In the first place, it is necessary to know by what signs we can recognise whether a character deviates from the normal types. Not to return to a subject already treated in the preceding chapter, we may briefly say:
1. A true character is reducible to one characteristic, one preponderant tendency which ensures its unity and stability throughout life. This conception is somewhat ideal, but definite characters tend, in varying degrees, to approximate thereto.
2. In practice, a clearly defined character always (except in rare cases, which explain themselves) permits us to foresee and foretell. We know beforehand what an active, a sensitive, a phlegmatic, or a contemplative will do under given circumstances. Neutrals, who are, properly speaking, not characters at all, are acted on by events or by other people, and calculations as to their future must start from a point, not within, but outside them.
One, if not both of these marks, is wanting in abnormal characters, and the further they depart from these two constituent conditions—unity and the possibility of foresight—the further they depart from the typical forms, to become at last unmistakably morbid.
We might be tempted to believe that the anomalies of character, as observed, are so varied in aspect, so manifold, as to elude all classification, so that it is impossible to find our way through the chaos. I think, however, that the determining characteristics given above will supply us with a clue. It is scarcely necessary to say that I exclude from the group of anomalies those slight, temporary, and intermittent deviations which are only passing infractions of the unity of character. Cæsar, Richelieu, Napoleon were well-defined types; yet, at certain points in their lives, they ceased to be themselves. On his journey to Elba, in face of the fury and the insults of the populace, Napoleon had moments of strange timidity. Facts of this kind prove, once more, that the complete character only exists as an ideal; but an indisposition lasting a few hours cannot be called an illness. Having made this reserve, we may, in our classification, follow the retrogressive march from co-ordinate unity to multiplicity, from stability to dissolution, and we thus have three groups departing more and more widely from the normal forms: (1) successive contradictory characters; (2) simultaneous contradictory characters; (3) unstable or polymorphic characters: the last stage of disaggregation. It only remains to study them, one by one, in their order.
By _successive_ contradictory characters, I understand two opposite forms or manners of feeling and acting, so that the life taken as a whole seems to be that of two individuals, one preceding, the other following the crisis.
Before dealing with the genuine cases, we must eliminate:
1. The apparently contradictory characters abounding in political history, such as the triumvir Octavius and emperor Augustus. Cromwell, by turns an illuminated mystic and a practical joker, retained, under these appearances, the fundamental tendencies of an entirely practical nature. So far from contradicting themselves and being unstable, the character is single and homogeneous throughout: there is perfect unity in the aims: it is only in the means that contradiction appears. The moralist has a perfect right to call them false characters, because they wear masks; for the psychologist they are quite normal and well marked. They may frequently be met with in ordinary life, and there one need not be an actor on a great stage to appear to contradict one’s self; it is enough to be faithful to the end in view and unscrupulous in the choice of means. Those whom, in revolutionary times, fear makes suddenly cruel belong to the same category; their unity lies in the instinct of self-preservation.
2. The transformations produced by the evolution of life and the change of circumstances. Thus an active character may show itself successively in love, in dangerous adventures, in ambition, and in the pursuit of riches.
Having got rid of doubtful cases, we may divide the successive contradictory characters into two classes: the first including anomalies, the second pathological forms.
I. As, in our classification, we start from the normal state and gradually leave it behind us, we must begin with the modified forms which are simple deviations from the ideal of the character—_i.e._, from a constant and undisturbed unity. Apart from all ideals, the successive characters are exceptional with regard to the generality of people; for even neutrals have throughout their lives a kind of unity, that of their perpetual plasticity.
In this first class I distinguish two cases. The reader may find these divisions and subdivisions excessively minute, yet they are necessary. There is no classification without distinctions, and it is impossible to follow a retrogressive order without marking every step on the way to dissolution.
1. The simplest case, and the nearest to the normal condition, consists in a change of direction in one and the same predominant tendency in the individual. Such is the case of Raymond Lulli, the change of the profane loves which occupied the first part of his life into the platonic and chivalrous love which filled the second; while the converse case, too, is not rare, and examples might be found among the mystics. Such are sincere conversions in religion or in politics (St. Paul, Luther). The same may be said of the cases where the fire of the temperament, having previously expended itself for good, now does so for evil, or conversely. All this, from the moralist’s point of view, is a complete change—_i.e._, there are two men; from the psychologist’s, it is simply a change of direction, and there is only one man. It is easy to see that, under the two contrasts, there is a common foundation, a latent unity, the same quantity or the same quality of energy directed to different ends; but we can recognise the chrysalis in the butterfly without difficulty.
2. These last are the modified forms; the clear cases, which depart further from the rule, imply a fundamental and genuine duality—_e.g._, the passage from a life of orgies to a _lasting_ ascetic one (if it does not last, the change is only a passing accident), from active to contemplative life (Diocletian), from contemplative to active life (Julian the Apostate); in short, all the cases where men burn what they have worshipped and worship what they have burnt, where we find two individuals in the same person. The common language calls this “a conversion.” It may be religious, moral, political, artistic, philosophical, scientific, etc., but it always consists in the substitution of one tendency or group of tendencies for the contrary, of one belief for its opposite, of one form of unity for another form, synonymous expressions which express the different psychological aspects of transformation. We may note, in passing, that in men who have passed through two opposite phases, common opinion is only cognisant of one, usually the final, or else the one of longest duration and the most conspicuous, the other being overlooked. We understand by St. Augustine, the man of the post-conversion, by Diocletian, the man of the pre-abdication period. This judgment is founded on the need for simplification and unity of mind as applied to character.
How does this change, dividing life in extreme cases into two contradictory phases, come about? It is impossible to reply in general terms; each particular case supposes special conditions. We may try, however, to determine, approximately, the causes oftenest in action.
First, the physical causes. A serious illness may, by changing the constitution, transform the character, thus showing how far it depends on cœnæsthesia. It is immaterial whether we suppose the ultimate condition to consist of chemical (or nutritive), or of physical modifications, the latter being the view of Henle and Seeland. There are violent shocks, more especially injuries to the head, of which we shall take occasion to speak later on. Azam gives some examples of these metamorphoses.[251] A steady, industrious man sustains a complicated fracture of the leg and subsequently becomes impulsive and ill-tempered; the author supposes that there must have been cerebral ischæmia. Another, under similar circumstances, exchanges a cheerful disposition for incurable melancholia. Persistent facial neuralgia has transformed a thoroughly kind-hearted man into a spiteful and morose being.
-----
Footnote 251:
_Le Caractère dans les Maladies_, p. 188 _et seq._
-----
We now come to the moral causes. They appear to act like a shock whose effect is either immediate or falls due some time later; hence the change is either sudden or consequent on a long incubation. The type of the former is found in conversions following an unforeseen crisis: St. Paul and his vision, Pascal and his accident, Raymond Lulli and the revelation of one of his mistresses; the Spanish nobleman, Maraña, whose story has so often been told, who, for half his life, was a Don Juan, and was suddenly changed by listening to church music. The “sudden conversions” of theologians involve a psychological truth. Those of the second type do not take place all at once, but after a struggle between the old and new tendencies. St. Augustine, Luther, Loyola, Francisco de Borgia, who, on seeing the corpse of his empress (Charles V.’s wife), resolved to renounce the world, but did not do so for many years after. To these illustrious names each reader may add for himself less known ones from among his own acquaintances.
We may ask whether even the most sudden changes are, in truth, as much so as they seem, if they have not their antecedent conditions in the life of the individual in question, and are not the accelerated result of a subconscious process. Whatever we may think, the psychological mechanism of conversions is very similar to that of irresistible impulses. In its complete evolution it passes through three stages: (1) the conception of an opposite aim or ideal; this may happen to any one without lasting or leading to action; this state will produce no effect if it merely passes through the mind. (2) This conception must become a _fixed_ idea, with the permanence, the predominance, the overmastering possession, which are the peculiarities of such ideas. (3) The action takes place because already included in the fixed idea, and because the fixed idea is a belief, and all beliefs presuppose something existing or about to exist. In short, there is no result till the idea becomes an impulse. In the cases where the individual is, so to speak, struck by lightning, the impetuous movement of the passion springs up suddenly and triumphs immediately. This is yet another point of resemblance to the irresistible impulses which pass into action, sometimes after a period of struggle, sometimes in a sudden ecstasy.
There is, in any case, this difference, that the new character—_i.e._, new ways of feeling, thinking, and acting—is lasting. This could not be, if in both stages, incubation and eruption, a profound change had not taken place in the individual constitution. Conversions do not create a new tendency, but they show that the greatest antitheses are latent in us, and that one may replace the other, not by an act of the will, which is always precarious, but by a radical transformation of our sensibility.
2. This division includes the _alternating_ characters, whose phases sometimes succeed one another with such rapidity and frequency as to approximate to the simultaneous contradictory characters. Instead of two different characters, one before and one after the crisis, whose formula for the whole life of the individual would be A, B, we have the alternation of two forms of character, with or without intermediary crises, and the formula would be A, B, A, B, and so on.
This alternation is found in the normal or quasi-normal state, but is too fugitive or too difficult to fix, to be distinguished from the unstable characters; but the case is not the same with the morbid types which show it in an exaggerated form. Such are the phenomena so much studied in our own day, under the name of alterations, diseases, disorders of personality. They will be known to the reader, but they are not altogether germane to our subject, and I only touch upon them in order to elucidate a particular point, the variations of character.
In cases of alternating personality we may consider either the physiological changes, which are rather obscure, or the intellectual changes, which have been referred, on the whole, to the memory, or the emotional changes, which have been somewhat neglected and in some observations omitted altogether. It is these last alone which interest us, because they may be summed up as alternations of character.
If, in fact, we take complete observations, it will be seen that the two personalities (there are sometimes more) do not consist merely in the alternation of two memories, but also in that of two distinct and usually opposite affective dispositions. Azam’s celebrated Félida is, in her first state, gloomy, cold, and reserved; in her second, cheerful, talkative, lively to the point of coquetry and boisterousness. In the case of Mary Reynolds, reported by Weir Mitchell, we have first a melancholy, silent, retiring woman; then, in her new personality, “her disposition is totally and absolutely changed,” she is fond of pleasure, noisy, always seeking company, except when taking long rides and walks through the woods and over the mountains, delighting in the spectacle of nature and absolutely unconscious of fear. These alternations lasted for sixteen years, after which “the emotional opposition between the two states seems gradually to have effaced itself,” and resolved itself into a medium state between the two—"a well-balanced temperament," which for a quarter of a century coincided with her now permanent second state. We may also recall the well-known case of L. V., who _spontaneously_ showed at the same time two opposite forms of character: at one time, talkative, arrogant, violent, brutal, insubordinate, a thief, ready to kill any one who gave him an order; at another, gentle, polite, silent, sober, of an almost child-like timidity. I say, spontaneously, for MM. Bourru and Burot have _artificially_ produced physical modifications in V. which are accompanied by some modifications in his character; but I am only speaking of natural changes. For other instances I refer the reader to special works on the alteration of personality.
I am inclined to believe that alternations of memory, though the strongest and most disturbing phenomena, result from an alternation of the affective dispositions (in other words, of the character), which themselves result from physiological changes, so that, in the last resort, we arrive at cœnæsthesia as the ultimate cause. When we see, _e.g._, that in L. V. the violent character always accompanies hemiplegia and anæsthesia on the right side, and the gentle character, hemiplegia and anæsthesia on the left side, not to mention the partial modifications accompanying the paraplegia, total anæsthesia, etc., artificially produced in the hypnotic state, it is difficult not to admit that changes in memory, in character, and in physical habit form an almost indissoluble whole, which is also the conclusion drawn by Bourru and Burot from their experiments.
In default of positive proofs that the change of cœnæsthesia is primordial in these alternations of character, we may compare them with a mental disease, where the alternation, being still simpler, allows us more easily to detect its physiological conditions. This is that duplex form of madness, sometimes called _folie circulaire_, or “alternating insanity,” etc. It consists in the regular alternation of two periods, that of depression and that of exaltation. The transition from one to the other is instantaneous, or takes place by imperceptible gradations, but nothing can be clearer than the contrast between the two periods.
During the depression, the affective symptoms are: melancholy, feeling of fatigue, torpor, indifference, vague terror, uneasiness with regard to everything. Physically, the patient is emaciated, aged, broken down, the temperature is lowered, and there is an enormous decrease in the pulse, the secretions and excretions, and the weight of the body, the latter going down as much as ten pounds in one week.
During the period of excitement the reverse takes place, point for point: a feeling of well-being, joy, pride, exuberant activity; the patient looks younger, grows stout, and his organic functions go on extensively and regularly. “This contrast,” says an alienist, “is one of the most curious and interesting peculiarities of mental medicine.”[252]
-----
Footnote 252:
Régis, _Maladies mentales_, p. 200.
-----
Here the connection between the affective disposition and the somatic state is quite clear, and seems to be referable to a tropho-neurosis of the brain (Schüle, Krafft-Ebing). It must be recognised that this disease, which is the extreme form, and the alternations of personality, which are modified forms, supply us with none but pathological examples; but the germs of morbid manifestations are present in normal life. Unfortunately, these alternations are only perceptible where strongly marked, and therefore none but exaggerated cases can be quoted. Compared to the successive characters, where the second has destroyed the first, the alternating characters mark a new stage on the road to dissolution, and form a transition to our second group—the _coexistent_ contradictory characters.
