It has been endeavoured to show that in what is known as the “duplex” and “multiplex personality,” the “double conscience,” the “dual ego,” lies one of the strongest arguments against the belief in the soul. As a matter of fact, these phenomena are the very reasons why we ought to believe in a soul. The “dividing up of the personality” is only possible when there never has been a personality, as with woman. All the celebrated cases which Janet has described in his book, “L’Automatisme Psychologique,” concern women, not in a single instance man. It is only woman who, minus soul or an intelligible ego, has not the power to become conscious of what is in her; who cannot throw the light of truth on her inmost self; who can by her completely passive inundation by a consciousness belonging to another, allow what is in her own nature to be suppressed by an extraneous element; who can display the hysterical phenomena described by Janet. Hysteria is the bankruptcy of this superficial sham self which has been put on, and the woman becomes for the time being a _tabula rasa_, whilst the working in her of her own genuine nature appears to her as something coming from without. This apparent “secondary personality,” this “foreign body in the consciousness,” this false self, is, in reality, the true female nature, sexuality itself appearing, and a proper understanding of this fact, and of the complications that must ensue from the ebbings and flowings of the false, supposed to be true, and the true supposed to be false, lie at the root of the most difficult phenomena of hysteria.
Woman’s incapacity for truth--which I hold to be consequent on her lack of free will with regard to the truth, in accordance with Kant’s “Indeterminism”--conditions her falsity. Any one who has had anything to do with women knows how often they give offhand quite patently untrue reasons for what they have said or done, under the momentary necessity of answering a question. It is, however, hysterical subjects who are most careful to avoid unveracity (in a most marked and premeditated way before strangers); but however paradoxical it may sound it is exactly in this that their untruthfulness lies! They do not know that this desire for truth has come to them from outside and is no part of their real nature.