On Double Consciousness Author:Alfred Binet Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: RELATIONS BETWEEN THE TWO CONSCIOUSNESSES OE HYSTERICAL INDIVIDUALS. Whenever we chance to discover a new fact, we seldom describe it correctly. As a rule, we... more » regard it as simpler than in reality it is. The observers who first investigated double consciousness in hysterical persons occupied themselves particularly with putting in a clear light the phenomenon of the separation of the two consciousnesses; this was, in fact, the first thing to be done. But the study of the numerous relations existing between these separate consciousnesses was almost entirely neglected. It is our purpose, in this paper, to recapitulate and present, in an abridged . form, the results of investigation on this topic; and I am convinced that some day it will furnish the clue to a great number of phenomena of mental alienation. Inward voices supposed to be heard by demented individuals, their fixed and impulsive ideas, the delirium of possessed persons, are very probably phenomena produced by the doubling of consciousness, and by the influences that one of the consciousnesses exerts upon the other. For the time being we shall remain true to the methods that we have followed in our previous study. We shall eliminate all complex and ill-defined observations and adhere, by preference, to small, simple,and precise experiments, easy of repetition, which, without teaching us the phenomena in their total development, at least yield an imperative proof of their reality, which certainly must be regarded as a decided advantage. Automatic writing furnishes the first illustration of the relations between the two consciousnesses. It is a most important phenomenon and is worth the trouble of being carefully studied. An examination of the .scientific collections of England and America shows that in those countri...« less