An extraordinary shock suffices to destroy the artificial structure, and to place woman in the arena to undertake a fight between her unconscious, oppressed nature, and her certainly conscious but unnatural mind. The see-sawing which now begins between the two explains the unusual psychic discontinuity during the hysterical phase, the continual changes of mood, none of which are subject to the control of a dominant, central, controlling nucleus of individuality. It is extraordinary how many contradictions can co-exist in the hysterical. Sometimes they are highly intelligent and able to judge correctly and keenly oppose hypnotism and so forth. Then, again, they are excited by most trivial causes, and are most subject to hypnotic trances. Sometimes they are abnormally chaste, at other times extremely sensual.
All this is no longer difficult to explain. The absolute sincerity, the painful love of truth, the avoidance of everything sexual, the careful judgment, and the strength of will—all these form part of that spurious personality which woman in her passivity has taken upon herself to exhibit to herself and to the world at large. Everything that belongs to her original temperament and her real sense form that “other self,” that “unconscious mind” which can delight in obscurities and which is so open to suggestion.
It has been endeavoured to show that in what is known as the “duplex” and “multiplex personality,” the “double conscience,” the “dual ego,” lies one of the strongest arguments against the belief in the soul. As a matter of fact, these phenomena are the very reasons why we ought to believe in a soul. The “dividing up of the personality” is only possible when there never has been a personality, as with woman. All the celebrated cases which Janet has described in his book, “L’Automatisme Psychologique,” concern women, not in a single instance man. It is only woman who, minus soul or an intelligible ego, has not the power to become conscious of what is in her; who cannot throw the light of truth on her inmost self; who can by her completely passive inundation by a consciousness belonging to another, allow what is in her own nature to be suppressed by an extraneous element; who can display the hysterical phenomena described by Janet. Hysteria is the bankruptcy of this superficial sham self which has been put on, and the woman becomes for the time being a tabula rasa, whilst the working in her of her own genuine nature appears to her as something coming from without. This apparent “secondary personality,” this “foreign body in the consciousness,” this false self, is, in reality, the true female nature, sexuality itself appearing, and a proper understanding of this fact, and of the complications that must ensue from the ebbings and flowings of the false, supposed to be true, and the true supposed to be false, lie at the root of the most difficult phenomena of hysteria.
Woman’s incapacity for truth—which I hold to be consequent on her lack of free will with regard to the truth, in accordance with Kant’s “Indeterminism”—conditions her falsity. Any one who has had anything to do with women knows how often they give offhand quite patently untrue reasons for what they have said or done, under the momentary necessity of answering a question. It is, however, hysterical subjects who are most careful to avoid unveracity (in a most marked and premeditated way before strangers); but however paradoxical it may sound it is exactly in this that their untruthfulness lies! They do not know that this desire for truth has come to them from outside and is no part of their real nature.
They have slavishly accepted the postulate of morality, and, therefore, wish to show at every opportunity, like a good servant, how faithfully they follow instructions.
It is always suspicious when a man is frequently spoken of as exceptionally trustworthy: he must have gone out of his way to let people know it, and it would be safe to wager that in reality he is a rogue. No confidence must be placed in the genuineness of hysterical morality, which doctors (no doubt in good faith) often emphasise by remarks as to the high moral position of their patients.
I repeat: hysterical patients do not consciously simulate. It can only be made clear to them by suggestion that they actually have been simulating, and all the “confessions” of the dissimulation can only be explained in the same way. Otherwise they believe in their own natural honesty and morality. Neither are the various things which torture them imaginary; it is much more likely that in the fact that they feel them, and that the symptoms first disappear with what Breuer calls “catharsis” (the successive bringing to their consciousness of the true causes of their illness by hypnotism), lies the proof of their organic untruthfulness.
The self-accusations which hysterical people are so full of are nothing but unconscious dissimulation. The sense of guilt, which is equally poignant in great and most trifling things, cannot be genuine; if the hysterical self-torturers possessed a standard of morality for themselves and others they would not be so indiscriminate in their self-accusations, and not cast as much blame on themselves for a slight error as for real wrong-doing.
The most distinguishing character of the unconscious untruthfulness of their self-reproaches is their habit of telling others how wicked they are, what terrible things they have done, and then they ask if they (the hysterical) are not hopelessly abandoned sort of people. No one who really feels remorse could talk in such a way. The fallacy of representing the hysterical as being eminently moral is one which even Breuer and Freud have shared. The hysterical simply become imbued with moral ideas which are foreign to them in their normal state. They subordinate themselves to this code, they cease to prove things for themselves, they no longer exercise their own judgment.
Probably these hysterical subjects approach more closely than any other natures to the moral ideal of the social and utilitarian ethics which regard a lie as moral if it is for the good of society or of the race. Hysterical women realise that ideal ontogenetically inasmuch as their standard of morality comes from without, not from within, and practically as they appear to act most readily from altruistic motives. For them duty towards others is not merely a special application of duty towards oneself.
The untruthfulness of the hysterical is proportional to their belief in their own accuracy. From their complete inability to attain personal truth, to be honest about themselves—the hysterical never think for themselves, they want other people to think about them, they want to arouse the interest of others—it follows that the hysterical are the best mediums for hypnotic purposes. But any one who allows him or herself to be hypnotised is doing the most immoral thing possible. It is yielding to complete slavery; it is a renunciation of the will and consciousness; it means allowing another person to do what he likes with the subject. Hypnosis shows how all possibility of truth depends upon the wish to be truthful, but it must be the real wish of the person concerned: when a hypnotised person is told to do something, he does it when he comes out of the trance, and if asked his reasons will give a plausible motive on the spot, not only before others, but he will justify his action to himself by quite fanciful reasons. In this we have, so to speak, an experimental proof of Kant’s “Ethical Code.”
All women can be hypnotised and like being hypnotised, but this proclivity is exaggerated in hysterical women. Even the memory of definite events in their life can be destroyed by the mere suggestion of the hypnotiser. Breuer’s experiments on hypnotised patients show clearly that the consciousness of guilt in them is not deeply seated, as otherwise it could not be got rid of at the mere suggestion of the hypnotiser. But the sham conviction of responsibility, so readily exhibited by women of hysterical constitution, rapidly disappears at the moment when nature, the sexual impulse, appears to drive through the superficial restraints.
In the hysterical paroxysm what happens is that the woman, while no longer believing it altogether herself, asseverates more and more loudly: “I do not want that at all, some one not really me is forcing it on me, but I do not want it at all.” Every stimulation from outside will now be brought into relation with that demand, which as she partly believes, is being forced on her, but which, in reality, corresponds with the deepest wish of her nature. That is why women in a hysterical attack are so easily seduced. The “attitudes passionelles” of the hysterical are merely passionate repudiations of sexual desire, which are loud merely because they are not real, and are more plaintive than at other times because the danger is greater.
It is easy to understand why the sexual experiences of the time preceding puberty play so large a part in acute hysteria. The influence of extraneous moral views can be imposed comparatively easily on the child, as they have little to overcome in the almost unawakened state of the sexual inclinations. But, later on, the suppressed, although not wholly vanquished, nature lays hold of these old experiences,
