Psycho-physiological phenomena

— The newspaper Siècle, of July 4, 1861, cites the following fact, according to the newspaper of Le Havre:

"A man has just died in the asylum, victim of one of the most singular mental aberrations. He was a soldier, named Pierre Valin, and had been wounded in the head at the battle of Solferino. Although the wound was completely cicatrized, from that time on he believed himself to be dead.

"When he was asked for news of his health, he would answer: "Do you wish to know how Pierre Valin is doing? Poor fellow! He was killed by a shot in the head at Solferino. What you see here is not Valin; it is a machine they made in his likeness, but very badly made. You ought to ask them to make another."

"In speaking of himself, he never said I or me, but this one. He frequently fell into a complete state of immobility and insensibility, which lasted several days. Applied against this affliction, the poultices and blistering plasters never produced the least sign of pain. Many times they explored the sensibility of this man's skin, pinching his arms and legs, without his manifesting the slightest suffering.

"To make sure that he was not dissembling, the doctor had him pricked on the back, while they conversed with him. The patient perceived nothing. Many times, Pierre Valin refused to eat, saying that this was not necessary; that, moreover, this had no belly, etc.

"The fact, furthermore, is not the only one of its kind. Another soldier, likewise wounded in the head, always spoke in the third person and in the feminine. He would exclaim: "Ah! how she suffers! She is very thirsty, etc." At first they made him perceive the error, and he agreed, quite surprised, although he continued to relapse into the same error, so much so that in the last times of his life he expressed himself only in that way.

"A zouave, also as a result of a head wound, notwithstanding his being perfectly cured, had lost the memory of nouns. As a drill sergeant, although he knew very well the names of the soldiers of his squadron, he designated them only by these words: "The big dark one, the little brown one, etc." To give commands, he made use of periphrases, when it was a matter of designating the rifle or the saber, etc. They were forced to send him home.

"The last years of the celebrated physician Baudelocque n offered the example of an analogous lesion, but less marked. He remembered very well what he had done when he enjoyed health; he recognized by voice those who came to see him, although stricken with blindness; but he had not the slightest consciousness of his existence. If he were asked, for example: How is your head? he would answer: "I have no head." If he were asked for his arm to take his pulse, he would answer that he did not know where it was. One day he himself wished to feel the pulse; they placed his right hand on his left wrist; then he asked whether it was really his own hand that he felt, after which he judged himself very healthy from the pulsation."

— At every step physiology offers us phenomena that seem anomalies and before which it remains mute. Why is this? We have said it before, and it would never be too much to repeat it: it is because it claims to refer everything to the material element, without taking the least account of the spiritual element. As long as it persists in that restrictive path, it will be powerless to resolve the thousand and one problems that arise at every instant beneath its scalpel, as though to say to it: "You see clearly that there exists something beyond matter; only, with matter, you cannot explain everything." And here we speak not solely of certain bizarre phenomena, which might catch it unprepared, but of the most ordinary effects. Has it at least given account of dreams? We do not even speak of real dreams, those that are real perceptions of absent things, present or future, but simply of fantastic dreams or of recollections. Does physiology explain how those images so clear and so distinct, which sometimes appear to us, are produced? What is the magic mirror that thus preserves the image of things? In natural somnambulism, which no one contests, does it explain whence comes that strange faculty of seeing without the aid of the eyes? Not of seeing vaguely, but in the smallest details, to the point of being able to carry out with precision and regularity tasks that, in the normal state, would require keen vision? There exists, then, in us, something that sees independently of the eyes. In that state, not only does the sensitive act, but he thinks, calculates, combines, foresees, and gives himself to works of intelligence of which he is incapable in the waking state, and of which he retains not the least remembrance. There is, therefore, something that thinks and that does not depend on matter. What is that something? Here it stops short. Yet such facts are not rare. More than one scholar will go to the antipodes to see and calculate an eclipse, while he will not go to his neighbor's house to observe a phenomenon of the soul. Very numerous are the natural and spontaneous facts that prove the independent action of an intelligent principle, but this action stands out still more evidently in magnetic and Spiritist phenomena, in which the isolation of that principle is produced, so to speak, at will. Let us return to our subject. We related a similar fact in the Review of June 1861, with regard to the evocation of the Marquis de Saint-Paul. In his last moments he always said: "He is thirsty; he must be given drink. He is cold; he must be warmed. He feels pain in such a place, etc." But when they said to him: But it is you who are thirsty, he answered: No, it is he. "It is because the thinking self is in the Spirit, and not in the body. Already in part detached, the Spirit regarded his body as another individuality which, properly speaking, was not himself. It was, then, to his body, to that other individual, that drink had to be given, and not to himself the Spirit. Thus, when in the evocation this question was put to him: Why did you always speak in the third person? he answered: "Because, as I told you, I was seeing and distinctly feeling the differences that exist between the physical and the moral. These differences, linked together by the fluid of life, become very distinct to the eyes of the clairvoyant dying. A similar cause must have produced the effect noted in the soldiers to whom we referred. Perhaps they will say that the wound brought on a kind of madness; but the Marquis de Saint-Paul had received no wound; he had his reasoning in a perfect state, of which we are certain, for we were informed of the case by his sister, a member of the Society. What was produced in him in a spontaneous manner can perfectly well, in others, have been brought on by an accidental cause. Moreover, all magnetizers know that it is very common for somnambulists to speak in the third person, still making the distinction between the personality of their soul, or Spirit, and the body.

In the normal state the two individualities merge, and their perfect assimilation is necessary to the harmony of the acts of life. But the intelligent principle is like those gases, which adhere to certain solid bodies only by an ephemeral cohesion, escaping at the first breath. There is always a tendency to free itself from its corporeal burden, as soon as the force that maintains the equilibrium ceases to act, from whatever cause. Only the harmonic activity of the organs maintains the complete intimate union of the soul and the body; but, at the slightest suspension of that activity, the soul takes flight. This is what happens in sleep, in near-sleep, in the mere torpor of the senses, in catalepsy, in lethargy, in natural or magnetic somnambulism, in ecstasy, in what is called waking dream, or second sight, in the inspirations of genius, and in all the great tensions of the Spirit, which often render the body insensible. It is, finally, what may occur as a consequence of certain pathological states. A number of moral phenomena have no other cause than the emancipation of the soul. Medicine does indeed admit the influence of moral causes, but it does not accept the moral element as an active principle. Hence it confounds these phenomena with organic madness, which is why it applies to them a purely physical treatment that, very often, brings on true madness, where there was only the appearance of it. Among the facts cited, there is one that seems very strange: it is that of the soldier who spoke in the third person of the feminine. As we have said, the primitive element of the phenomenon is the distinction of the two personalities as a consequence of the detachment of the Spirit. But there is another cause, revealed by Spiritism, and which must be taken into consideration, inasmuch as it can give the ideas a particular character: it is the vague remembrance of previous existences which, in the state of emancipation of the soul, can awaken and permit a retrospective glance upon some points of the past. In such conditions the detachment of the soul is never complete, and the ideas, suffering from the debility of the organs, cannot be very lucid, for they are not entirely so even in the first moments following death. Let us suppose that the man of whom we speak was a woman in his preceding incarnation: the idea he might have retained could be confounded with that of his present state. Might one not find in this fact the first cause of the fixed idea of certain insane persons who believe themselves to be kings? If they were so in another existence, there may remain in them a remembrance that gives them the illusion. This is no more than a supposition, but, for neophytes in Spiritism, it is not devoid of verisimilitude. It will be said that, if such a cause is possible in this case, it could not apply to those who believe themselves to be wolves or pigs, since it is known that man was never an animal. That is true; but man may have been in an abject condition that obliged him to live among filthy or savage animals. There perhaps lies the source of this illusion, which might well, in some, have been imposed upon them as a punishment for the acts of their present life. When facts of the nature of those we are speaking of present themselves; if, instead of systematically assimilating them to purely corporeal maladies, we attentively followed all their phases, with the aid of the data furnished by Spiritist observations, we would recognize without difficulty the double cause we have pointed out to them, and we would understand that it is not with douches, cauterizations, and bloodlettings that they can be remedied. The case of Dr. Baudelocque finds its explanation likewise in analogous causes. The article says that he had not the slightest consciousness of his existence. This is an error, because he did not believe himself dead; he only had no consciousness of his corporeal existence. If he found himself in a state more or less similar to that of certain Spirits who, in the first times after death, do not believe themselves to be dead and take their body for that of another, the perturbation in which they find themselves does not permit them to give account of the situation. What happens with certain disincarnates can happen with certain incarnates. It is thus that Dr. Baudelocque could abstract himself from his body and say that he no longer had a head, because, indeed, his Spirit no longer possessed a carnal head. Spiritist observations offer numerous examples of this kind, thus casting an entirely new light upon an infinite variety of phenomena hitherto unexplained, and inexplicable without the bases furnished by Spiritism. There would remain to examine the case of the zouave who had lost the memory of nouns. But this can be explained only by considerations of an entirely different order, which would belong to the domain of organic physiology. The developments it entails oblige us to devote to it a special article, which we shall publish shortly.

[1] [Jean-Louis Baudelocque (November 30, 1745 at Heilly in Picardy — May 2, 1810 in Paris) was a French gynecologist and professor of obstetrics, and the most famous gynecologist of his time. Father of obstetrics and author of The Art of Childbirth, he made obstetrics a scientific discipline.]