Psychic-Physiological Phenomena People who speak
about themselves in
the third person
The following fact was reported in the periodical Le Siécle, on July 4th,
1861 according to the Havre newspaper:
“A male victim of an incredible mental anomaly has just passed away
at the hospice. He was a soldier by the name of Pierre Valin who
was wounded in the head during the battle of Solferino. His injury
was completely healed but since the event he considered himself dead.
When asked about his health he used to say: ‘You want to know how
Pierre Valin is doing? Poor man! He died from a bullet injury in the
head in Solferino. What you see here is not Valin, it is a machine
that resembles him but a not very good copy. You should ask to have
it done again and better.’ Every time he spoke of himself he would say
him instead of me. He frequently fell prostrated, completely motionless
and insensitive and that could last days. He was then treated with mustard filled gauze and blistering agents that never had any painful
reaction. He often had his arms and legs pinched but he never manifested
any pain. To make sure that he was not pretending the doctor
used to poke him on the back while talking to him; he felt nothing.
On several occasions he refused to eat saying that it was unnecessary,
that he had no bowels, etc.”
However this is not the only case of that kind. Another soldier that
was also injured in the head spoke in the third person and using
the feminine form. He used to say: ‘Ah! She suffers a lot! She is very
thirsty! etc.’ In the beginning he was led to see the mistakes which he
acknowledged with surprise but later he would go back and repeat
it so much so that towards the end of his life he only spoke in that
manner.”
“In the same way and after a head injury a Zouave that was perfectly
cured lost his memory of nouns. A Drill sergeant who knew very
well the names of the soldiers in his battalion but since the event he
used to call them as: The large brown haired, the little carrot, etc. He
began using periphrases to command the troops just to designate the
musket, the sword, etc. They had to send him home.”
“The final years of the renowned doctor Baudelocque also offered
an example of similar lesion but less characteristic, though. He
remembered well what he had done during his healthy life. He recognized
those who came to visit him by their voices since he had become
blind, but he had no awareness of his current situation. For example,
when asked: ‘How is your head?’ he would respond: ‘I have no head.’
If asked to extend his arm to have his pulse checked he would respond
that he did not know where his arm was. One day he wanted to feel
his pulse himself hence he was helped and his right hand was placed on his left wrist. He then asked if that was really him who was feeling
the pulse. Yet, he counted the beats correctly.”
Physiology reports phenomena that seem abnormal and that science remains
quiet about them in every step of the way. Why so? We have already
said that and it is never too much to repeat: they try to attribute everything
to the material element, with no account to the spiritual element.
As long as it remains in that restrictive path, science will remain powerless
to resolve thousands of issues that show up all the time under its scalpel,
as if saying: “As you see there is something else beyond matter since one
cannot explain everything with matter alone.”
And here we are not speaking of some bizarre phenomena only, that
could find science unprepared, but we are speaking about the most common
effects. For example, what about dreams? We don’t speak about the
real dreams, those that are real perceptions of distant things, present or
future, but simply about the fantastic dreams, or memories. Can that
science explain how those clear and accurate images that we sometimes
see are produced? What is that magic mirror that somehow keeps the image
of things? In natural somnambulism that nobody denies, how does
it explain the strange ability of seeing without the help of the eyes? And
that is not vaguely, but with minor details, to the point of a somnambulist
being able to carry out a task that would require sharp vision in the
waking state.
Thus, there is something in us that sees without the eyes. The sensitive
person not only sees but acts, thinks, calculates, organizes, foresees and
carries out intellectual tasks that the same person is incapable of doing in
the normal vigil state and from which they keep no memory. Hence, there
must be something that thinks and that is independent of matter. What is
that? Science stops here. Such facts are not rare, though.
A scholar, however, will go to the other side of the world to see and calculate
an eclipse but he will not visit his neighbor’s house to observe a
phenomenon of the soul. The spontaneous and natural facts that demonstrate
the independent action of an intelligent principle occur in large
numbers but such action is even more evident in the magnetic and spiritist
phenomena in which the isolation of that principle is produced at will, so
to speak.
Let us return to our subject. We registered a similar fact in the June 1861
issue of The Review, regarding the evocation of the Marquis de SaintPaul.
Towards his final days he used to say: “He is thirsty. He needs water.
He is cold. He needs to be warmed up. He has pain here or there,
etc.” And then when he was told: “But Sir, it is you who is thirsty”, he
responded: “No. It is him.”
The reason for that is the fact that the thinking ‘self ’ is in the spirit and
not in the body. Since the spirit is already somewhat separated from the
body, it then considers the body as a third party, as if it were not him.
Thus, it was necessary to give water to that other being, to the body, and
not to him, the spirit. That is why he gave the following answer to this
question in his evocation: “Why did you always speak in the third person”
to which he responded: “Because, as I said, I saw and felt very well the
differences between the physical and the spiritual. Those differences that
are intertwined by the fluid of life become very distinctive to the eyes of
the agonizing clairvoyant.”
A similar cause must have produced the effect noted on the soldier
mentioned above. They may perhaps say that the wound caused a kind of
madness. The Marquis de Saint-Paul, however, had not been wounded.
He was perfectly healthy and we are positive about this because his sister
who is a member of the Society confirmed it to us. What was spontaneously
produced in him could perfectly well have been produced in others
by the effect of an incident. As a matter of fact, every magnetizer knows
that it is very common to have the somnambulists speaking in the third
person, thus creating a distinction between the personality of the soul, or
spirit, and that of the body. In the normal state, both individualities get
mixed up and their perfect assimilation is necessary to the harmony of
life, but the intelligent principle is like those gases that are not easily contained
and escape in the first opportunity. There is always the tendency
of separating from its heavy corporeal burden as long as the equilibrium is
no longer in place by the force that keeps the two together, by any given
cause. Only the harmonic activity of the organs may keep the complete
and subtle union between the soul and the body. However, at the minor
suspension of that activity, the soul is airborne again. That is what
happens during sleep, or when the senses are benumbed, in catalepsy,
lethargy, in the natural or magnetized somnambulism, during ecstasy,
during what is called daydreaming or second sight, during the inspirations
of the genius, in every significant stress of the mind, that sometimes
renders the body insensitive. That is how, finally, those things may happen
as a consequence of certain pathological states. A large number of
spiritual phenomena have no other cause but the emancipation of the
soul. Medical science does acknowledge the influence of moral causes but
does not admit the spiritual element as the active principle. That is why
medicine confuses these phenomena with organic madness and also why
a purely physical treatment is applied, treatment that frequently leads to
real madness something that only had the appearance of madness.
Among the facts mentioned above there is one that seems really bizarre.
It is the officer who spoke in the feminine third person. The primitive
cause of the phenomenon, as we said, is the distinction between the
two personalities as a consequence of the separation of the spirit. There
is, however, another cause revealed by Spiritism and that must be taken
into account, since it may give a special character to the thoughts: it is the
vague memory of previous existences that in the state of emancipation of
the soul may awake and allow a retrospective vision about some points of
the past. In those cases the separation of the soul is never complete. The
thoughts are affected by the failing organs and for that very reason they
are not very lucid, as they are not at the first moments after death either.
Suppose the man that we spoke about had been a woman in his preceding
existence. In that case he could confuse the memory that he might have
preserved with his current condition.
Couldn’t we find a similar explanation to the obsessed idea of certain
alienated persons who believe to be kings? If they were kings in preceding
existences they may be affected by some memory of that. This is only
a hypothesis but which does not lack credibility to the acquainted with
Spiritism. If this cause is possible some will then say that it cannot be applied
to the cases in which mad people believe to be wolves or pigs since
everyone knows that man has never been an animal. That is correct but
a man may have been in a condition that forced him to live among dirty
animals and savage people. That could well be the source of such illusion
that to some may have been imposed as punishing to this present life.
When we are presented with facts of such a nature instead of referring
them to the purely physical diseases, if we carefully followed all their
phases with the support of the data provided by the spiritist observations,
we would effortlessly detect the double causes that we identified and we
would promptly understand that we cannot treat them with showers,
bleedings and cauterizations.
Mr. Baudelocque’s case also finds its explanation in analogous causes.
The article says that he had no awareness of his own existence. That is a
mistake since he did not consider himself dead; he was just unaware of
his corporeal life. He was in a more or less similar situation as the spirits,
who at their initial moments just after their deaths don’t believe to be dead
and take their bodies as someone else’s since they cannot understand the
situation, given their disorientation. The same that takes place with certain
disincarnate spirits may also happen to some incarnate. That is how
Mr. Baudelocque could make an abstraction of his body and say that he
had no head, once his spirit had no corporeal head. The spiritist observations
provide numerous examples of this kind, thus shedding new light
onto an immense variety of phenomena that up until now could not be
explained and were simply inexplicable without its foundations. There is
still the case of the Zouave that lost the memory of nouns to be examined.
But this case can only be explained by considerations of a different order,
which fall into the field of organic physiology. The developments led by
that event commit us to devote a special article about it, to be published
soon.
