DOUBLE PERSONALITY

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXII, Issue 36, 26 January 1932, Page 7

DOUBLE PERSONALITY

STRANGE SYDNEY CASE. U.S. GIRL’S THREE LIVES. To sit down at table hungry, take knife and fork in hand, and then to find the meal over and the plates empty, without any knowledge of having eaten anything, is the experience of a man being treated by a Sydney psychiatrist for disintegrated or “double” personality. According to the specialist, the man has two distinct personalities, which take control of him in turns, and sometimes ioss of memory occurs during the presence of the secondary personality The man will go to bed Mr. Al and wake the next morning Mr. A2. The first personality is quiet, scholarly, and timid; the second rowdy, impulsive, and pugnacious. He does things as A2 which he would never dream of doing as Al. To his friends ho just appears a little eccentric and changeable. Lately he invited three budding professional prize-fighters to come and live with him. to make him “tough.” Al had the awkward task of explaining it was a mistake. His case was not unique, said the psychiatrist. In a non-pathological way double personalities were common. Ln fact, there was some doubt whether there was such a thing as a “single” one. He quoted Professor E. T. Reichert, of Pennsylvania University, who studied the remarkable case or Miss Beauchamp, a girl who lived three separate lives. According to the professor: “Personality is a manifestation of an extremely complex aggregate of inter-associated and interacting mental states ... a combination that is so plastic that one or more of the components may become suppressed or exaggerated, and thus, transiently or permanently, impart to the individual mental characteristics that are more or less at variance with their recognised identity.”