To mention only a few cases,[28] as long ago as 1661 there was an outbreak of this kind at the home of a wealthy Englishman named Mompesson, an invisible ghost for months disturbing the peace of the Mompesson family by beating on a drum, banging at doors, tugging at bedclothes, and hurling household articles about in a most destructive manner. The affair made so much stir that a royal commission was sent to inquire into it, but signally failed to lay the ghost. For nearly a year, in 1716-1717, the Reverend Samuel Wesley, father of the founder of Methodism, was tormented in like fashion at his rectory in Lincolnshire. In 1753 a Russian monastery was invaded by an equally malicious and equally invisible “spirit,” which for months amused itself by ringing the monastery bells at unseemly hours. Nine years later all London was thrilled by the celebrated Cock Lane ghost, which produced spirit rappings with as much éclat as the most up-to-date, medium-invoked visitant from “the other side.” In none of these instances did contemporary investigators find a wholly satisfactory explanation for the singular phenomena involved.
Nevertheless, it may confidently be affirmed that, instead of strengthening the case for the physical phenomena of spiritism, the doings of the poltergeists—as these tricky ghosts are called by psychical researchers—considerably weaken it. For during recent years a number of poltergeist hauntings have been looked into by members of the Society for Psychical Research, and whenever the conditions have been such as to permit a thorough investigation, it has been found that, so far from being spiritual entities, poltergeists are invariably compounded of deceit, credulity, and delusion. Even more important, from the standpoint of getting at the true inwardness of physical mediumship, the discovery has been made that fraud has frequently been practised in poltergeist cases without any apparent motive.
Again I will give an instance from actual occurrence, in order to make my meaning perfectly clear. Word was one day received at the London offices of the Society for Psychical Research that a ghost had taken possession of a farmhouse in Shropshire, and was making life miserable for the lawful occupants, a family named Hampson and their two maidservants, Priscilla Evans and Emma Davies. Nobody saw the ghost, but it made its presence felt in true poltergeist style.
It had announced its advent, about four o’clock one fine afternoon, by lifting a saucepan from the kitchen fire and throwing it across the room, picking red-hot coals out of the fire and scattering them over the floor, and by causing a lamp globe to fly miraculously through the air. This last prank, naturally enough, so frightened the Hampsons and their servants that they fled from the house, and summoned aid from the nearest neighbors, among them a Mr. Lea, who, in the report that reached the Society for Psychical Research,[29] declared that when he approached the Hampson homestead, it seemed as if all the upstairs rooms were on fire, “as there was such a light in the windows.”
Reënforced, the Hampsons made bold to enter the house again, but the poltergeist had seemingly formed a strong dislike to them, for the report added:
“As things were continuing to jump about the kitchen in a manner which was altogether inexplicable, and many were getting damaged, Hampson decided to remove everything out of the apartment. He accordingly took down a barometer from the wall, when something struck him on the leg, and a loaf of bread, which was on the table, was thrown by some invisible means, and hit him on the back. A volume of ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ was thrown, or jumped, through the window, and a large, ornamental sea-shell went through in similar fashion.
“In the parlor a sewing machine was thrown about and damaged. The nurse girl was nursing the baby by the fire when some fire leaped from the grate, and the child’s hair was singed and its arms burned. The girl was so alarmed that she set off to a neighbor’s, and on the way there her clothes took fire, and had to be torn from her body. During the evening, while the girl was at the neighbor’s, a plate, which she touched while having her supper, was repeatedly thrown on the floor, and the pieces were picked up by some unseen agency, and put in the center of the table.”
On the girl’s return to the Hampson place the manifestations broke out anew. Mr. and Mrs. Lea were strongly of the opinion that they were the work of the devil; the Hampsons, however, inclined to the view that the blame lay at the door of some evil spirit that was especially desirous of tormenting the nurse girl, Emma Davies, it being noticed that things quieted down whenever she was out of the house. On this theory they sent her to her home in a neighboring village, where the poltergeist continued to annoy her. In the presence of a police officer, watching her closely to detect evidence of fraud, it wrenched the buttons from her dress and ripped out the stitches of her apron. While the village schoolmistress and some twenty other people looked on, it twice drew off her shoes and tossed them to the opposite side of the room; and it was said to have afterward lifted her bodily from the floor, and held her suspended in mid-air.
Clearly, this was a case calling for investigation, and the Society for Psychical Research at once commissioned one of its expert detectives of the supernatural, Mr. F. S. Hughes, to proceed to the scene of the disturbances. But before he arrived, the mystery was solved. The girl, it seems, had been made so nervous and excited by the unwelcome attentions of the poltergeist that it was thought best to place her in a physician’s care, and she was accordingly taken to a sanitarium and kept in strict seclusion, under the constant observation of the physician’s housekeeper, Miss Turner, a shrewd, level-headed woman. For three days, the poltergeist continued to plague her. Then it suddenly took its departure, under the following circumstances, narrated by Mr. Hughes in his official report:
“On Tuesday morning Miss Turner was in an upper room at the back of the house, and the servant of the establishment and Emma Davies were outside, Emma having her back to the house, and unaware that she was observed. Miss Turner noticed that she had a piece of brick in her hand, held behind her back. This she threw to a distance by a turn of the wrist, and, while doing so, screamed to attract the attention of the servant, who, of course, turning round, saw the brick in the air, and was very much frightened. Emma Davies, looking round, saw that she had been seen by Miss Turner, and, apparently imagining that she had been found out, was very anxious to return home that night.
“Miss Turner took no notice of the occurrence at the time, but the next morning she asked the girl if she had been playing tricks, and the girl confessed that she had, and went through some of the performances very skillfully, according to Miss Turner’s account. Later on in the day she repeated these in the presence of the doctor, Miss Turner, and two reporters from London.”
Obviously, trickster though she was, the girl had no rational motive for her conduct. It had already cost her a good position, and rendered it most unlikely that she would easily get another. And, in fact, this same absence of motive is conspicuous in nearly all the poltergeist cases exposed by the Society for Psychical Research, and by independent investigators. It is also noteworthy that when discovery is made, the active agent is usually found to be a boy or girl, man or woman, constitutionally or temporarily in an abnormal nervous condition.
In this particular case, for instance, the girl, Emma Davies, on the testimony of her mother, was subject to “fits.” In another case, investigated by the Society, the poltergeist was definitely identified with a little deformed girl, twelve years old, of decidedly abnormal characteristics. In a third case, investigated by Mr. Frank Podmore, another member of the Society and a specialist on poltergeists, a confession of fraud was elicited from a neurotic boy of fifteen—a confession only partial, it is true, but in one sense more illuminating than any full confession would have been. The case is so instructive, both for its revelation of the almost incredible credulity of many devotees of spiritism, and for the light it throws on the problems of physical mediumship, that I quote it, condensed, from Mr. Podmore’s detailed review of his investigation.[30]
“In the autumn of 1894,” he states, “Mrs. B., a lady living in a provincial town, gave me an account of certain curious incidents which had recently taken place in her house. The occupants of the house—an old one—consisted, besides Mrs. B. and her family, of a widow lady, Mrs. D., and her two children, a girl of about twenty, C. D., and a boy of fifteen, E. D.
“Mrs. B., C. D., and E. D. had been in the habit of trying experiments with planchette in the evening. Planchette had given them to understand that the house was haunted by four spirits, a wicked marquis, a wicked monk, a lay desperado, and a virtuous and beautiful young lady. These spirits wrote, through planchette, of treasure concealed in the house, of a hidden chamber, and many other matters. Among other proofs were the following:
“One evening after dark, Mrs. B., in accordance with directions received through planchette, went with C. D. and E. D. to an old oak tree in the garden, and, standing with the girl and boy on either side, holding a hand of each, she distinctly heard a stone strike the garden roller a few feet off. The phenomenon was repeated twice; and her companions solemnly assured her that they had no part in the performance.
“On another occasion, sitting in a bedroom in the dark, with only E. D. in the room, Mrs. B. was struck by a stone on the temple, heard objects thrown about the room, felt an arm put through hers, and so on. Some of these phenomena occurred when she was alone in the room—but with the door, I gathered, not shut.
“Mrs. B. one morning placed a white chrysanthemum bouquet on the boughs of the oak tree. It disappeared shortly afterward, and on the next morning two other small bouquets were found there. Mrs. B. asked for whom these were intended, and went away, leaving pencil and paper. On her return she found the paper torn in half, and the initials of her own Christian name, and that of C. D., written on the two halves respectively, with a bouquet on each half.
“About this time a secret chamber was discovered with the skeleton of a cat crouching in act to spring, and the skeleton of a woman. Asked more particularly about the latter, Mrs. B. said: ‘Well, at least a skull and some bones—but it was a woman’s skull.’
“A few days after receiving this account, I went down by invitation to the house. I saw Mrs. D. and her two children, and received from them ungrudging corroboration of Mrs. B.’s marvelous story. In E. D.’s company I penetrated the secret chamber, and found there the mummified skeleton of what might have been a cat—but nothing else. In removing the stains left by this exploit, I contrived a tête-à-tête interview with E. D., and asked him: ‘How much did you do of all these things?’ He replied: ‘Oh, not much. I only did a few little things.’
“Pressed on particular points, he admitted having thrown one stone at the garden roller, and having also thrown a trouser button against the wall when sitting alone in the bedroom with Mrs. B. He denied having produced the other phenomena on those occasions. Asked as to the bouquets, he said he had not placed them on the tree. Pressed a little more, he said: ‘If I did it, it must have been without knowing it.’ This without any suggestion from me as to possible somnambulism, or unconscious action. He assured me that his sister had had no hand in this matter. I could not get any more out of him, as he was shortly after called away.
“I subsequently learned from his mother that E. D. was so nervous and delicate that he slept in her room at night; that he was not allowed to do much mental work; that he was subject to attacks of somnambulism; and had, indeed, fallen into a semiconscious state only a few days before, during a lesson in carpentry.”
Probably the whole affair originated in a moment of mischief, and was carried on and elaborated because of an uncontrollable, and perhaps not entirely conscious, desire on the part of the abnormally conditioned lad to mystify the too easily imposed upon elderly lady.
In point of fact, the investigations of the Society for Psychical Research make it certain that in nine cases out of ten a poltergeist is a by-product of hysteria, using the term in its strictest medical sense. As is well known, one of the distinctive symptoms of hysteria is a tendency to indulge in all manner of lies and deceptions, coupled often with almost diabolical cleverness in giving these lies and deceptions a color of reality. Impulse to such trickery may arise from a great variety of motives; frequently, it would seem, from nothing more than an abnormal craving for notoriety and admiration. Certainly, the hysterical young people run to earth by the poltergeist hunters of the Society for Psychical Research did not engage in their hoaxings because they expected to make money out of them.
The bearing of all this on the physical phenomena of spiritism is surely self-evident. It shows, for one thing, that the money motive is not the only motive inciting mediums to fraud; that when a neurotic or hysterical condition is present, the best of characters is no guarantee against duplicity; and that under such circumstances the detection of fraud is exceedingly difficult, particularly in the case of witnesses predisposed to regard the phenomena as genuine. If hysterical children can, as they have often done, carry on a course of deception mystifying a whole community, it is manifest that mediums of similar hysterical tendencies, working under cover of darkness or in a dim light, can more or less readily deceive the most expert observers; and, moreover, that they may be only partially, if at all, conscious of their own frauds.[31]
Further, in estimating the nature of the phenomena produced at the séances of physical mediums, it is imperative to take into account the innumerable possibilities of mal-observation on the part of the spectators. Experience has shown that comparatively few people, no matter how honest, are trustworthy witnesses even when conditions for observation are of the best.
For proof of this, one does not need to look beyond the courtroom, where every day perfectly honest people give the most contradictory accounts of some simple occurrence. If it is thus difficult to see correctly what goes on in the broad light of day, it surely is far more difficult to be certain of exactly what is happening in a room where there is darkness rather than light. Besides which, the imaginative faculty may be excited to such an extent that the sitters at a séance may not only be misled into making inaccurate reports of what really occurred, but they may even, and with absolute sincerity, testify to phenomena which did not occur at all.
A friend of mine, now a physician in Maryland, used to amuse himself in his student days by playing medium at table-tipping séances. He would cause the table to rap out messages to various acquaintances of his, none of whom were spiritists, but several of whom became intensely interested, owing to their inability to fathom the source of the communications they received, my friend managing things so skillfully that they did not suspect him of hoaxing them.
One evening the table announced the presence of the “spirit” of a little child, the daughter of a lady well known to most of the sitters. They were not aware, however, that my friend was intimately acquainted with the little one’s life history, and when, utilizing this knowledge, he proceeded to make the table rap communications of a most personal character, there was considerable excitement. Suddenly a lady present, not a relative of the dead child, uttered a piercing scream, and fainted.
When she was revived, she declared, with emphatic assurance, that she had seen the head of a child emerge from the center of the table.
Equally indicative of the part imagination plays in constructing spiritistic phenomena is an experience of my own with a New York medium. His specialty was materialization, but at the séance in question he did not attempt to develop “spirit forms” by any of the methods in vogue among materializers. Instead, the gas having been lowered until the room was almost in total darkness, he went into a “trance,” and, seated at the séance table, with his head resting on his hands, declaimed in a singsong voice:
“The spirits are coming. I can feel them approaching. You will be able to see them soon. They are almost here. Here is one now, on my left. Can’t you see it? And here comes another, and another. They are crowding around me, so anxious to communicate with you. Can’t you see them? I can’t hold them long; they will be gone soon. Oh, can’t you see them?”
There were, perhaps, a dozen people present, including myself and a fellow investigator, who had accompanied me. Of the others, three responded to the hypnotic suggestiveness of the medium’s words and manner, and solemnly declared that they could see a “spirit” hovering about him. One lady, whose integrity I could not doubt, insisted that she saw two “spirits,” which she identified as her dead husband and brother.
Undoubtedly, therefore, it is proper to assume that when, in the instances cited at the beginning of this chapter, Professor Lombroso, sitting with Eusapia Paladino, saw a huge wardrobe advance to attack him; and when Lords Crawford and Dunraven saw the medium Home floating through the air, hallucination rather than “spirit action” is the correct explanation. At all events, in view of the known fallibility of the human senses; the manifold opportunities for fraud open to mediums; and the fact that, with the single exception of Home, every medium subjected to scientific investigation has been caught practising fraud at one time or another, it seems extremely rash to accept as genuine any of the phenomena of physical mediumship.
Still, it would be incorrect to say that the time devoted by psychical researchers to the investigation of these phenomena has been time wasted. They have performed a necessary police duty for society, and their labors, as we shall see, have been productive of psychological discoveries of great practical importance.
When the Society for Psychical Research was founded, in 1882, its purpose was not only to obtain, if possible, scientifically acceptable proof of the survival of human personality after bodily death, but also to study the nature of personality in its mundane aspects, with a view to securing greater insight into the powers and possibilities of man here on earth.
In this latter quest it has been eminently successful, and thanks to its labors our knowledge of ourselves has been increased a thousandfold. As has been shown, phenomena hitherto regarded as mysterious and “supernatural”—such as apparitions, clairvoyance, crystal-gazing, etc.—have been definitely explained on a purely naturalistic basis; and, as was said at the close of the last chapter, in addition to naturalizing the supernatural, psychical researchers have made, or have assisted in making, discoveries of great practical utility, and having a profound bearing on affairs of everyday life.
Among these, none is of more importance than the discovery of the “subconscious.” This term, which was almost unheard of a few years ago, is nowadays used by psychologists in a variety of ways, but it may be broadly defined as including an extensive range of mental processes and phenomena that occur beneath the surface of our ordinary consciousness. Subconscious mental action, in fact, has a constant, unceasing part in our lives. It is in evidence in such commonplace acts as walking, talking, writing, playing the piano, handling a tool, a tennis racket, or a baseball bat.
There was a time, in the experience of all of us, when we could do none of these things, but had to learn them by conscious effort. Little by little, as we acquired more skill, the element of consciousness became less and less, until at last we could execute them in a seemingly automatic manner, as in the fashion of the piano player described by Miss Cobbe:
“Two different lines of hieroglyphics have to be read at once, and the right hand has to be guided to attend to one of them, the left to the other. All the fingers have the work assigned as quickly as they can move. The mind, or something which does duty as mind, interprets scores of A sharps, and B flats, and C naturals into black ivory keys and white ones, crotchets, and quavers, and demi-quavers, rests, and all the mysteries of music. The feet are not idle, but have something to do with the pedals. And all this time the performer, the conscious performer, is in a seventh heaven of artistic rapture at the results of all this tremendous business, or perchance lost in a flirtation with the individual who turns the leaves of the music book, and is justly persuaded she is giving him the whole of her soul.”
The subconscious is thus a sort of reservoir in which are stored up, available for future use, the things learned through education and experience; and it also has a dynamic power that enables it to supplement, economize, and enlarge the operations of the upper consciousness. Ordinarily we fail to appreciate what we owe to this hidden servitor, for the reason that its workings are so smooth, so unobtrusive, as to pass quite unnoticed. Yet abundant evidence has been secured to demonstrate not simply the fact of its existence, but the more significant fact that it is never at rest, but is perpetually laboring in our behalf.
Even when our consciousness is for the moment completely in abeyance—as when we are asleep—the subconscious continues operant. Many of my readers have doubtless had the experience of vainly endeavoring for hours, perhaps for days, to solve some important problem, and then awaking one morning with a luminously clear idea of its correct solution. While they slept, their subconsciousness had been at work disentangling the threads of their conscious reasoning, stripping away and discarding unessentials, and finally presenting them with, so to speak, a ready-made understanding of that which had previously been so perplexing to them.
In all such cases the action of the subconscious is more vividly evident when, as often happens, the desired solution is gained during sleep itself, in the form of a dream. An excellent example is found in an episode narrated by a business man, who says:
“I had been bothered since September with an error in my cash account for that month, and, despite many hours’ examination, it defied all my efforts, and I almost gave it up as hopeless. It had been the subject of my waking thoughts for many nights, and had occupied a large portion of my leisure hours. Matters remained thus unsettled until the eleventh of December. On this night I had not, to my knowledge, once thought of the subject, but I had not been long in bed and asleep, when my brain was as busy with the books as though I had been at my desk.
“The cash book, banker’s pass books, etc., etc., appeared before me; and, without any apparent trouble, I almost immediately discovered the cause of the mistakes, which had arisen out of a complicated cross entry. I perfectly recollect having taken a slip of paper in my dream, and made such a memorandum as would enable me to correct the error at some leisure time; and, having done this, that the whole of the circumstances had passed from my mind.
“When I awoke in the morning I had not the slightest recollection of my dream, nor did it once occur to me throughout the day, although I had the very books before me on which I had apparently been engaged in my sleep. When I returned home in the afternoon, as I did early, for the purpose of dressing, and proceeded to shave, I took up a piece of paper from my dressing table to wipe my razor, and you may imagine my surprise at finding thereon the very memorandum I fancied I had made during the previous night. The effect on me was such that I returned to our office and turned to the cash book, when I found that I had really, while asleep, detected the error which I could not detect in my waking hours, and had actually jotted it down at the time.
“I have no recollection whatever as to where I obtained the paper and pencil with which I made the memorandum. It certainly must have been written in the dark, and in my bedroom, as I found both paper and pencil there the following afternoon. The pencil was not one which I am in the habit of carrying, and my impression is that I must either have found it in the room, or gone down-stairs for it.”[32]
Illustrative of the same subconscious mechanism, and doubly interesting because of the light it throws on the true nature of many dreams frequently regarded as supernatural, is a singular experience that once befell Professor H. V. Hilprecht, the well-known archæologist of the University of Pennsylvania.
At the time, Professor Hilprecht was trying to decipher the inscriptions on two small fragments of agate from the temple of Bel in ancient Babylonia, and believed by him to be portions of the finger rings of some wealthy Babylonian. He had already published a preliminary report on the collection of which they formed a part, but, despite weeks of earnest effort, had utterly failed to get at the meaning of the words inscribed on them.
One Saturday night, after working on the fragments until nearly twelve o’clock without any satisfactory result, he went to bed weary and exhausted, and was soon in a deep sleep. He then dreamed that he was transported to the temple of Bel, where a venerable priest, whose dress showed that he belonged to a pre-Christian epoch, conducted him into the treasure chamber of the temple. It was a small, low room, without windows, and contained a large wooden chest, around which were scattered pieces of agate and other valuable stones. While Professor Hilprecht stood looking at these, the priest said to him:
“The two fragments which you have published separately upon pages 22 and 26 belong together, are not finger rings, and their history is as follows:
“King Kurigalzu [who reigned in Babylonia about 1300 B. C.], once sent to the temple of Bel, among other articles of agate and lapis lazuli, an inscribed votive cylinder of agate. Then we priests suddenly received the command to make for the statue of the god Ninib a pair of earrings of agate. We were in great dismay, since there was no agate at hand as raw material. In order to execute the command, there was nothing for us to do but cut the votive cylinder into three parts, making three rings, each of which contained a portion of the original inscription.
“The first two rings served as earrings for the statue of the god; the two fragments which have given you so much trouble are portions of them. If you will put the two together you will have confirmation of my words. But the third ring you have not yet found in the course of your excavations, and you never will find it.”
With this the priest disappeared, and the dream came to an end. In the morning, impressed with its coherence and vividness, Professor Hilprecht again attacked the troublesome fragments, put them together as directed, and, by making the proper guesses for the missing middle portion, readily deciphered the full inscription: “To the god Ninib, son of Bel, his lord, has Kurigalzu, pontifex of Bel, presented this.”[33]
Nor are the intellectual achievements of the subconscious during sleep confined to the solution of problems that have been vexing the upper consciousness. It has a highly original, creative power of its own. Thus the composer Tartini dreamed one night that he heard the devil playing a wonderful sonata, and, remembering it on awaking, was able to set it down on paper, and thereby put to his credit one of the finest pieces of music that bears his name. Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” was another dream composition; and, indeed, a long list of masterpieces in music, art, and literature, originating through subconscious mental action in sleep, might be drawn up.
A typical case was recently communicated to me by a well-known Pacific Coast architect, Mr. B. J. S. Cahill. He had been commissioned to design a twenty-six-story office building, to be erected in Portland, Oregon, and he determined, if possible, to plan one that would be a real contribution towards the solution of some of the most difficult problems of modern commercial architecture. For weeks Mr. Cahill labored hard to devise a building that would unite a maximum of beauty, solidity, and capacity with an abundance, and as nearly as possible an equality, of light and air for the many offices it was to contain. The structure he ultimately conceived was certainly novel, and differed conspicuously from the ordinary four-sided office building, with its inner offices lighted from a court.
His plan called for the construction of a building shaped much like a St. Andrew’s cross, or like a square with a triangle cut out of each side. In this way the need for an inner court was completely obviated, and the only poorly ventilated and dimly lighted portion of the building would be its central “core.” Here the elevators and stairs were to be located.
According to the architect’s own statement, this plan—which has been highly praised by so eminent a critic as Mr. Montgomery Schuyler—was born in his mind while he slept. One night he saw in a dream a building shaped in this fashion, and knew that his problem was solved. He tells me that on awaking he made two rough sketches of the plan in a pocket note-book—one showing the general design, the other indicating the appearance of the building when completed.
Perhaps no one has ever been more favored in this same way than that remarkable man of genius, the late Robert Louis Stevenson. The plots for many of Stevenson’s best stories—including the marvelous “Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”—came to him in dreams, as he himself has related in a delightful autobiographical essay, in which, with characteristic whimsicality, he personifies his subconscious ideas as “Brownies” and “little people.”
“This dreamer, like many other persons,” he says, “has encountered some trifling vicissitudes of fortune. When the bank begins to send letters, and the butcher to linger at the back gates, he sets to belaboring his brains after a story, for that is his readiest money winner; and behold! at once the little people begin to bestir themselves in the same quest, and labor all night long, and all night long set before him truncheons of tales upon their lighted theater. No fear of his being frightened now; the flying heart and the frozen scalp are things bygone; applause, growing applause, growing interest, growing exultation in his own cleverness—for he takes all the credit—and at last a jubilant leap to wakefulness, with the cry: ‘I have it, that’ll do!’ upon his lips; with such and similar emotions he sits at these nocturnal dreams, with such outbreaks, like Claudius in the play, he scatters the performance in the midst.
“Often enough the waking is a disappointment; he has been too deep asleep, as I explain the thing; drowsiness has gained his little people; they have gone stumbling and maundering through their parts; and the play, to the wakened mind, is seen to be a tissue of absurdities. And yet how often have these sleepless Brownies done him honest service, and given him, as he sat idly taking his pleasure in the boxes, better tales than he could fashion for himself.
“The more I think of it,” Stevenson continues, “the more I am moved to press upon the world my question: ‘Who are the little people?’ They are near connections of the dreamer’s, beyond doubt; they share in his financial worries, and have an eye to the bank book; they share plainly in his training; they have plainly learned, like him, to build the scheme of a considerable story, and to arrange emotion in progressive order; only I think they have more talent; and one thing is beyond doubt—they can tell him a story piece by piece, like a serial, and keep him all the while in ignorance of where they aim.
“That part of my work which is done while I am sleeping is the Brownies’ part beyond contention; but that which is done when I am up and about is by no means necessarily mine, since all goes to show the Brownies have a hand in it even then.”[34]
It is worth noting that facts like these have recently led to a novel theory explanatory of what is known as “genius.” Instead of adopting the Lombrosian doctrine, and regarding the man of genius as a kind of transcendental degenerate, this latest theory affirms that he is what he is by reason of enjoying a readier communication than most men possess between the conscious and subconscious portions of his mind. Such a view has the further virtue of being completely in accord with the familiar definition of genius as an infinite capacity for hard work.
From what has been said, it must be evident that the contents of the subconscious are made up in large measure of knowledge gained at one time or another by conscious endeavor and thought. The man who thinks hard consciously, is certain to have a richer fund of subconscious information at his disposal than the one whose conscious thinking is of the idle, futile, scatter-brained sort. All successful men, whether a Milton or a Rockefeller, a Shakespeare or a Morgan, are men who have developed their subconscious faculties by laborious application of their conscious powers in the routine of daily life.
On the other hand, it has also to be observed that knowledge is often obtained subconsciously without passing through any preliminary stage of conscious attention and awareness; and that, by a reversal of the usual process, the conscious frequently acquires from the subconscious information of which it would otherwise be ignorant.
I have previously alluded to this interesting and most important fact in my discussion of telepathy, clairvoyance, crystal-gazing, and kindred problems in psychical research. As we then saw, the subconscious has a certain eerie faculty of imparting its information to the upper consciousness in the way of hallucinations, indicative at times of thought transference from mind to mind, or, more commonly, originating merely from unnoticed impressions of direct, personal experience.
It cannot be too firmly borne in mind that every day of our lives we see and hear and feel more than we realize; that these unobserved sights and sounds and sensations may, nevertheless, be subconsciously registered in our minds; and that they may soon or late be projected above the threshold of consciousness in a form astonishing, puzzling, and perhaps annoying to us, as in the case of a strange experience of a young New York newspaper man.
It was his business to edit for publication in a number of country newspapers the dispatches sent in by a telegraphic news agency. He had been thus engaged for perhaps a year when he noticed, greatly to his dismay, that he was repeatedly omitting items which he believed, on reading them in the telegraphic copy, to be “old news,” but which were printed with more or less prominence in the next morning’s issues of other newspapers. This occurred so often that he began to tremble for his position, and set himself earnestly to solve the mystery.
Luckily he had some acquaintance with psychology, and knew that his trouble must be due to a faulty identification of subconscious with conscious impressions. But why was it, he asked himself, that on certain nights he would be quite free from such errors of judgment, while on others he might omit, or be strongly tempted to omit, on the ground of supposed previous publication, half a dozen items of real news value? The truth dawned on him one evening as he was sitting down to begin work.
On his desk lay a heap of envelopes containing the dispatches that had come from the news agency before his arrival at the newspaper office. These should already have been opened by an office boy, but that night he had been busy with something else. Mechanically, the editor himself tore open the envelopes, smoothed out their contents, and, without reading them, made a neat pile of the typewritten sheets, preparatory to going through them.
He had not been working an hour when he came to a dispatch, which he tossed aside, with the muttered comment, “That’s an old story, sure. I’ve read it somewhere before.”
Then, remembering the mistakes he had been making, he hesitated, picked it up, and read it carefully. Every word in it seemed familiar. But where could he have read it? In the evening papers? He went through them one by one, without result. Then it suddenly occurred to him that possibly, in opening the dispatches, he had, without being aware of it, glanced at this particular item, and had obtained a subconscious knowledge of it, which was now welling up confusedly as a conscious memory.
To test this theory, he directed the office boy to open the dispatches without fail for the next few nights. On none of these did he suffer from memory confusion.
Possibly, if he had analyzed the matter further, he would have found that the news items which had caught his eye while smoothing out the dispatch sheets related to subjects of some special interest to him. For just as one’s conscious attention is arrested by that which is particularly interesting, so does the subconscious select for presentation to the upper consciousness information of temporary or habitual interest and significance.
Sometimes, too, there is involved a harking back to interests of an earlier period of life. A simple but instructive illustration of this is found in a little incident that occurred to Doctor Richard Hodgson while on a visit to England. It may best be reported in his own words:[35]
“Yesterday morning (September 13, 1895), just after breakfast, I was strolling alone along one of the garden paths of Leckhampton House, Cambridge, repeating aloud to myself the verses of a poem. I became temporarily oblivious to my garden surroundings, and regained my consciousness of them suddenly, to find myself brought to a stand, in a stooping position, gazing intently at a five-leaved clover. On careful examination, I found about a dozen specimens of five-leaved clover, as well as several specimens of four-leaved clover, all of which probably came from the same root.
“Several years ago I was interested in getting extra-leaved clovers, but I have not for years made any active search for them, though occasionally my conscious attention, as I walked along, has been given to appearances of four-leaved clover, which proved, on examination, to be deceptive. The peculiarity of yesterday’s ‘find’ was that I discovered myself, with a sort of shock, standing still and stooping down, and afterward realized that a five-leaved clover was directly under my eyes.”
Compare with this an incident reported by an English clergyman, the Reverend P. H. Newnham. We find in it exactly the same element of selective subconscious attention, accompanied, however, by an auditory hallucination as a means of notifying the upper consciousness of the fact subconsciously observed.
“I was visiting friends at Tunbridge Wells,” says Mr. Newnham, “and went out one evening, entomologizing. As I crossed a stile into a field, on my way to a neighboring wood, a voice said distinctly in my right ear: ‘You’ll find “Chaonia” on that oak.’ This was a very scarce moth, which I had never seen before, and which most assuredly I had never consciously thought of seeing. There were several oaks in the field, but I instinctively walked up to one, straight to the off side of it, and there was the moth indicated.”[36]
The psychological explanation of this is simple enough, and is equally applicable to similar, if more sensational, hallucinations widely heralded as of supernatural character. It is manifestly absurd to suppose that a “spirit” announced to the entomologizing clergyman the presence of the rare and greatly sought-after moth which it was his good fortune to capture. But it is not at all absurd to suggest that quite likely, although he had consciously forgotten all about it, he had at some time seen Chaonia, or an entomological text-book picture of Chaonia; that he had subconsciously caught a glimpse of it, fluttering across the field and settling on the oak, and that his subconscious recognition of its identity had set in motion the proper mental mechanism to notify his upper consciousness of a fact in which it would naturally be much interested.
There may also be a subconscious intensification, or “hyperæsthesia,” of other senses than that of sight. In all probability hyperæsthesia of the sense of hearing is sufficient to account for the dramatic central incident in the following story, told by a lady whose identity I am unable to reveal:
“I was living one summer in a little mining camp in the Rocky Mountains. Our house, a frame building, was some little distance from any other, at the top of a steep hill; the only disadvantage of this being the additional difficulty of getting water, which was an expensive commodity in the camp, as the adjacent mines had drained most of the wells.
“The house contained six rooms, all opening one out of another, my own room, with a dressing closet beyond, where my child slept, being at one end, and the front porch, which overlooked the valley, at the other.
“One evening, after my little girl was asleep, I lit a tiny night lamp, always left burning on a bracket in her room; and, leaving all doors and windows open, on account of the intense heat, went to sit on the front porch. I may have sat there half an hour, when my attention was caught by a great blazing light in the direction of the farthest houses. It appeared evident that one at least had taken fire, and the difficulty of getting water, and the hope that no children were in danger, flashed through my mind.
“While watching the rapidly growing glare, I heard a faint, crackling sound in my own house. It would not have disturbed me at any other time, as I only supposed that some smouldering piece of cedar in the kitchen stove had blazed up. But, with the present thought of fire in my mind, I went into the kitchen to look, and, glancing through the open doors as I passed, saw a volume of flame and smoke pouring from the child’s room into mine.
“Thank God it was still possible to rush through and save her; and I carried her out in a blanket to prevent the scorch, for the room was only burning at one end; the side where the bed stood, though fearfully hot and suffocating, was not yet on fire, and, thanks to the timely warning, the water left in the barrels proved just enough to extinguish the flames before very much was destroyed.
“After all was quiet, I went back to the porch to look at that other burning house, feeling so thankful that my child was safe, and wondering if others were, also. But all was dark, and when I came to make inquiry next day, nothing was known in the camp of any such fire. Had it not been for my strange vision of it, which must have lasted fully ten minutes, I feel sure that my little girl would have been burned to death.”[37]
There is a possibility, though only a possibility, that telepathy between mother and child may have had part in the production of this helpful hallucination. But hyperæsthesia of the sense of hearing seems to afford the likelier explanation, as also in numerous well-authenticated instances, in which railroad men, obeying an unaccountable impulse or hallucinatory monition, have taken action averting disastrous wrecks. A single illustrative example must suffice, a case called to the attention of the Society for Psychical Research by Mr. William H. Wyman, of Dunkirk, N. Y.:
“Some years ago my brother was employed on, and had charge as conductor and engineer of, a work train on the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway, running between Buffalo and Erie. I often went with him to the gravel bank, where he had his headquarters, and returned on his train with him.
“On one occasion I was with him, and after the train of cars was loaded, we went together to the telegraph office to see if there were any orders, and to find out if the trains were on time, as we had to keep out of the way of all regular trains. After looking over the train reports, and finding them all on time, we started for Buffalo.
“As we approached Westfield station, running about twelve miles per hour, and when within about one mile of a long curve in the line, my brother all of a sudden shut off the steam, and, quickly stepping over to the fireman’s side of the engine, he looked out of the cab window, and then to the rear of his train. Not discovering anything wrong, he put on steam, but almost immediately again shut it off, and gave the signal for brakes, and stopped.
“After inspecting the engine and train, and finding nothing wrong, he seemed very much excited, and for a short time he acted as if he did not know where he was or what to do. I asked what was the matter. He replied that he did not know; then, after looking at his watch and orders, he said that he felt that there was some trouble on the line of the road. I suggested that he had better run his train to the station and find out. He then ordered his flagman to go ahead around the curve, which was just ahead of us, and he would follow with the train.
“The flagman started and had barely time to flag an extra express train, with the general superintendent and others on board, coming full forty miles an hour. The superintendent inquired what he was doing there, and if he did not receive orders to keep out of the way of the extra. My brother told him that he had not received orders, and did not know of any extra train coming; that we had both examined the train reports before leaving the station. The train was then backed to the station, where it was found that no orders had been given.”[38]
Incidents such as this are of not infrequent occurrence. By the superstitious they are regarded as weird and uncanny, and savoring of the spiritistic. In reality they are only exceptional exemplifications of a process which is ceaselessly taking place in all of us. There is no one who does not, every day, perform acts which he cannot consciously account for, and which, if closely inquired into, would be found similarly to take their rise in unnoticed subconscious impressions. For the matter of that, it is possible to train one-self to subconscious attention to selected impressions, even in sleep.
A familiar illustration is the mother who, undisturbed by other sounds, awakens at the least cry of her infant. The same phenomenon is observable in the case of the conscientious medical nurse, who, no matter how profound her sleep, responds instantly to any movement by her patient. And, in the course of conversation not long ago, a physician said to me:
“As you know, my house is on a car line, and, besides the cars, there is much automobile and carriage traffic on my street for a large part of the night. Nothing of this breaks my rest. I sleep so soundly that a thunderstorm does not arouse me. Yet let the telephone bell begin to ring, and I am out of bed and have the receiver at my ear before the bell has ceased ringing.”
I have myself, like a good many other people, found it possible to make the subconscious do the work of an alarm clock. That is to say, if, on going to bed, I mentally determine to wake at a certain hour, I invariably do so, and this although I am one of the deepest of sleepers. It matters not what hour I select, nor how late I retire the previous night, the mental sentinel whom I have placed on guard punctually notifies me when the appointed time arrives.
This goes to show, of course, that the subconscious is, to a certain extent, at any rate, amenable to conscious control and direction. That such control is highly desirable is evinced not merely by the facts reviewed above, but by others which we must next take under consideration—facts of altogether different import. For if, as we have seen, the subconscious is in many ways a docile and helpful auxiliary of the upper consciousness, it also contains within itself dire possibilities of unhappiness, suffering, disease, and even death.
The subconscious, I repeat, does not always exercise a helpful influence; there are times when it may impose upon us indescribable misery.
It is able to do this by virtue of the intimate relations existing between the mind and the body. At this late day it is scarcely necessary for me to undertake to demonstrate that the state of one’s mind has a great deal to do with the health of one’s body. What is not so generally known, and what all of us ought to know, is the further fact that many diseases are directly due to distressing mental states, and in such cases usually to subconscious mental states—that is to say, to thoughts and emotions of which the sufferer consciously has no knowledge. The same often holds good even with regard to maladies the symptoms of which are almost wholly if not altogether physical, and the causes of which one would naturally expect to find physical, likewise.
Indeed, ignorance of the tremendous rôle played by the subconscious in the causation of disease, has in the past been responsible for many medical shortcomings. Nor is the situation as yet much improved, although it is rapidly improving, thanks chiefly to the labors of a little group of scientific investigators known as psychopathologists, or medical psychologists, who have made it their special business to ascertain the different ways in which the subconscious may affect health adversely, and to devise methods for coping with mentally caused diseases.
These men are not “faith healers.” They are not making any war on medicine. They are, in fact, themselves physicians, graduates of the best medical schools, of excellent standing in their profession, and seeking, above all things, to increase the usefulness and precision of medical science. Already, though their labors were begun only a few years ago, they have effected numerous cures of a seemingly miraculous character; but always they have effected them by utilizing natural laws which they have discovered by the rigorous processes of scientific experiment.
Of fundamental importance among these laws is one known as the law of dissociation. It might almost be called the law of forgotten memories, for to a large extent its workings depend on the interesting circumstance, to which attention has previously been drawn, that ideas which have faded from the conscious memory persist in the subconsciousness. As Pierre Janet, the distinguished Frenchman and most eminent of living psychopathologists, has tersely phrased it, “Nothing that goes into the human mind is ever really lost.”
No matter how remote, past experiences, as I have shown in earlier chapters, can be recovered and recalled to mind by means of crystal-vision, automatic writing, or other psychological methods of “tapping the subconscious.” Obviously we have here no absolute loss of memory, but merely a splitting off, or “dissociation,” from the field of waking consciousness.
Now, while the memories thus dissociated and lying hidden in the subconscious usually exercise no appreciable effect other than in the molding of character, the enlargement of our store of knowledge, etc., there are conditions under which, in the case of persons predisposed by circumstances of heredity or environment, they may give rise to all manner of mental and physical ills.
A person, for instance, experiences a sudden fright. Time passes, the fright is completely forgotten, or, at most, vaguely remembered. But one day unmistakable, and sometimes exceedingly peculiar, symptoms of disease appear. The victim, it may be, suffers from a strange obsession or “fixed idea,” or from a general “nervous breakdown,” or from an actual paralysis of some bodily organ, or from the development of abdominal or other enlargements resembling true organic growths.
Whatever the symptoms, the mechanism of the puzzling malady is always the same. There has been an abnormal dissociation. The ideas connected with the original shock, although submerged beneath the threshold of consciousness—in a word, forgotten—remain vividly alive in the subconscious, to act as perpetual irritants of the nervous system and in time to give rise to the appearance of the symptoms of which the sufferer complains. Often, indeed, the dissociation is instantaneous, and the appearance of the disease symptoms equally rapid.
In either case, the resultant malady is purely psychical in its origin, and can be cured only by psychical, not by physical means. What is needed is to get at the dissociated mental states—the forgotten, disease-creating memories—and reassociate them with the upper consciousness, or root them out completely by means of “suggestions” skillfully applied.
This is no fanciful theory. It is the solidest kind of fact, repeatedly tested and verified. Time and again, patients pronounced incurable by competent physicians have been taken in hand by the psychopathologists and, once their disease has been definitely traced to some dissociation, have been restored to perfect health.
For the matter of that, of course, the same thing has been done to some extent by Christian Science healers and other irregular practitioners of “mental medicine.” But the difference between all of these and the psychopathologists is just this—that the former apply the healing power of suggestion to all sorts of diseases, and without any adequate understanding of its laws and limitations, whereas the psychopathologists recognize that it is only one of several valuable medical methods, and that it is legitimately applicable only to certain maladies.
Experience has taught them, too, that even within its proper sphere of usefulness it often is of therapeutic value only after a searching scientific examination of the patient’s subconsciousness has brought to light the particular dissociated states which have to be corrected before a cure can be wrought.
Nevertheless, the range of maladies susceptible of cure by psychopathological processes is marvelously wide, and it is no exaggeration to say that the discovery of the influence exercised by the subconscious in the causation of disease is one of the most vitally significant ever made in the history of medicine.
The truth of this may readily be shown by citing a few cases illustrating some of the manifold ways in which dissociation works havoc in the human organism, and the extreme ingenuity displayed by the skilled psychopathologist in overcoming its ravages.
There was brought one day to the Parisian hospital of the Salpêtrière, the world’s greatest center of psychopathological investigation, a woman of forty, designated in the medical record of her case by the name of Justine. She was accompanied by her husband, who explained that he wished Doctor Janet to examine her because he feared that she had become insane. And, in fact, she presented the aspect of a veritable maniac. Her jet-black hair was flowing loosely over her shoulders, her eyes were fixed and glaring, her hands trembling, the muscles of her neck twitching, and she constantly made the most horrible grimaces. When Doctor Janet gently sought to question her, she buried her face in her hands, and cried:
“Oh, it is terrible to live thus! I am afraid, I am so afraid!”
“And of what, pray, are you afraid?” the physician asked.
“I am afraid of cholera.”
“Is that all you are afraid of?”
“But surely it is quite enough.”
Doctor Janet turned for an explanation to her husband, who shook his head despairingly, as he replied in an undertone:
“This is the way she has been for years, doctor, only lately she has grown much worse. She will scarcely eat anything, for fear of catching cholera. It is difficult to persuade her to stir from the house. She seems to think the air is full of cholera germs. She sees cholera in everything. Tell me, doctor, is my poor Justine mad? Must we be separated, she and I? Is it that she will have to spend the rest of her life in an asylum?”
“Leave her here a few days,” said Doctor Janet, “and I can tell you better then.”
Psychopathologists have invented some delicate tests for discriminating infallibly between true organic insanity, which in the present state of medical knowledge is quite incurable, and functional mental troubles due to dissociation. Applying these, Doctor Janet soon reached the conclusion that Justine was not really insane, and that her “phobia,” or irrational fear, was due to some forgotten shock connected with the disease cholera.
But, closely though he questioned her, she could recall nothing of the sort. He then decided to try the effect of hypnotizing her, for, as all psychopathologists are aware, hypnotism, when it is possible to use it, is an unrivaled agency for recovering lost memories. Put into the hypnotic state, patients easily remember incidents in their past of which they have no conscious recollection when in the normal, waking state. It was thus with Justine, who proved to be most hypnotizable.
“I want you,” Doctor Janet told her, after she had passed into deep hypnosis, “to try to remember whether at any time in your life you saw a person suffering from cholera, or one who had died from cholera.”
“Why, certainly I did,” she promptly replied, shuddering violently.
“When was it?”
“When I was a little girl—fifteen years old.”
“Tell me the circumstances.”
“My mother was very poor. She had to take all sorts of work. Sometimes she nursed sick people, and when they died she got them ready for burial. Once two people in our neighborhood died from cholera, and I helped her with the corpses. They made a frightful sight—one of them, at all events. It was the body of a man, naked, and all blue and green. Oh, frightful, frightful! What if I should catch the cholera? I shall catch it, I know I shall! Nothing can save me!”
Her voice rose in a shriek of terror, and Doctor Janet hastened to de-hypnotize her.
The situation was now perfectly clear to him. Evidently the sight of the corpse, “naked, and all blue and green,” had so profoundly affected the impressionable girl as to cause a severe dissociation whereby all memory of the shocking episode had been blotted out of her consciousness, only to be subconsciously remembered in most minute detail.
To bring about a cure, to free her from the obsessing dread of cholera, it was necessary to remove the gruesome subconscious memory image, and Doctor Janet essayed to do this through suggestions given to her when she was again hypnotized.
“You will no longer think of this,” he kept assuring her. “You will forget it, absolutely, permanently.”
Day after day, for weeks, he hypnotized her, and reiterated similar commands. But she continued to be afflicted with her irrational fear, and it finally became certain that her subconscious recollection of the phobia-causing scene of twenty-five years before was too deeply rooted to be destroyed by direct attack. Instead, however, of abandoning the task as hopeless, Doctor Janet, with a shrewdness born of long experience, made a clever change in tactics.
“You insist,” he said to the hypnotized Justine, “that you cannot help seeing in your mind’s eye the corpse of the man who died. Very well, I have no objection to that. But hereafter you must see it decently clothed. So when it next appears to you, you will see it wearing a bright blue-and-green uniform, the uniform of a foreign military officer.”
Happily, this suggestion “took,” and Doctor Janet followed up his advantage by suggesting that the subconscious memory image which she regarded as that of a corpse was, in reality, the image of a living man. This suggestion likewise being successful, he set about getting rid of the idea “cholera,” and its dire implications. Hypnotizing the patient as usual, he demanded:
“What is this ‘cholera’ that troubles you so much? Do you not understand that it is only the name of the fine gentleman in blue and green, whom you see marching up and down? He is a Chinese general, and his name is Cho Le Ra. Bear that well in mind.”
Quite evidently there was nothing to inspire dread in the image of a picturesque Chinese officer, General Cho Le Ra. Little by little, as this artificial conception obtained firmer lodgment in Justine’s subconsciousness, the baneful idea which it was intended to supplant faded away, and with its fading the abnormal fear diminished, until at length it entirely disappeared, greatly to her joy and the warm gratitude of her devoted husband.[39]
Other psychopathologists, following Doctor Janet’s lead, have similarly used this method of substituting one subconscious idea for another. Doctor John E. Donley, a well-known neurologist of Providence, Rhode Island, and one of the few psychopathologists whom the United States has yet produced, was once consulted by a young man of thirty-two, who said to him:
“Doctor Donley, I hear you have been very successful in handling people troubled with foolish notions. I’m bothered with as foolish a notion as any one could possibly imagine. I simply can’t bear to ride in a street-car with an odd number. Even-numbered cars give me no trouble at all, but if an odd-numbered car comes along, I’ve got to let it pass, no matter how great my hurry. My friends laugh at me, but I tell you it’s no laughing matter. The thing has got on my nerves so that it is unbearable.”
“How long have you been suffering in this way?” asked Doctor Donley.
“For years. Just when it began I can’t remember.
“Is it only odd-numbered cars that affect you? How about odd-numbered houses, for instance?”
“No, no,” answered the young man, “it isn’t odd numbers in general. That doesn’t bother me a bit. It’s just when they’re painted on street-cars.”
“H’m,” said Doctor Donley. “Ever been in a street-car accident?”
“Never.”
“Ever seen one?”
“Not that I remember.”
“You are quite sure as to that?”
“Quite.”
“Have you any objection to my hypnotizing you?”
“Not in the least, if it is likely to do me any good.”
In another ten minutes the problem was solved. Doctor Donley from the outset had felt confident that the young man’s phobia must be connected in some way with a street-car accident, and so it proved. Fourteen years earlier, when walking along the street, he had seen a car strike and seriously injure a child who unexpectedly came from behind a wagon. He had noticed at the time that the car bore the number two hundred and thirteen, and he remembered thinking to himself: “There is always bad luck in thirteen.” The sight of the accident gave him a marked emotional shock, which, he said, upset him for several days.
All of this had long since passed from his waking memory, but was distinctly recalled during hypnosis. It was clear to Doctor Donley that the case was one of dissociation, and that the exciting cause of the young man’s unreasonable dread of odd-numbered cars was based on a painfully vivid subconscious memory image of the consciously forgotten tragedy. Also, it was evident that before the dread could be overcome the distressing memory image would have to be eradicated.
To accomplish this, Doctor Donley resorted to the method of substitution, suggesting to the patient, while still under hypnotic influence, that he was quite mistaken in supposing that the street-car had seriously injured the little girl; that, on the contrary, it had scarcely touched her.
The result, after only eight days’ treatment, was effectually to replace the painful memory image with one free from distressing associations. As by magic, the young man shook off his absurd phobia. No longer, when he had to take a car, did he stand on street corners, sometimes for an hour at a time, waiting anxiously for a car with an even number to appear.[40]
Bizarre as these cases must seem, they are actually typical of a widespread malady that causes an amount of suffering only appreciable by the sufferers themselves. In every land there are thousands of men and women afflicted with obsessions equally strange and equally distressing, yet amenable to treatment by the methods of psychopathology.