In her almost half a century of medical practice, the Novosibirsk psychiatrist Maria Isaakovna Steinberg met with similar cases only twice. However, each of them forever sunk into her soul and served as an occasion for deep and persistent research, which, according to Maria Isaakovna herself, did not give her a clear and precise answer about the reasons for such phenomena.
Amazing patient
At the end of the 40s of the XX century, when a young graduate of a medical institute came to work in a regional psychiatric dispensary, she was introduced to one of the patients, calling his disease "very nonspecific" and "does not fit into the classification picture of diseases of the schizophrenic group." The head physician of the dispensary suggested that Maria observe this unusual patient so that Steinberg could later use the accumulated material in her dissertation. Maria happily agreed, not yet knowing what phenomenon she was about to face.
The patient was a fifty-year-old, unusually thin and sullen man who had suffered from a mental disorder since childhood. Ivan - that was the name of the patient - at first glance, had a typical split personality: either he pretended to be a little capricious boy who demanded maternal affection, then suddenly he again became a withdrawn and taciturn man who resignedly endured all medical procedures. However, something soon happened that shocked Maria.
During the evening round, Ivan suddenly fell into a stupor, but at the same time he quickly spoke in the purest German. Steinberg, who knew this language well and devoted many years to studying it, understood from the monologue that Ivan was reporting to a certain mister major about why his company had retreated from the position near the Tisza River. In addition to the knowledge of a foreign language by a patient who could not even read and write in Russian, Maria was surprised by the strange timbre of his voice, which turned from a soft baritone into a guttural barking tenor …
Scary memories
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Since that time, Maria Isaakovna did not miss the opportunity to talk with Ivan in German during such attacks. From the dialogues that continued with enviable regularity over the next two and a half years, Steinberg was able to establish that Erich (as Ivan called himself during strange seizures) was born in 1882 in the small German town of Lunen in the family of a shoemaker. Until 1914, he, like his father, was engaged in shoemaking. Then he was drafted to the Eastern Front, where he fought for almost two years. Erich-Ivan's memories each time ended with a story about a rainy autumn day in 1916. A man with horror on his face informed Maria that he saw a bright flash, felt a blow to the chest, suffocation, he could not stand, fell on his back, plunging into a fetid muck …
In the winter of 1951, Ivan suddenly fell ill with croupous pneumonia and died four days later.
Unique abilities of a retired officer
The second and last similar case in the practice of Maria Isaakovna occurred already in the early turbulent 90s. By that time, Steinberg had collected quite a lot of material about such phenomena of the human psyche, kindly provided by colleagues from domestic and even foreign clinics, whose psychiatrists, since the 60s of the XX century, have been actively studying the ability of individuals to be bipersonal or even polypersonal., otherwise called the reincarnation of the person.
Then, in 1993, a retired officer, who had been dismissed from the armed forces for redundancy two years earlier, ended up in their hospital. The man tried unsuccessfully to do business, lost all his savings and an apartment. In addition to all the troubles, his wife left him, taking his only son. On the basis of all the experiences he had experienced, the man developed a severe mental disorder, to some of the features of which the highly experienced Steinberg immediately drew attention to.
Overwhelmed by frequent outbursts of anger, the retired officer sometimes became very quiet and thoughtful. In such rare moments, he asked for paper, pen and sat down to write. It was these recordings that attracted Maria Isaakovna. In them, a retired military man who knew only armored vehicles and had a rather limited outlook, showed extraordinary knowledge and abilities in various fields of science and art. So, once, in a few minutes, he created a love poem of an extraordinary beauty of syllable and architectonics, containing almost thirty pages of handwritten text. On another occasion, a man streaked a sheet of paper with strange mathematical formulas. Then, suddenly, he created a large treatise on the origin of man in French, in which the postulates of Charles Darwin's theory were intertwined with very original views on this problem.
But the most unusual thing was that from time to time a retired officer would bend over the paper and begin to write strange characters on it, vaguely reminiscent of the Hebrew alphabet. When the notes of the strange man were shown to the specialist in oriental studies, he explained that he saw the first five books of the Old Testament, otherwise called the Pentateuch, rewritten word for word in Hebrew …
In the summer of 1996, the retired officer finished rewriting the texts of the five holy books of the Jews and disappeared a day later. A week later, his body was fished out of the Ob by fishermen. This happened fifteen kilometers from Novosibirsk …
Joan of Arc and Johann Wolfgang Goethe
History knows many cases of such polypersonism. The most famous figure with this deviation was Joan of Arc. For seventeen years of her life, this simple peasant girl was no different from her peers and was not known to anyone. Then, for exactly a year, she performed acts that could only be done by an experienced commander or a major politician and thanks to which she became a savior for France - the great Virgin of Orleans. And for the last, nineteenth year of her life, Jeanne was in captivity and was on trial, giving surprisingly accurate and correct answers to 132 members of the tribunal.
The great German poet Goethe experienced a similar state of short-term transformation of personality. According to his recollections, he created "The Sorrows of Young Werther" completely unconsciously, like a lunatic, and when he read the poem, he was very surprised by its plot and style.
This is the realm of theology …
According to Maria Isaakovna Steinberg, the cases of reincarnation were well known before. However, these facts were attributed to the influence of either the devil or higher good forces. But it was the 20th century - a bloody, stormy, in many ways "apocalyptic" - that showed the world the largest number of cases of polypersonism noted in archives, press, medical and judicial documents.
On the one hand, this can be explained by the previously unseen influence of external factors on the human psyche, leading to its pathological changes. Constant stress is the reason that a person transforms into a person of a different gender, age, nationality and even language. During the periods of reincarnation, a person's brain activity increases unusually, the imagery and brightness of thinking and language, the ability to deep and comprehensive analysis, up to foresight, increase manifold.
On the other hand, and Maria Isaakovna herself admits this, it would be materialistic naivety to explain these phenomena as a consequence of chemical reactions occurring in the substance of the brain and the human nervous system. Steinberg's attempts to achieve similar effects using hypnosis and drugs gave very poor results. And this testified to the fact that in the minds of a person "suffering" from the reincarnation of personality, certain processes are taking place that have not been studied at all by modern psychology and psychiatry.
Steinberg, relying on the cautious opinion of some researchers, suggests that in such cases, perhaps, echoes of previous incarnations of the personality in various material bodies appear. However, as Maria Isaakovna declares, this is no longer the sphere of medicine, but of theology and theosophy.
Sergey K0ZHUSHK0