Observations placeholder

Mr. Pierre Janet - L'Automatisme psychologique

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

You can have the subject play all the scenes of his own life and see, as if you were referring to that time, details that he thought were completely forgotten and could not tell. Léonie stayed for two hours transformed into a 10-year-old girl and she lived her own life again, with a very strange vivacity and joy, screaming, running, calling her doll, talking to people she could not remember, as if the poor woman had really returned when she was ten years old. Although she is still anesthetized on her left side at this time, she regained her full sensitivity to play this role.

These modifications of sensitivity and nervous phenomena by such a suggestion sometimes give rise to strange phenomena. Here is an observation that seems like a joke, but it is accurate and, in fact, quite easy to explain.

I suggest to Rose that it is no longer 1888, but 1886, the April, to merely see the changes in sensitivity that might occur. But here is a very strange accident; she moans, complains of being tired and not being able to walk: "Well, what is wrong with you? - Oh, nothing, but in my situation. - What situation? What situation?" She replied with a gesture, her stomach had suddenly swollen and stretched by a sudden attack of hysterical tympanites: I had, without knowing it, brought her back to a period in her life when she was pregnant. The suggestion had to be removed to stop this bad joke.