Strange cases of a split personality, when two completely different souls alternately appear in one person, have always attracted increased attention of scientists, writers and parapsychologists.
Indeed, the state when a person is, as it were, reincarnated from one personality to another, is described with great artistic force in many of Dostoevsky's works - such cases were deeply interested in the writer-psychologist.
First of all, one can point to the amusing introspections of the poor real state councilor Pralinsky, who unexpectedly intoxicated his subordinate at a wedding dinner (The Bad Joke), then a series of pictures and experiences in The Eternal Husband, and finally, the development of a complete split personality in Mr. Goliadkin "Double" and Ivan Fedorovich in "The Brothers Karamazov".
These examples from Dostoevsky's writings show that varying degrees of split personality are not uncommon in everyday life in people who are supposedly healthy.
The phenomenon of the same category - cases of reincarnation or reincarnation (transmigration of souls) - has long been of interest to parapsychologists. It lies in the fact that people - usually children from two to five years old - suddenly begin to talk about their "past" life. To the surprise of researchers, such stories often coincide with reality to the smallest detail, despite the fact that the child could not possibly know the circumstances of the previous life of the person on whose behalf he spoke.
Here is a typical reincarnation case investigated by a leading expert in the field, Dr. Ian Stevenson (recounted by another prominent US parapsychologist, Dr. Richard Broughton).
On June 6, 1926, Mr. Kikai Pandan Sahei, a well-known and respected lawyer from the town of Bareilly, in the Indian state of Uttar Pradash, returned from his relatives to his home to look after his seriously ill wife. While he was at home, his three-year-old son, Jagdish Chandra, asked his father to buy a car - a rarity in India at the time.
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The father replied with a non-binding "Will buy soon", but the boy did not want to wait. Buy Now! he demanded. "Well, where do you think I can get a car?" - the lawyer asked his son and, to his great surprise, he heard in response: "Take mine, he is in the house of Babuji in Benares" (the city of Benares is located on the banks of the Ganges River, more than three hundred miles from Bareilly).
When Sahei asked his son to explain who Babuji was, the boy replied, "He is my father."
In another country, such a twist would disturb a loving dad a lot, but Hindus seriously believe in transmigration of souls. Sahei understood that this faith explains the strange words of his son. However, the mind of the lawyer did not want to attribute everything to religion, so the lawyer carefully wrote down his son's words in order to check them later.
A few days later, Sahei asked his son to tell him more about Babuji, and the boy amazed his father with the abundance and accuracy of details.
To begin with, Jagdish Chandra stated that his name was Jai Gopal and that Babuji Pandi was his father. The boy added to his name the honorary title "pandit", thereby emphasizing Babuji's belonging to the Brahmin caste (to which his current family did not belong). According to the boy's description, his Benares house had a large gate, a living room and a basement floor, where a steel fireproof cabinet was embedded in the wall.
The kid said that Babuja had two cars, a phaeton and a couple of horses. In addition, he told in detail about the personality of this person, saying, in particular, that Babuji loves to sit with friends in his yard, drinking baig - a hoppy drink made from Indian hemp, loves massage, and before the morning wash he smears his face or covers it with powder … Another boy claimed that Babuji had a wife and two sons, but they all died.
Before taking any action, Sahei asked seven friends and colleagues from the court to testify to his son's claims and advise him on how to approach the case scientifically. It was decided that the first thing to do was write to the mayor of Benares and ask him to make inquiries.
The city council chairman, a lawyer named Munshi Mahadeva Prasad, replied that, as far as he could establish, what Sahei's son had said was true. Babu Pandi is an old client of his, and as soon as he read Sahei's letter, Prasad knew who it was.
On June 27, Sahei published a letter in a leading English-language newspaper in the county, in which he outlined his son's statements and asked for new information about Babuji Pandey.
As a result, he received new confirmation of the details described by his son. Babu Pandey did have a son named Jai Gopal who had died a few years earlier.
Everything came together to the smallest detail, only Babuja did not have two cars, he just rented them from time to time.
As the story began to gain public and press attention, Sahei asked the local city government to poll Jagdish Chandra and record all of his statements. The result was a very complete description of the Pandy house, with names and details of the lifestyle and habits of family members; even the name of a prostitute was mentioned, who came to the house on holidays as a dancer and singer. All this information was confirmed in writing by the neighbor Babu Pandey and his relative.
About a month later, Sahei and his son went to Benares. Accompanied by a crowd of onlookers, three-year-old Jagdish Chandra led the way through a maze of streets to Babu Pandey's home. The boy recognized both Pandy himself and his household by sight, recognized local landmarks and swam in the Ganges without showing any fear, which was difficult to expect from a three-year-old toddler who had never seen this river before.
Ian Stevenson began studying this case in 1961, adding to the already rich documentation left by the deceased Sahei. In 1973, Stevenson interviewed Jagdish Chandra, his brothers and mother, and Babu Pandey's daughters several times. The doctor visited the houses in which both families lived in order to verify the claims in Sahei's published report.
Thanks to Sahai's meticulousness, Stevenson could add little to what he already knew. He found out how Jagdish Chandra's earlier life influenced his childhood later. The most striking example of this influence was Chandra's penchant for the way of life and customs of the Brahmins (especially in food and clothing), which were completely different from his own family. Jagdish Chandra had a long-term passion for cars, which he explains by the fact that Jaya Gopala, a very spoiled child, was often driven in a car.
At first, the Pandis were cool with Jagdish Chandra. Apparently, along with Chandra's proven claims, several statements have been made that put his "former" father in a very unfavorable light. It is clear from them that Babuji was a panda-brahmin who helped the pilgrims to bathe in the sacred waters of the Ganges.
Babu Pandey not only hired a squad of thugs to extort "donations" from the pilgrims, but, according to Chandra, once killed and robbed a pilgrim. True, after the death of Babu Pandey, the rest of the family accepted Jagdish Chandra, and he often visited them for many years.
Since Sahei immediately published his son's statements in all details, without even making an attempt to verify them, Stevenson decided that there could be no question of a prank. Sahei was a well-known lawyer, cheating would have done him nothing, but could only hurt, given the interest in the case of the newspaper and the public. Everyone who knew Sahei claimed that he was an outstanding person and only scientific curiosity prompted him to do this business.
It is also unlikely that Jagdish Chandra accidentally stumbled upon information about the Pandy family, which he later divulged. Little Jagdish Chandra almost never left the village, where his parents' house stood, and if he left, then in the company of adult family members, only one of whom, Sahei himself, occasionally visited Benares. He almost did not know this city, and guests from Benares never came to his house, not even Sahei's cousin who lived there.
Stevenson considers the above case to be one of the most powerful examples of transmigration. All in all, his archives, collected over thirty years, contain information about more than two thousand such cases studied by him. None of the explanations proposed by scientists have yet been recognized as valid.
People suffering from the so-called demonic content are also distinguished by a kind of "duplicity". They claim that a consciousness alien to them has entered their body, commanding their will and actions. Something similar happens with mediums in a seance.
In a special, trance state, they speak, write and act on behalf of their guiding spirits. Curiously, both the devil and mediums sometimes communicate information that is not known to them and allegedly received from a consciousness alien to them.
In some cases, there is a spontaneous splitting of a person's consciousness into primary, normal, and secondary, the so-called somnambulistic. The latter can last for weeks or months, and then the person suddenly returns to a normal state of consciousness. One of the most interesting examples of this kind is given by L. Levenfeld in the book "Hypnotism" (Saratov, 1903).
13-year-old Felida, who was born to healthy parents, showed the first symptoms of hysteria, and after a year and a half she developed fits of hysterical somnambulism. With the passage of time, the seizures became less frequent, but the secondary, somnambulistic state of the psyche became longer. When she turned 32, the latter lasted for about three months, interrupted by the normal, primary, for several hours.
The secondary, or somnambulistic, personality remembered well the events of both states, but the primary, or normal, did not remember what she did in the somnambulistic state.
Therefore, brief glimpses of normalcy in recent years have been very unpleasant for Felida. The secondary personality was easier for her than the primary one, which was reflected in her character.
In the normal period, she was melancholy, withdrawn, silent, constantly complaining of pain, in general, she was extremely busy with herself and paid little attention to her surroundings. In a state of somnambulism, she was cheerful and carefree, did not like to work and was more engaged in the toilet, but, on the other hand, showed more love and affection for children and relatives. Thus, undoubtedly, two psychic personalities lived in one person.
It happens that this kind of splitting of the psyche is caused by a strong mental shock. Here is one of such cases, reported by the famous French psychologist A. Binet. A young man of about sixteen, working in a vineyard, once stumbled upon a snake and was so shocked by this that he fainted. When he woke up, his legs were paralyzed.
In addition, profound changes in his psyche were revealed: the young man presented himself as a nine-year-old boy and behaved in all respects the same way as boys of this age. He read poorly, wrote like a beginner, lived exclusively on the impressions and interests of his nine years of age. The entire later phase of life was forgotten, all later acquisitions of life experience fell out.
As a result of paralysis of the legs, the young man was moved from the vineyard to a tailor's workshop. There he learned to sew, learned to read and write again and took up tailoring. A few years later, our tailor is experiencing a new strong shock, which caused a prolonged swoon.
When this time he regained consciousness, the paralysis of the legs disappeared, and the whole forgotten period of his life and work in the vineyard, which preceded the meeting with the snake, was restored in his memory. But at the same time, everything that related to life in a tailor's workshop, as well as all knowledge and skills in tailoring, was forgotten.
Interestingly, in this young man, Binet could evoke the traits of a particular personality through hypnotic suggestion. If the unfortunate man was inspired that he was working in the vineyard, then upon awakening from a hypnotic sleep, he behaved as if he had only worked there until now: his legs turned out to be completely healthy, but tailoring skills completely disappeared.
In the next session of hypnosis, he was suggested that he was a nine-year-old boy. Upon coming out of hypnotic sleep, the young man behaved in a proper way: he could not walk, but he was excellent with a needle.
As can be seen from the above example, scientists in the last century, using the possibilities of hypnosis and suggestion, learned to reproduce such states artificially. It turned out that a hypnotized person can, as it were, "instill" character traits and behavioral features that are not at all characteristic of him, that is, in an experiment, cause such personality changes that some hysterical patients develop by themselves.
For example, during a hypnosis session, a modest and respectable person is suggested that he is not him at all, but some notorious celebrity. And then, hypnotized by all his behavior, he begins to imitate her, and does this with the art available to good actors.
In the course of this kind of research and observation, scientists managed to understand the psychophysiological mechanisms of the phenomenon of "personality splitting". However, it has not yet been possible to explain where the second ("superfluous") person gets the information inaccessible to the first, for example, information about his "past" life.