacombe it is.
Then, the medium having discovered that O. J. L.'s family had a tent by the water, O. J. L. asks: 'Is it all one chamber in the tent?' Answer: 'He didn't say that. He was going to say no, and then he stopped to think. No, I don't think it was, it was divided off.'
Next a yacht appears out of the spirit world, and O. J. L. asks: 'What about the yacht with sails, did it run on the water?' The medium needstime to think, and the answer comes: 'No' (Feda (sotto voce): Oh, Raymond! don't be silly!) he says, 'No. (Feda: It must have done.) He is showing Feda like a thing on land—yes, a land thing. It's standing up, like edgeways. A narrow thing. No, it isn't water, but it has got nice white sails.'
O. J. L. 'Did it go along?'
'He says itdidn't! He's laughing! When he said "didn't" he shouted it.' Feda should have said, 'He laid particular emphasis on it.'
The first question is capable of two interpretations and the answer is ambiguous, though the ambiguity is further 'evidence' to Sir Oliver, because he remembers that a double-chamber tent had been turned into a single-chamber one.
The second question may be compared with 'Did you feel that?' in the production of hysterical anæsthesia (see Chapter VIII). The hysteric reasons, consciously or unconsciously:—It is natural to feel a pin prick, but the doctor is looking for signs of disease and he must expect to find a numbness or he wouldn't ask the question, so the answer is 'no'.
When Sir Oliver asks concerning a yacht, 'Did it run on the water?' the reasoning is similar, and the word 'run' helps, for no yacht runs on the water; if the yacht sailed on the water the question would not be asked, therefore the answer here was 'no', but the medium maintained a clever ambiguity whilst feeling her way.
The third answer was a cleaner guess, but wrong.
He says: 'All this about the tent and boat isexcellent, though not outside my knowledge'.... Then he adds, concerning the boat, 'I believe it went along the sands very fast occasionally, but it still wouldn't sail at right angles to the wind as they wanted it.... On the whole it was regarded as a failure, the wheels were too small; and Raymond's "didn't" is quite accepted.'
And Raymond's 'did' would have been as readily accepted and put in the same chapter headed 'Two evidential sittings.'
Contrast these halting scraps to the following (p. 249): 'He wants to tell you that Mr. Myers says that in ten years from now the world will be a different place. He says that about fifty per cent. of the civilised portion of the globe will be either spiritualists or coming into it.'
No hesitation here, but no possible verification either, nor any hint that a hundred per cent. of the uncivilised people of the globe are already spiritualists.
Sir Oliver's imagination does not keep pace with his readiness to fit revelation to fact. After the tent, the water, and the yacht, comes—'rods and things, long rods. Some have got little round things shaking on them like that. And he's got strings, some have got strings. "Strings" isn't the right word, but it will do. Smooth, strong, string-like.'
Of this Sir Oliver says: 'The rod and rings and strings mentioned after the "boat", I don't at present understand. So far as I have ascertained the boys don't understand either at present.'Surely an out-of-door family like this includes at least one fisherman; why not think out who he is and score another bull's-eye to the medium?
A delightful example of Sir Oliver's anxiety to help the medium occurs on page 256:—
O. J. L.: 'Do you remember a bird in our garden?'
(Feda (sotto voce): 'Yes, hopping about').
O. J. L.: 'No, Feda, a big bird.'
'Of course not sparrows, he says. Yes he does.' (Feda (sotto voce): Did he hop, Raymond?)
'No, he says you couldn't call it a hop.'
This book of Sir Oliver Lodge's shows an honesty which, together with the circumstances under which it was written, makes critical examination difficult; but there are similar circumstances in many a household to-day, and the honesty of the writer leads many people, who reason that what an eminent man honestly believes must be true, to turn to a mind-wrecking belief in mediums instead of finding consolation in a saner philosophy or religion.
At my first séance it strained my belief in human intelligence to find respected friends believing the romances and guesses of a trickster to be spiritual manifestations, and I thought that there must at least be a more elaborate type of deceit, since believers were to be found among our scientific aristocracy. My belief is no longer strained, but broken, for I find in Sir Oliver's medium the same tricks, the receptivity, the halting search for material, and the same easy flow of unverifiablerevelations that characterised the medium I first met.
Thanks to his honesty, one is able from the material supplied by this writer to trace the source of many 'revelations', and in the rare examples where the source is not manifest (as in the 'pedestal' incident, p. 257) it is scarcely unfair to presume some unintentional suppression. I say unintentional because Sir Oliver, blind to the explanations his own book offers, is plainly incapable of wilfully suppressing facts that tell against himself.
Spiritualism has its fashions, apparitions and materialisations having now given place to communications with the dead, which is the 'New Revelation'. Its newness is not so apparent when we read the story of the Witch of En-dor. Even the occasional deportation of undesirable mediums is not new, for Saul 'put away those that had familiar spirits, and the wizards, out of the land' (1 Samuel, chap. xxviii.). When he disguised himself to visit the witch she recognised him just as the mediums recognise Sir Oliver; but the modern resemblance is best seen when we read that Saul, after asking for Samuel, 'said unto her, what form is he of? and she said, an old man cometh up, and he is covered with a mantle. And Saul perceived that it was Samuel.'
Here we see the medium giving to the credulous believer just what he wants, and the believer reaching out to accept the trivial guess as a spirit revelation. But the remoteness of the event (even at the time the account was written) allowedof prophecies far more to the point than any modern medium's, though, as often happens nowadays, their fulfilment was described by the same writer that reported them.
In one respect we have degenerated since the days of Saul; the Witch of En-dor was not hailed as an instrument of divine power destined to provide a new driving force for religion.
One is repeatedly faced with a story of the marvellous and invited to explain it away or believe in the supernatural. My favourite way of dealing with such a proposition is to borrow a pack of cards, invite the story-teller to take a card, and, without letting me see it, to think of it whilst holding my hand. After a silent pause I name the card and may be told, 'of course that's a trick', and on assuring my friends that the spirits have told me the name of the card I am called a scoffer; somehow a pack of cards is not spiritual enough.
Some stories are hard to explain without full evidence, and here is one of them: A friend assured me that inRaymondwas an account of how one of Sir Oliver Lodge's family went to London to visit a medium, and how after she had started some others of the family met in Birmingham, and, calling up the spirit of Raymond, asked him to say 'Honolulu' at the London séance. Sure enough at the London séance held on the same day 'Honolulu' came into the spirit talk. This account is substantially correct (see pp. 271et seq.) and the incident is inexplicable so far; Sir Oliver Lodge says of the episode:—
'1. It establishes a reality about the home sittings.2. It so entirely eliminates anything of the nature of collusion, conscious or unconscious.3. The whole circumstances of the test make it an exceedingly good one.'
'1. It establishes a reality about the home sittings.
2. It so entirely eliminates anything of the nature of collusion, conscious or unconscious.
3. The whole circumstances of the test make it an exceedingly good one.'
Then, after suggesting Telepathy as an explanation, he writes: 'I venture to say there is no normal explanation, since in my judgement chance is out of the question.'
If the information had stopped at this no explanation on natural lines would be possible, but so painfully honest is Sir Oliver that in the same book he supplies full material for such an explanation. At a London séance on December 20th, 1915, with the same medium there occurs the following:—
(Question): 'What used he to sing?'(Answer): 'Hello-Hullolo, sounds like Hullulu-Hullulo, something about "Hottentot," but he is going back a long way he thinks.'
(Question): 'What used he to sing?'
(Answer): 'Hello-Hullolo, sounds like Hullulu-Hullulo, something about "Hottentot," but he is going back a long way he thinks.'
On April 11th, 1916, a song of Raymond's is found with the words written in pencil:—