Observations placeholder

Mr Pitres - Leçons sur l'hystérie et l'hypnotisme

As quoted in Gabriel Delanne - Materials for use in the study of Reincarnation

A patient, Albertine M..., 28 years old, during the ‘ecmnesic’ [sic] delirium found herself regressed  to the age of 7 years old, when she was busy looking after her nurse's cow.

After observing the whole series of auras that usually precede the explosion of her delirium attacks, the patient began to walk slowly again, lowering herself from time to time, as if she had picked flowers from the side of a road. Then she sat on the floor humming a song. Moments later she made the gesture of digging sharply into her pocket and started playing jacks, not without often interrupting her game to talk to her cow. We addressed her at that moment, and she, believing she was in contact with the children of the village, immediately offered to share her games with us. It was impossible to make her understand her mistake. To all the questions we asked her about her cow, her grandmother, the inhabitants of the village, she answered with the naivety of a child, but with an imperturbable precision. If, on the contrary, we told her about the events she had witnessed or acted in during her lifetime, after the age of 7, she seemed very surprised and understood nothing about the matter.

I must point out two particularities that are not insignificant. Until the age of 12, Albertine stayed in a small village in the Charente region, among poor farmers who barely spoke French. At that time, she herself spoke only the Saintonge dialect; it was only much later that she learned French.

Also, throughout the attack, she spoke in dialect, and if we asked her to speak French, she invariably replied, and always in dialect, that she did not know the language of the city's gentlemen.

The second peculiarity is no less curious. At the age of 7, Albertine had not yet had any hysterical accidents and, in all likelihood, she did not yet have hemianesthesia or hysterogenic zones. However, during the attack of the ecmnesic delirium we are dealing with, skin sensitivity was normal on both the left and right sides, and all the spasmogenic areas had lost their action, except the left ovarian area, whose energetic pressure had the immediate effect of stopping the delirium. Back to normal, the patient had no recollection of what she had said and done during this state.