Poltergeist: A Classic Study in Destructive Haunting by Colin Wilson Page B

Margaret.
    We know that sudden shock can destroy the reason, perhaps turning the person into a “vegetable.” It is, in effect, as if a ship had been torpedoed. Other kinds of stress and misery can cause something more like a “slow leak”; a draining of vital energy. This is what happened to the unfortunate Father Tranquille, who virtually died of “shock” after being “possessed” by the “spirits.” He went into “exhaust status.” Prince’s theory is that dual (or multiple) personality occurs when severe shock threatens a person’s mental stability. The “other personality” could be considered as the mind’s own defense against destruction. And, in fact, the majority of cases of multiple personality begin with a bad shock that threatens to overwhelm the person with “discouragement.” We can see how such a shock might turn Doris—at the age of three—into Margaret, who treated life as a joke. But it is almost impossible to understand how it could create “Sleeping Margaret,” the “guardian angel.”
    In The Devils of Loudun, Aldous Huxley tries to explain the behavior of Sister Jeanne des Anges by appealing to the concept of multiple personality. He prefers to speak of the case of “Christine Beauchamp,” recorded by another famous American professor of psychology, Morton Prince, around the turn of the century. (Her real name was Clara N. Fowler.) Huxley summarizes the case:
    Here is Miss Beauchamp, a blameless but rather sickly young woman, full of high principles, inhibitions and anxiety. From time to time she plays truant from herself and behaves like a very naughty and exuberantly healthy child of ten. Questioned under hypnosis, this enfant terrible insists that she is not Miss Beauchamp but someone else called Sally. After some hours or days Sally disappears and Miss Beauchamp returns to consciousness—but returns only to her own consciousness, not to Sally’s; for she remembers nothing of what was done, in her name and through the agency of her body, while the latter was in control. Sally, on the contrary, knows all that goes on in Miss Beauchamp’s mind and makes use of that knowledge to embarrass and torment the other tenant of their shared body. Because he could think of these odd facts in terms of a well-substantiated theory of subconscious mental activity, and because he was well acquainted with the techniques of hypnosis, Dr. Morton Prince, the psychiatrist in charge of this case, was able to solve Miss Beauchamp’s problems and to bring her for the first time in many years, to a state of physical and mental health.
    All that need be added is that the case of Christine Beauchamp—who lived in Boston—bears many resemblances to that of Doris Fischer. Her father was also a drunkard, and Christine became “neurasthenic” (inclined to suffer from nerves) when her mother died in unpleasant circumstances (which Prince does not detail). She greatly admired a close friend of her father’s named William Jones, who seemed to her to possess all the qualities her father lacked; when Jones got drunk one night, and made some kind of sexual advance to her, she became even more depressed and neurasthenic. Prince began to treat her for general depression and fatigue, and tried hypnotizing her. This proved to be a mistake, in that it released the secondary personality—who called herself Sally—like a genie out of a bottle. From then on, Sally behaved toward Christine rather as Margaret did toward Doris, but with more malice. Sally, who was as strong as a horse, would take a long walk into the countryside, then abandon the body to the feeble Christine, who had to walk home. (One of the strangest features of cases of multiple personality is that the body seems to be as weak—or as strong—as the personality occupying it; in the case of “Eve”—Christine Sizemore—the secondary personality even emerged when the primary one was unconscious under anaesthetic.) When Christine went to New