214. What has been said of hysterical defects of sensation might be repeated for motor defects. There, too, the powers of which the supraliminal self has lost control continue to act in obedience to subliminal promptings.

"I cannot in the least understand what is going on," said Maria, when she entered the hospital [I quote Dr. Janet again]; "for some time past I have been working in an odd way; it is no longer I who am working, but only my hands. They get on pretty well, but I have no part in what they do. When it is over I do not recognise my work at all. I see that it is all right; but I feel that I am quite incapable of having accomplished it. If any one said, ' It is not you who did that!' I would answer, ' True enough, it is not I.' When I want to sing it is impossible to me; yet at other times I hear my voice singing the song very well. It is certainly not I who walk; I feel like a balloon which jumps up and down of itself. When I want to write I find nothing to say, my head is empty, and I must let my hand write what it chooses, and it fills four pages, and if the stuff is silly I cannot help it"

"The curious point is," continues M. Janet, "that in this fashion she produces some really good things. If she makes up a dress or writes a letter she sometimes shows real talent, but it is all done in a bizarre way. She looks absorbed in her work, but yet unconscious of it; when she lifts her head she seems dazed as if she was coming out of a dream, and does not recollect what she has been doing. Her way of acting recalls what is said of men of genius who obey their inspiration without being themselves aware of accomplishing their masterpieces.... To take a humbler comparison, she acts as we occasionally do when we let our hand write of itself a word which we have forgotten how to spell. But what with us is accidental is with her perpetual; although she has still activity she has no longer the personal consciousness of this activity, and her acts therefore can no longer be called voluntary.... Some patients, on the other hand, will not or cannot abandon themselves to this automatic activity. They try to perform the actions consciously and voluntarily, and then they fail altogether".

215. I pass on to one of M. Janet's most acute observations1 - a case where the difference between the faculty still at the command of the supraliminal personality and the faculty transmissible only by automatic impulse from the subliminal self reaches its maximum point, and suggests some reflections of novel import.

"If we tell hemiplegics or amyotrophies to squeeze the dynamometer, we get such figures as 5 and 10, - very much what these hysterics manage to reach. But with the truly paralysed such figures do not surprise us. We know that we are dealing with impotent persons whose every action shows their weakness. But our hysterics who mark 5 and 10 are by no means impotent; they sew, they work, they carry burdens without any apparent trouble. Célestine, for instance, is a robust country girl, accustomed to hard work, and still asking as a favour to' be allowed to sweep and rub the floors. She is quick-tempered, and when things do not go just as she likes she shakes the beds, changes their places, and lifts with one arm the wooden armchairs. She has terrible fits of passion; and in some asylums where she has been she has soundly thrashed strong men. Well, I stop this young woman in the middle of her work, and give her the dynamometer to squeeze. To begin with, she is absolutely anaesthetic on both sides of her body, and must needs look at the instrument in order to be able to squeeze it at all. I have tried this experiment often; and the dynamometer generally marks 9 with the squeeze of her right hand, 5 with that of her left.

Now I repeat that such indications of feeble muscular power are in complete contradiction with what I see her doing every minute. I have made the trial myself, and although I can squeeze the same dynamometer up to 50, I cannot lift and move the chairs and beds as Célestine does.... It is clear that in the hysteric there is a special modification of muscular power when she is made the subject of an experiment, when she is told to pay attention, and to squeeze an instrument with personal will in order to show her personal strength. She can then no longer get at her strength; she cannot use it in this fashion; albeit the strength is really there, and is lavishly expended in all the acts of common life when the patient is not thinking of it. What we have here is a defect not of muscle but of will".

1 Etat Mental des Hystériques, p. 171.