Real Ghost Stories | Page 9

For when the Conscious Personality is hopeless,
diseased, or demoralised the Unconscious Personality can be employed
to renovate and restore the patient, and then when its work is done it
can become unconscious once more and practically cease to exist.
Chapter II.
Louis V. and His Two Souls.
There is at present[2] a patient in France whose case is so extraordinary
that I cannot do better than transcribe the report of it here, especially
because it tends to show not only that we have two personalities, but
that each may use by preference a separate lobe of the brain. The
Conscious Personality occupies the left and controls the right hand, the
Unconscious the right side of the head and controls the left hand. It also
brings to light a very curious, not to say appalling, fact, viz., the
immense moral difference there may be between the Conscious and the
Unconscious Personalities. In the American case Bourne was a
character practically identical with Brown. In this French case the
character of each self is entirely different. What makes the case still
more interesting is that, besides the two personalities which we all
seem to possess, this patient had an arrested personality, which was
only fourteen years old when the age of his body was over forty. Here
is the report, however, make of it what you will.
[2] 1891.
"Louis V. began life (in 1863) as the neglected child of a turbulent
mother. He was sent to a reformatory at ten years of age, and there
showed himself, as he has always done when his organization had
given him a chance, quiet, well-behaved, and obedient. Then at

fourteen years old he had a great fright from a viper--a fright which
threw him off his balance, and started the series of psychical
oscillations on which he has been tossed ever since. At first the
symptoms were only physical, epilepsy and hysterical paralysis of the
legs; and at the asylum of Bonneval, whither he was next sent, he
worked at tailoring steadily for a couple of months. Then suddenly he
had a hystero-epileptic attack--fifty hours of convulsions and
ecstasy--and when he awoke from it he was no longer paralysed, no
longer acquainted with tailoring, and no longer virtuous. His memory
was set back, so to say, to the moment of the viper's appearance, and he
could remember nothing since. His character had become violent,
greedy, quarrelsome, and his tastes were radically changed. For
instance, though he had before the attack been a total abstainer, he now
not only drank his own wine, but stole the wine of the other patients.
He escaped from Bonneval, and after a few turbulent years, tracked by
his occasional relapses into hospital or madhouse, he turned up once
more at the Rochefort asylum in the character of a private of marines,
convicted of theft, but considered to be of unsound mind. And at
Rochefort and La Rochelle, by great good fortune, he fell into the
hands of three physicians--Professors Bourru and Burot, and Dr.
Mabille--able and willing to continue and extend the observations
which Dr. Camuset at Bonneval, and Dr. Jules Voisin at Bicetre, had
already made on this most precious of mauvais sujets at earlier points
in his chequered career.
"He is now no longer at Rochefort, and Dr. Burot informs me that his
health has much improved, and that his peculiarities have in great part
disappeared. I must, however, for clearness sake, use the present tense
in briefly describing his condition at the time when the long series of
experiments were made.
"The state into which he has gravitated is a very unpleasing one. There
is paralysis and insensibility of the right side, and, as is often the case
in right hemiplegia, the speech is indistinct and difficult. Nevertheless
he is constantly haranguing any one who will listen to him, abusing his
physicians, or preaching--with a monkey-like impudence rather than
with reasoned clearness--radicalism in politics and atheism in religion.

He makes bad jokes, and if any one pleases him he endeavours to
caress him. He remembers recent events during his residence at
Rochefort asylum, but only two scraps of his life before that date,
namely, his vicious period at Bonneval and a part of his stay at Bicetre.
"Except this strange fragmentary memory, there is nothing very
unusual in this condition, and in many asylums no experiments on it
would have been attempted. Fortunately the physicians at Rochefort
were familiar with the efficacy of the contact of metals in provoking
transfer of hysterical hemiplegia from one side to the other. They tried
various metals in turn on Louis V. Lead, silver, and zinc had no effect.
Copper produced a slight return of sensibility in the paralysed arm, but
steel applied to the right arm transferred the whole insensibility