One of the most striking and familiar facts in ordinary hypnosis is the complete and dramatic change of personality on the part of the hypnotized subject at the command of the hypnotizer. Even an ignorant person and one who in ordinary circumstances possesses no dramatic ability whatever, may impersonate any character suggested by the hypnotizer, with great vividness and freedom. Under the influence of suggestion he apparently loses all sense of his own identity, and speaks, moves, and acts in every Way like the lovesick swain or anxious parent whom he believes himself to be. In the minds of many who know nothing of the nature of hypnosis, such changes of identity arouse a superstitious fear of hypnotism. It becomes a source of fascination or of horror to them in very much the way in which witchcraft appealed to the imagination of the world three centuries ago. It is not the purpose of the present brief chapter to describe any special cases of multiple identity in hypnosis. Instances will doubtless be given in other chapters of this work, and the classic cases of Ansel Bourne, Leonie, Lucie, and Felida X, are recorded in every popular work on hypnotism.

Our object is rather to inquire into the nature of these instances, and to present in brief the explanation offered by the sanest psychology of the day.

To the psychologist the explanation of the strange phenomena of hypnotism, and of every abnormal form of mental life, is to be found in the study of the ordinary workings of the normal mind. Professor Ladd of Yale has expressed our standpoint in saying, "As in the case of the insane, so in the case of the hypnotic. Between the wildest vagaries of a pathological sort and the most regular operations of the sanest mind, it is possible to interpolate an innumerable series of gradations so as to shade up or shade down from one into the other." * To understand, then, the personalities of the hypnotic subject we must consider in the first place the nature of our ordinary consciousness of self, and then notice the series of variations in our own identity, leading up to the phases observed in hypnosis.

* Ladd, Philosophy of Mind, p. 167.

An early idea of self is evidently an idea of our bodily selves. We have focused attention upon certain "warm and intimate" sensations, and have distinguished this group from all others. The entire living body with its keen pleasures and pains, its impulses and desires, its mobility, its vague masses of inner organic sensations, becomes our self, separate and distinct from all objective experience. With growing intelligence we include in our knowledge of self the memory of a vast number of past events and the thought of many circumstances bearing no immediate reference to our bodies. Our self is now to some extent a descriptive history of our past and present. The idea becomes a great organic system of ideas, and the more widely we extend its content, the more abstract becomes the idea which serves as a nucleus to the whole system. In just the same way that we ascribe certain groups of sensations to "things" that exist and possess these properties, so our very complex group of subjective experiences is inevitably referred to a self that really exists and to which, through memory and self-consciousness, they all belong.

As intelligence becomes more and more reflective it grasps more fully the idea of a permanent self as the center, the owner, and in a sense the creator of all that belongs to one individual consciousness.

We need not enlarge this account of the knowledge of self since it is one already generally well known. Let us pass on to notice the striking variations in the idea that are to be found in ordinary experience. Among the lesser modifications are those observed after a sudden and overwhelming change in circumstances. The instance most often cited is the one so humorously presented by Shakespeare in "The Taming of the Shrew." Christopher Sly, the tinker, is not at all sure that it is himself whom he finds attired in the rich robes of a noble. "I smell sweet savors and I feel soft things. Upon my life, I am a lord indeed." How often we hear the phrases, "He was not himself at the time," "He is a different man" or "I hardly knew myself." Sudden illness, the loss of family or property or position, or the entrance into any entirely new scenes and conditions of life will call forth such comments. But in all these alterations there is no real loss of personal identity. In spite of the startling changes, one clings perhaps all the more intensely, to memory and consciousness of the same self.

We must look further for instances in normal life of at least a temporary loss of personal identity. Such instances are common enough. We find them in the play of children, the actor, the musician, the author, the prophet and the priest. The little girl playing with her doll is first the mother and then the child. The small boy playing school is first the stern teacher and then the meek pupil. The great actor, too, at least in some stage of his study of a part, finds himself transferred completely to the character he is presenting. Many authors, for example, Thackeray, Dickens and Balzac, at times temporarily merge their own personality in that of some vivid character of their own creation.

A yet more striking class of instances of a temporary loss of personal identity, and one common to most men, is found in dream life. Here almost everyone occasionally becomes someone else. And it often happens that the "I" of a single, clear and coherent dream is one person early in the dream and another person later in the same dream. Identity seems to shift as the center of interest shifts from one character to another. Those who have paid any attention to their own dreams are often astonished by the ways in which they surpass or contradict their own characters in their dreams. A young student of French noticed with surprise that when he dreamed of speaking French in his own person he spoke no more correctly than in his waking hours; but when he dreamed that he had become a Frenchman his accent and language were far superior to those of his waking self. Upon rousing from his dream he jotted down certain phrases that had fallen from the lips of his French self, and found that they were good idiomatic French expressions, although hitherto no part of his own vocabulary. The thoroughly upright man dreams of being a cheat, a thief and a murderer.