Personality

Term that has three uses in describing the self: (1) the sum of the characteristics that make up physical and mental being, including appearance, manners, habits, tastes, and moral character; (2) the characteristics that distinguish one person from another (individuality); and (3) the capacity to engage in mental processes, that is, possessing consciousness (according to psychical researcher James H. Hyslop ).

For psychical researchers, this last definition is of primary importance. The question of survival after death cannot be decided until the continuance of personality as a stream of consciousness is proved. A stream of consciousness is proof of the presence of a personality.

The identity of this personality, however, is inseparably bound up with the faculty of remembrance. With a complete loss of memory a new personality will develop. If the former memory returns, the new personality tends to disappear. It may be resuscitated by another attack of amnesia or under hypnosis, in which case it will act as an independent personality.

The case of Anselm Bourne, investigated by William James and Richard Hodgson in 1890, is illustrative. Bourne suddenly lost his memory in 1887 in Providence, Rhode Island, and eight weeks later awoke in Norristown, Pennsylvania, as a shopkeeper. He knew nothing of Albert John Brown, the name under which he lived, nor of the shop or the business. In hypnosis a secondary personality came forward and Bourne's movements were satisfactorily traced from the moment of his disappearance.

This was a plainly degenerative case. Bourne suffered from a postepileptic condition. He had fits of depression from childhood and in later life presented symptoms suggestive of epilepsy. Such degenerative instances are numerous. In other cases the secondary state is an improvement on the primary one.

F. W. H. Myers gave an account of such a case, that of a Dr. Azam's patient, "Felida X." She was born in Bordeaux, France, in 1843, exhibited symptoms of hysteria around age 13, felt pains in her forehead and fell into a profound sleep, from which she awoke in a secondary condition. Whereas in her original condition she exhibited a melancholy disposition, constantly thought of her maladies, and suffered acute pain in various parts of her body, in the secondary state she appeared to be an entirely different person, happy and free from pain.

Such changes at first occurred every five or six days and were marked by a more complete development of her faculties. Her memory in the secondary state was continuous. This state was her lucid one; the primary state was marked by fits of melancholy. The secondary personality became more frequent and, relapses of short duration disregarded, slowly suppressed the melancholy one.

Multiple Personality

A well-developed secondary personality is often followed by the appearance of other personalities. As many as 11 personalities were recorded in the case of "Mary Barnes" (see Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. 11, p. 231; vol. 12, p. 208). They may come and go, like lodgers in a tenement house. Among the better-investigated cases of multiple personality in the literature of psychical research was that of a Miss Beauchamp, discussed by Morton Prince in Dissociation of a Personality (1906). Under emotional shocks, Beauchamp developed four personalities antithetic to her original one. They not only differed markedly in health, in memories, and in knowledge of their own life, but they were formally at war with one another. The third personality, "Sally," was the most interesting. She had all the appearance of an invading, outside entity. She wrote her autobiography, in which she claimed conscious but suppressed existence as far back as Beauchamp's infancy. She had a will of her own, could hypnotize the other personalities, had no notion of time, and exhibited complete tactile anesthesia. She persistently said that she was a spirit.

Prince attempted with hypnotic suggestion to weld the four personalities into one. Sally was bitterly resistant. After a long struggle and much reasoning, however, she agreed to be "squeezed" out of existence, and Beauchamp was restored to one personality commanding the memories of all her former selves with the exception of Sally.

In the remarkable case of Doris Fischer, Prince had to deal with five personalities. They were called "Real Doris," "Margaret," "Sleeping Margaret," "Sick Doris," and "Sleeping Doris." Real Doris barely had five minutes' conscious existence a day. The alternating personalities were veritably chasing after one another for years. After lengthy efforts, Prince finally effected a cure.

In the October 1931 issue of the British medical journal The Lancet, a case of eight distinct personalities is recorded by Robert M. Riggall, clinical psychologist at the West End Hospital of Nervous Diseases, London. The personalities were (1) "Mabel," the patient herself—good, composed, moral, and economical, without many faults, but usually unhappy; (2) "Miss Dignity," who considered it her duty to do all in her power to hurt Mabel. Miss Dignity went so far in her hostility as to write a letter to Mabel, urging her to commit suicide and saying that she had enclosed a packet of poison; (3) "Biddy"— bright, cheerful, laughing, and helpful; (4) "Hope"; (5) "Faith"; and (6) "Dame Trot," who were harmless and seldom appeared; (7) "Miss Take," so named because she did not know when she first appeared or what her name was, and added that she was just a mistake; and (8) another unnamed personality of an evil stripe.

Slight causes such as hunger, fatigue, or fever are sometimes sufficient to produce a transient but violent perturbation of personality. The novelist Robert Louis Stevenson, if ill or feverish, always felt possessed in part of his mind by another personality. According to Frank Podmore, overindulgence in daydreams is probably the first indication of a tendency to isolated and unregulated psychic activity, which, in its extreme form, may develop into a fixed idea or an obsession. Theodore Flournoy added:

"As a crystal splits under the blow of a hammer when struck according to certain definite lines of cleavage, in the same way the human personality under the shock of excessive emotions is sometimes broken along the lines of least resistance or the great structural lines of his temperament. A cleavage is produced between the opposite selves—whose harmonious equilibrium would constitute the normal condition—seriousness and gaiety; optimistic tendencies and pessimistic; goodness and egoism; instincts of prudery and lasciviousness; the taste for solitude and the love of Nature, and the attractions of civilization, etc. The differences, in which the spiritists see a striking proof of an absolute distinction between the spirits and their so-called instruments, awaken, on the contrary, in the mind of the psychologist the irresistible suspicion that these pretended spirits can be nothing but the products of the subconsciousness of the medium himself."

F. W. H. Myers argued that the first symptom of disintegration of personality is an idée fixe, the persistence of an uncontrolled and unmodifiable group of thoughts or emotions, which, from their brooding isolation, from lack of interchange with the general current of thought, become alien and intrusive, so that some special idea or image presses into consciousness with undue and painful infrequency. (Such a fixed idea has also, of course, led to some of the major new contributions by individuals to society.)

In the second stage, Myers maintained, there is a confluence of these obsessive notions overrunning the whole personality, often accompanied by something of a somnambulic change. This is the birth of the secondary personality from emotionally selected elements of the primary personality. It may attain a morbid intensity, and it may lead to so-called demonic possession. In other cases, arbitrary development of a scrap of personality is responsible for the dissociation. Its most common mode of origin, Myers believed, is in sleepwalking that is repeated until the mind acquires a chain of memories related exclusively to the sleepwalking state; this chain then alternates with the primary chain.

Sleepwalkers may display a secondary personality as the acts in repeated spontaneous somnambulism form a chain of memory. Considering the wide power and tenacious memory of the subconscious, Myers suggested that the conscious personality should be regarded as a privileged case of personality, a special phase, easiest to study because it is accessible. Its powers of perception he similarly considered a special case of the subliminal faculties.

The question of secondary personalities is unanswered, in spite of continued research over the decades. No single explanation has emerged as dominant. Within the psychic community, interest has centered on cases that seem to provide some evidence of possession or obsession by spirit entities or reincarnation. Many cases appear to be a matter of abnormal psychology in which artificial personalities are created from repressed desires, anxieties, or traumas. The question has been the center of a new debate within the psychological community with the emergence of a new set of multiple personality cases claiming origin in childhood trauma from ritual sexual abuse.

Much obscurity surrounds the development of normal personality in individuals, a situation likely to remain the case given the aversion of psychologists to researching personality using models with large groups of people. Character traits often change during the course of time. Many apparently normal individuals sometimes present different personalities in public from those exhibited in private.

The maintenance of a recognizable personality depends heavily on accumulated experiences and memories (the most obvious attribute of an individual personality) and the reassurance of a familiar body and sensory perception. If one grants the possibility of survival after death, the sudden removal of memories, sensory associations, and bodily presence must be a traumatic experience. The confusing or vague messages relating to identity received at many séances could be explained on this basis. Even the triviality of many communications seems explicable, since the departed spirit might place great value on such trivialities as reassurance of a continuation of personality.

How real are our personalities? Fantasy plays a great part in the maintenance of personality, nourished by the myriad fictions of novels, movies, and television shows. Our personalities have been shaped by fashion and role models that have had powerful influence through the modern mass media society. Talented actors and actresses have shown that it is possible to change roles night after night in a physical and psychological masquerade that becomes an intensely shared experience with an audience.

The larger implications of personality involve philosophies and religions, which often differ markedly in their understanding of personality. The imperfections and contradictions of earthly personality constitute unfinished chapters in the fascinating story of life, and it is reasonable to postulate sequels in an afterlife involving progressive evolution of personality.

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