211. This mode of description, - it may be convenient to point out, is thoroughly concordant with Professor Janet's phrase of rétrécissement de la personnalité. As he justly insists, the hysterical loss of sensibility is due to a state of misère psychologique, - to a "psychical poverty," a slackness of the grip with which the known or apparent personality holds and controls the organism's capacity of sensation. Over a certain part of the mechanism of sensation this grasp gives way; there is a deep and prolonged distraction of attention, which ends in the permanent loss of the power to recognise the sensations of the special part affected. With all this I agree; these words describe the phenomena from the supraliminal point of view. From the point of view of the first subliminal region - of the hypnotic stratum - matters look slightly different. There we see certain dreamlike incoherent faculties functioning with undue freedom, for the same reason which affected the supraliminal attention, namely, the enfeebled hold which the personality now has upon the organism.

Acting in dreamlike fashion these fragments of subliminal faculty disturb and confuse the weakened threshold, - the psychical diaphragm, now grown too permeable, - above which should lie all the faculty needed for the conduct of life by the supraliminal self. The morbid subliminal activity attracts or sucks down scraps of supraliminal activity, - scraps often quite fantastic in their delimitation, - and deprives the supraliminal self of thus much of its due scope of control. And observe that even at this early stage the conception here given of subliminal operation is needed to fill gaps which remain in the explanation which is given from above the threshold alone. Whence comes, for instance, the notion of the "anaesthetic bracelet"? Not from the hysteric's supraliminal self; for she is generally unaware of its existence until the physician discovers it. Nor is it a chance combination; - even were there such a thing as chance. It is a dream of the hypnotic stratum; - an incoherent self-suggestion starting from and affecting a region below the reach of conscious will.

In this view, then, we regard the fragments of perceptive power over which the hysteric has lost control as being by no means really extinguished, but rather as existing immediately beneath the threshold, in the custody, so to say, of a dreamlike or hypnotic stratum of the subliminal self, which has selected them for reasons sometimes explicable as the result of past suggestions, sometimes to us inexplicable. If this be so, we may expect that the same kind of suggestions which originally cut off these perceptions from the main body of perception may stimulate them again to action either below or above the conscious threshold.

212. We have already, indeed, seen reason to suppose that the submerged perceptions are still at work, when Dr. Janet pointed out how rare a thing it was that any accident or injury followed upon hysterical loss of feeling in the limbs. A still more curious illustration is afforded by the condition of the field of vision in a hysteric. It often happens that the field of vision is much reduced, so that the hysteric, when tested with the perimeter, can discern only objects almost directly in front of the eye. But if an object which happens to be particularly exciting to the hypnotic stratum - for instance, the hypnotiseds finger, used often as a signal for trance - is advanced into that part of the hysteric's normal visual field of which she has apparently lost all consciousness, there will often be an instant subliminal perception, - shown by the fact that the subject promptly falls into trance. A hysterical boy, a patient of Professor Janet's, with great retrenchment of the visual field, had been frightened into his first attack by a conflagration, and the sight of a flame near him was enough to bring on an attack again. Professor Janet, with due precautions, moved a lighted match into the normal visual field, far beyond his hysterically narrowed range of conscious sight.

Almost at once the boy cried, "Fire! fire!" and fell into hysterical convulsions. The same experiment was tried by M. Laurent with a girl who had first been frightened into hysteria by the sight of a mouse. A stuffed mouse - held quite outside her narrowed field of conscious vision - had the same effect upon this girl as the lighted match upon the boy.

In these cases the action of the submerged perceptions, while provoked by very shallow artifices, continued definitely subliminal. The patient herself, as we say, does not know why she does not burn her anaesthetic limbs, or why she suddenly falls into a trance while being subjected to optical tests.

But it is equally easy to devise experiments which shall call these submerged sensations up again into supraliminal consciousness. A hysteric has lost sensation in one arm; Dr. Janet tells her that there is a caterpillar on that arm; and the reinforcement of attention thus generated brings back the sensibility. A patient of Professor Pitres is hysterically unable to see with the left eye. On a screen before her he places a word or sentence so arranged that her right eye can only see half the print. The attention thus generated enables the left eye to aid her in reading the whole inscription.

213. These hysterical anæsthesiæ, it may be added here, may be not only very definite but very profound. Just as the reality, - though also the impermanence, - of the hysterical retrenchment of field of vision of which I have been speaking can be shown by optical experiments beyond the patient's comprehension, so the reality of some profound organic hysterical insensibilities is sometimes shown by the progress of independent disease. A certain patient feels no hunger or thirst; this indifference might be simulated for a time; but her ignorance of severe inflammation of the bladder is easily recognisable as real. Throw her into hypnosis and her sensibilities return. The disease is for the first time felt, and the patient screams with the pain. This result well illustrates one main effect of hypnosis, viz., to bring the organism into a more normal state. The deep organic anaesthesia of this patient was dangerously abnormal; the missing sensibility had first to be restored, although it might be desirable afterwards to remove the painful elements in that sensibility again, under, so to say, a wiser and deeper control.

Another peculiarity of interest for us in these anæsthesiæ lies in what I may term a partial regression to the vagueness of primitive irritability. The patient M., Dr. Janet tells us, has been for years totally anaesthetic.

"Under certain circumstances, and particularly after she has long been kept in the somnambulic state, she recovers for a time, but incompletely, tactile sensations. Sometimes sensibility seems to return in the vague form of pain or distress, with no distinctive sign. Her sensations are indefinite; heat, cold, a pinch, an object placed in her hands, - each of these stimuli produces only a vague sense of something disagreeable." And even when the sense of touch becomes more definite, confusion and error of localisation still persist. Thus may hysteria present to us in a few minutes a series of stages through which our early ancestors have slowly travelled; - stages to which we may fall back in dementia, but through which only in this quasi-experiment which nature offers us can we see the spirit pass and repass unmoved.