Mad, Bad, and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors

by Lisa Appignanesi

  The wild ‘subliminal romances’ which Hélène produces in her new full trance state, her journeys to Mars and invention of Martian, are far more adventurous than anything she indulged in before Flournoy’s observations. Then, too, the Hindoo [sic] Prince she meets in her persona as the daughter of an Arab sheikh bears a marked resemblance to him. Revealing this to the reader, Flournoy offers a rare Freudian explanation and uses the German term Abwehr Psychosen or defence psychosis. He is letting the sophisticated ‘scientific’ reader know that Hélène’s move is a hysterical defence against a sexual attraction which is incompatible with her ideas and so expresses itself in this mediumistic fantasy. This is one of the few times in this potboiler of a journey From India to the Planet Mars, more Jules Verne than scientific investigation, when Flournoy has recourse to a piece of psychological terminology in another language. He is, of course, tactfully protecting Hélène’s honour, defending her from herself, since she will read the book. He is also, one suspects, protecting his own reputation.

  Flournoy’s book became a bestseller in both Europe and America, going into three editions in three months and far outstripping in sales Freud’s contemporaneous Interpretation of Dreams. William James hailed the book as the decisive step in ‘converting psychical research into a respectable science’. Spiritualists, however, were angry: Flournoy had exposed Hélène Smith’s visions and trance journeys as fabrications; no theories of a creative subliminal consciousness at work could sugar the scientific pill which disproved their beliefs–not even Flournoy’s allowance for the existence of telepathic transmission.

  Hélène was equally distressed. Like many a biographee, she felt both exposed and traduced. She may have allowed Flournoy to write her story, may have collaborated with Flournoy’s suggestions, but the fame it brought her radically changed her life. She insisted that she really was now Hélène Smith and could have no other identity, despite the mockery of her talents the book provoked. Flournoy had traced each of her great reincarnations back to her childhood or reading. Her visions, her spiritist travels, had been reduced to symptoms, a ‘maladaptation of the organism, physical and mental, to the hard conditions of the environment’ of her childhood. Hélène now stopped Flournoy from coming to her séances. She developed the Martian cycle, which had through Flournoy brought the attention of such famous linguists as Roman Jakobson to study her speaking in tongues, into new Iranian and lunar cycles or mediumistic journeys. She also demanded royalties from the book.

  Flournoy eventually paid her half of the earnings and gave the rest to the Archives de Psychologie, the journal he established in 1901 with his cousin Edouard Claparède. Meanwhile, an American benefactress appeared, to look after Hélène. Psychological investigation apart, Flournoy’s book had also presented a portrait of the artist as medium, a woman’s version of growing up other and talented when there were so few vocations to choose from. Now the medium gave up mediumship to devote herself to painting. Even so, she long continued to feel that Flournoy was spying on her, that she somehow had to escape his grip and that of an entourage who ‘tormented and agitated her’. She remained unmarried, waiting for the ‘fiancé of her soul’ until her death in 1927. As for Flournoy, the scientist who had stepped in to become her trance lover, the Prince Sivrouka, he never again found as stimulating a subject. Hélène Smith had helped to create the idea of the ‘subliminal imagination’ for which he is remembered.

  Boston’s Miss Beauchamp and Morton Prince (1854–1929)

  The very remarkable case of Miss Beauchamp, who in treatment developed three separate and competing alters, unfurled itself between 1898 and 1904 for Morton Prince, Professor of Diseases of the Nervous System at Tufts College Medical School and Boston City Hospital. Prince came from a prominent family, numbered William James at Harvard amongst his friends and colleagues, as well as that other pioneer of American psychology, G. Stanley Hall, the man responsible for Freud and Jung’s visit to America. After imbibing the influence of Charcot in Paris, Prince returned to Boston to become one of the new discipline’s driving forces. A teacher as well as a physician, he was also editor from 1906 of the Journal of Abnormal Psychology. William James corresponded with him about the intriguing Miss Beauchamp and relished the mystery of the ‘lovely’ Sally, who helped to make multiple personality so popular a form of being woman that it eventually travelled to a Broadway Theatre. Long after Prince would have preferred to forget her, Miss Beauchamp’s potent influence also played its way through the psy professions, appearing, for example, in Cambridge psychology exams in the 1920s.

  Prince recorded Miss Beauchamp’s six-year-long treatment in over 560 pages complete with samples of writing in her personality as Sally, a feisty, outspoken, greedy and desiring character quite unlike the reticent and responsible student Miss Beauchamp, who had sought Prince’s help for her troubles. In his opening pages Prince draws attention to Miss Beauchamp as ‘an example in actual life of the imaginative creation of Stevenson’, even though her split, unlike Jekyll and Hyde’s, was along ‘temperamental’ and not ‘ethical lines of cleavage’. The ensuing story makes exciting reading, a Gothic romance in which the Prince wakes the sleeping beauty who had gone into a trance of forgetfulness on a fatal and stormy evening in 1893.

  Clara Norton Fowler, the real name of the patient Prince calls Miss Beauchamp, had a small but appreciative social circle in Boston. She came to see Prince at the age of twenty-three with ‘headaches, insomnia, bodily pains, persistent fatigue and poor nutrition’. She was incapable of working, or indeed of exercise. Her ‘bookish’ nature, however, made her insist on pursuing her studies with what Prince saw as an excessive conscientiousness. He reports his case notes of the time as reading: ‘Is a pronounced neurasthenic of extreme type; has never been able to pursue steadily an occupation in consequence. Tried three times to do professional nursing and broke down. Is now studying at——College; ambitious, good student; does good work, but always ill; always suffering…Is very nervous and different parts of body in constant motion.’

  Referred to as both a hysteric and a neurasthenic, Miss Beauchamp echoes the syncopation between the terms that was prevalent at the time. She also suffered from aboulia–an inhibition of the will which prevented her from doing what she wanted to do, perhaps something as insignificant as picking an object up from the table or telling her doctor why she had come. Reticent, highly suggestible, often lost in ‘abstraction’, her family history was fertile ‘psychopathic soil’: on the paternal side there was ‘violence of temper’. The mother, who died when her daughter was thirteen, ‘exhibited a great dislike’ for the nervous, impressionable, oversensitive child Miss Beauchamp was, one prone to headaches, nightmares and sleepwalking, as well as spontaneous trances and daydreams so intense she confused them with the real.

  In the course of her long treatment, Miss Beauchamp splits into three separate entities, apart from her waking self. Prince is haunted by the fact that he has somehow called Miss Beauchamp’s alters into being through hypnosis. The length of her cure may have been in part propelled by his desire to prove that her dissociation really is the result of emotional trauma and weak nerves.

  Prince designates these dissociated personalities as Miss Beauchamp’s earliest hypnotized self (BII); BIII, who comes into being in deep hypnosis, and is at first ‘Chris’ before she dubs herself in her obstreperous and rebellious way, Sally; and BIV, who appears after a year and is a rather limited self, whom Sally names ‘the idiot’. Prince organizes his patient’s personalities into types which reflect the prevailing vision of woman. In her waking state, Miss Beauchamp is the Saint–a woman who sees ‘selfishness, impatience, rudeness, uncharitableness, a failure to tell the truth or a suppression of half the truth’ as sins whose wickedness can be overcome by ’fasting, vigils and prayer’.

  Sally is the Devil, a mischievous imp of the perverse whom Prince in fact finds irresistible without quite admitting it. He portrays himself and Sally flirting with each other. She suggests
marriage, breaks all conventions to smoke like Prince, and constantly derides Miss Beauchamp, whom she plagues with her irresponsibility, making her miss appointments or turning up as an outspoken tomboy. Sally is a ‘co-consciousness’. She knows everything about Miss Beauchamp; but this is not true the other way round, since Sally is in a sense her ‘subconscious’: she has been around from the beginning, as she reveals in the autobiography Prince has her write. She has all the wilful boyishness, outspoken desire to be an adventurous male, and the naughty flirtatiousness of girls before they are forced into the sexual mould and the long skirts of womanhood.

  Prince designates Miss Beauchamp’s third alter (BIV) as the Woman, a vividly misogynistic bit of naming, since this personality has all the ‘frailties of temper, self-concentration, ambition and self-interest’ of the ordinary ‘realist’. In Prince’s description, this ‘Woman’ is a walking parody of the New Woman who thinks she is ‘capable of running the world’.

  Given his social circle, Prince was well acquainted with the burgeoning women’s movement. The American Woman Suffrage Association had, after all, had its home in Boston since 1868. Women’s clubs–over 250 of them around the country by the turn of the century–were spreading, as was agitation for the vote, for property and divorce rights and university education. The first PhD awarded to an American woman came from Prince’s own Boston University. In the dissociation of Miss Beauchamp, we can see some of the tugs and tensions women internalized during this period of historical transformation as they struggled with old dissatisfactions, new challenges and male hostility. And in Prince’s description of the several personalities of Miss Beauchamp, male fears about the strength and freedoms of the new woman are equally evident.

  Yet Prince also strives for the ‘objectivity’ of the medical gaze. In summing up the ‘health’ of Miss Beauchamp’s personalities, it is clear that the first Miss Beauchamp, the Saint, is the worst off. The Woman is far stronger and capable of greater exertion, while the pre-pubescent Sally, who has yet to confront the problems that sexuality and being gendered woman will bring, ‘does not know what illness means’.

  Prince’s reflections on the nature of gender and sexuality are part of the discussion of bisexuality then being held in progressive circles in both Europe and America. Weininger, Freud, Stanley Hall–all in different ways saw bisexuality as fundamental to the human. Prince was prepared to reject any notion of ‘natural’ and fixed sexual identities and imagined a spectrum of sexuality ranging from ‘strong, vigorous masculine characters’ through ‘men with female personalities’ and ‘masculine females’ to ‘strongly marked feminine personalities’. Education and environment, he wrote, shaped the ‘tastes and habits of thought and manners’ of the child, and if the sexes were brought up differently, each could have the ‘tastes and manners of the other sex’. This culturalist view of gender and sexual behaviour is, however, underpinned by an understanding of homosexual orientation as being grounded in a nervous disposition: all healthy beings will turn to the opposite sex once puberty is scaled.

  Prince wants to have it both ways: gender is a question both of biology and of social mores, but the latter will suppress homosexuality in the person of healthy mind and body. Adolescent Sally has permission to flirt with boyish behaviour and all kinds of love: she offers in a letter to marry Prince and also to run off with the mysterious William Jones, the dark hero of this romance. Miss Beauchamp’s possibilities are far more constrained.

  Like some psychic detective endowed with six years of stamina, Prince goes in search of the ‘real’ Miss Beauchamp. He tracks his patient back to the painful moment when the initial dissociation took place. Moving in trance between her alters, Miss B confuses Prince with the elusive William Jones who tries to embrace her and/or hypnotize her. He begins to see that the real Miss B is not the ‘Saint’ but the ‘Woman’, who split off in a frightening encounter with Jones on a stormy evening in June 1893 and has ever since been ‘asleep’. Jones, an idealized older man who had taken care of Miss Beauchamp since her mother’s death, unexpectedly came to visit her at the hospital where she was training as a nurse. Seeing a ladder, he climbed up to her room. Illuminated by lightning, his head terrified an unsuspecting Miss Beauchamp, who promptly forgot the event by dissociating her ‘real’ self from it and slipping into her saintly aspect. Retrograde amnesia, says Prince, had moved this traumatic encounter into oblivion. All Miss Beauchamp’s ills, he gradually confirms by evoking the scene with each of her alters, can be traced back here.

  It is difficult not to give this scene a Freudian, sexual reading: even the weather is accommodating with its stormy Wuthering Heights overtones, let alone the window nook at which the dramatic head appears. A similar storm attended Henry James’s Isabel Archer when the aptly named Caspar Goodwood kissed her a little too forcefully, so that she, too, rushed into rather more saintly pursuits. The real Miss Beauchamp (BIV) has forgotten that the events of that fateful night didn’t stop with her refusing to see Jones and going into the ward where a child was crying. In fact, as Prince induces her to remember, she went down to see Jones: they stood together outside with the lightning flashing across his face, and she was frightened because he was so nervous that he seemed perfectly mad. It is this shock which led to Miss Beauchamp/the Saint, taking over. BIV’s memory then ceased for the next six years. What had brought everything back to her on that particular day was that in the university library a messenger had given her a letter from Jones which was couched in the same language as he had used during the encounter that literally blew her mind apart.

  Prince’s account of the scene is hardly explicit. Nor does Miss Beauchamp seem to recount enough of its terror for it to constitute the trauma, the external violence, Prince needs for his hypothesis of dissociation. Perhaps it is the very holes in the construction of the scene which, years later in the 1920s, made him reconsider the whole case in a Freudian perspective and ascribe a sexual conflict to Miss Beauchamp.

  In the second part of his book, Prince argues that a ‘normal’ personality is one which can adjust itself ‘physiologically’ to its environment as well as psychologically. So he begins the difficult business of reintegrating Miss Beauchamp into the ‘Woman’ that ‘she was intended by nature to be’. This entails much hypnosis, automatic writing and play of alters, and at the end eradicating the rebellious Sally, making her ‘subconscious’. It also means merging the saintly, ‘emotional idealism’ of the patient who had first approached Prince, with the strength of the ‘Woman’, who must give up her ‘bad temper and wilful self-determination’. Only thus will the transformation into the real Miss Beauchamp be complete: the woman who remembers all her past, is physically and mentally strong, and resists hypnosis. This is the woman who can blithely say in 1904, following six years of the remarkable play of alters: ‘After all, it is always myself.’

  It was this ‘myself’, Clara Norton Fowler, who in 1912, after having completed three semesters at Radcliffe, ended up marrying the Boston psychotherapist Dr George A. Waterman, a well known colleague of Morton Prince. In the history of the mind doctors, star patients in one way or another often end up staying in the profession.

  Meanwhile, for several years following publication of her case, Morton Prince’s Miss Beauchamp led to a wave of multiples. But Freud’s rising importance in America following his trip there in 1909, together with the gradual disappearance of hypnosis from the treatment agenda, meant that multiple personality steadily vanished from the diagnostic spectrum. Ian Hacking in his important study of the memory politics that shaped the twentieth century, Rewriting the Soul, shows how by 1909 Prince himself sniffed at his own diagnosis. Janet, too, in his compendious 1919 Psychological Healing gives it only a single page and relegates it to the early days of pathological psychology. Diagnoses had changed. One might also say that women had woken up into a new world and a new range of symptoms. The stubborn, mischievous Sally with her masculine dreams had driven ambulances in the war and was no longer
so easily to be put to sleep.

  After this, if a young woman ‘chose’ mediumistic trance or hearing voices as a form of expression or of manifesting symptoms, psychologists would be far quicker to diagnose a sexual malaise. G. Stanley Hall, a student of William James and one of America’s great founding psychologists, particularly in the area of child development, in 1918 in his article ‘A Medium in the Bud’ noted how a young woman in an ‘incipient stage’ of mediumship during which she had visited Mars, loved the abandon and the male masquerade that being a medium permitted her. Inhibitions were thrown to the wind. The ‘most secret things in the soul…which ordinary social conventions would make impossible’ could here be expressed: ‘there is a sudden freedom from responsibility and sensitive, shrinking, repressed natures, who would above all things dread to shock or violate convention in phrase or manner, are freed from the necessity of even being agreeable or primly proper which must often become irksome, hedged about as they are by so many senseless taboos’.

  Once normal experience gave women the possibility of moving beyond senseless taboos, states of sleep receded. And as the mind doctors focused in on the sexuality of the patient, doublings, multiples and dissociation gave way to a new set of symptoms and diagnoses.

  It is worth noting that neither Janet’s somnambules nor Miss Beauchamp seem to have relayed a history of child abuse, which was underscored as a regular and necessary triggering event for patients who developed multiple personality disorder during the high point of the malady and its diagnosis in the 1980s and 1990s. What is common between the two historic moments of ‘alternating’ personalities is that these talking and walking other selves were most often consolidated, and sometimes only ever fully emerged at all, with induced deep hypnosis. It seems to be the very relationship between doctor and patient which produces the florid aspect of these alters: the patient pleases the doctor by producing ‘symptoms’ or ‘states’ which the doctor finds interesting, while the doctor alleviates the patient’s symptoms (sometimes of his own making) and induces ‘betterment’ by the very force of his interest.