Consciousness

Real B

B I

B Ia

B IV

and

conversely

B II

B II

Real B

Real B

B IB IV

B IVa

B IVa

Real B

B Ia

FIGURE 16.3 • According to Morton Prince, the Real Miss Beauchamp disintegrated into BI and BIV.

(a) These two personalities could be hypnotised to give BIa and BIVa, who could be

synthesised into BII. (b) Alternatively Real B could be hypnotised immediately into BII

who could be dissociated into BIa and BIVa (after Prince, 1906, p. 520).

her friends, and made her smoke cigarettes,
which she hated. As Prince put it, she ‘indulges
tastes which a moment before would have
been abhorrent to her ideals, and undoes
or destroys what she had just laboriously
planned and arranged’ (1906, p. 2). Some
nights Sally threw off all the bedclothes and
piled the furniture on the bed before folding
up again. Imagine waking up in such a situa-
tion, with no recall of the past few hours, and
knowing that no one else could have entered
your room.

Two of the personalities had no knowledge of
each other, or of the third, and each had blanks
in memory corresponding to times when the
others were active. Oddly enough, though,
Sally knew about the others and said she could
recall times when they were in control. She
even claimed that, though ‘squeezed’ when
Miss  Beauchamp was ‘out’, she was still conscious and had her own thoughts,
perceptions, and will. She claimed to be aware of Miss  Beauchamp’s dreams,
although she herself neither slept nor dreamt. In other words, this was not alter-
nating consciousness (as we might interpret Ansel Bourne’s case) but simultane-
ous consciousness, or ‘co-consciousness’, with what Prince calls a ‘subconscious
self ’ or a ‘subconsciousness’, having its own stream of conscious experiences while
another controls the body.

Seeking the ‘real Miss  Beauchamp’, Prince concluded that the sub-personalities,
including Sally, were just ‘a dissociated group of conscious states’ (1906, p. 234)
deserving ‘psychical murder’ (p. 248). This extraordinary story had a happy ending,
for he eventually brought them all together into what he called (though others
might disagree) ‘the real, original or normal self, the self that was born and which
she was intended by nature to be’ (p. 1).

This was among the last of the classic cases of multiple personality – most being
reported between 1840 and 1910 before a wave of reaction against the increas-
ingly bizarre phenomena reported. Critics pointed out that most cases involved
older men hypnotising young women who were eager to please and might easily
be duped. Others argued that multiple personality, or ‘dissociation’, was iatro-
genic (i.e. created by the treatment or the therapist), and in 1994, the American
Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-IV
changed Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) to Dissociative Identity Disorder
(DID). The fifth edition of the DSM (American Psychiatric Association, 2013)
defines DID as involving ‘Two or more distinct identities or personality states [. . .],
each with its own relatively enduring pattern of perceiving, relating to and think-
ing about the environment and self ’. DID research suggests that cultural context
is related both to the overall prevalence and to the likelihood of different triggers,
such as experience of abuse (Slogar, 2011).

Should we conclude that multiple personality tells us more about the interactions
between patients, hypnotists, and therapists than about self and consciousness?

WHO IS CONSCIOUS

NOW?