observation. After three months, this interesting child was brought to me again for treatment, and I easily succeeded in putting her into a placid and trustful sleep in which the redemptory suggestions were given without interruption and with eventual success.

The difficulty of discriminating, in such a case as Susie's, between an ill-wishing spiritual intruder and a separate personality of the individual under treatment, is obvious. No room for doubt exists in the case of Natalie D., another patient who passes daily from one personality to another without appreciable cause. In consequence of a nervous shock received in her eighth year, during convalescence from fever, the mind of Natalie D. remained a child's mind while she gradually developed into physical womanhood in the thirty years that followed. In one personality she repeats aloud the petitions of the Prayer-Book continuously for six hours, being constantly interrupted by the other personality whom she styles Miss D. and whom she peremptorily orders out of her presence with emphatic gestures. In one personality, she is affectionate, confiding, and tractable; in the other, she is cunning, suspicious, and difficult to control. In one personality, this child-woman loves me; in the other, she fears me. Her mother believes her to be possessed. The psychology

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of this case of alternating personality is, however, clear.

Persons under the sway of delusions, recognizing them as such and eagerly desirous of escape, may, in hypnosis, succumb to the control of an opposing fragment which, without knowledge of the primary consciousness, puts up a stiff fight against dispossession, sometimes awakening the subject as the destructive suggestions are given.

The most ordinary expression of alternating personality is manifested by those persons who treat a friend most cordially one day, and who, without the slightest provocation for change of attitude, hardly accord recognition on another. There is psychological reason for believing that they do not at the time really know the apparently slighted friends. Indeed, alternations of personality are much more commonly met with than is generally realized, and explain actions and abnormal mental conditions otherwise incomprehensible. Two young women came to me in the spring to be cured of alcoholic intemperance. Though only in the thirties, both had served a ten years' apprenticeship to excessive indulgence, and both had seriously injured the brain. To each was given in a state of perfect suggestibility the uncompromising suggestion that whisky thereafter would be a deadly poison and its ingestion would be followed by vomiting

and serious illness. As a rule, women who drink are more unreasonable than men, and more susceptible to the dictation of alternating phases. Both these young women, under the pressure of moral dejection, played the Jekyl and Hyde act; both became dipsomaniacal at the bidding of a rebellious self-fraction, and both paid the penalty of the outraged suggestion, through the active protest of an all-powerful and otherwise cohering personality. One reported at my office in a state of collapse, and was interned and cared for by my nurse. The other, after drinking a half-pint of whisky, was similarly affected at home, with the addition of lancinating pains over her whole body. She thought she was at death's door, sent for me, and was surprised to learn that she could not trifle with a suggestion accepted by her higher self without disastrous consequences.

A lady who was referred to me by Dr. Frank E. Miller, the laryngologist, received the suggestion that her arm would refuse to obey any impulse to lift to her mouth a glass of spirits or wine. This was silently opposed by some objecting fragment of her personality, but ineffectually; for shortly after, at a dinner with a friend at the Waldorf, she ordered, in an attitude of perversity, the usual bottle of champagne. But when it was served she found herself unable

to raise her glass from the table. This was certainly an effectual protest of the higher self, which temporarily paralyzed her arm.

Such protests on the part of a nature regenerated by suggestive treatment are the saving clause where there is inherent tendency to personality disintegration. They prove that when the subliminal is aroused, it dominates the flesh or natural life.

The saddest page in the history of this psychological disease is that which records the facts of many divorces and marital separations. Changes of personality, sudden or progressive, may account for some of the changes of affection in married partners so frequent in this day; and their proximate cause is usually overwork or mental strain with its attendant auto-intoxications. When a husband, who has always been most devoted, suddenly assails his astonished wife with the declaration that he has ceased to love her and will live with her no longer, defending his conduct with some flimsy excusethere being no other woman in the case-his action is only explicable as constrained by an alternating aspect which comes mysteriously to the front and raises the standard of a senseless revolution in a defenseless brain.

Such abnormal action is not the work of the true subliminal self, but rather of a co-existing

or co-conscious split-off phase or dissociated element of the normal personality, temporarily in control for the sinister purpose of degrading the earth-life. Why the discerning and potent subliminal ignores the pranks of these fragmentary psychic expressions until wakened to action by dynamic suggestions is undiscoverable. In the light of this psychology, every man may be his own devil.