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Dr. Morton Prince having been led to the view that in certain instances at least hallucinations are essentially the emergence into awareness of imagery belonging to subconscious thought, the same sort of imagery that occurs in conscious thought, he describes in this paper a systematic experimental study based on a combination of various methods. He details his procedure as follows: (a) to induce experimentally subconscious processes; (b) to 'tap' the subconscious process while in progress and obtain physical records of it; (c) if any illusions occurred synchronously to obtain a detailed description of the same; (d) to correlate by comparison if possible the imagery of the hallucination with the ideas expressed in the written record of the subconscious process; and (e) to obtain immediate evidence by subconscious introspection of the relation, if any, between the elements of the subconscious and the imagery of the hallucination and the mechanism of the same. The latter method included, in some of the observations, a 'carefully worded questionnaire to be answered by automatic script and followed often by a rigid cross-examination of the replies, care being taken to suggest no leads or theories'. The work was carried out on a subject who combined the conditions of experiencing hallucinations and producing automatic script without awareness of what the hand was writing, a young woman who had come to Dr. Morton Prince suffering from double personality, although this condition had disappeared at the time of the experiments.
The detailed account of the experiments is of great interest, and rich in psychological material. The subconscious thought was directed in turn to (1) the description of an actual episode which had occurred to the subject a year or two earlier; (2) a fabricated story, constructed out of the material of the former phantasies of one of her alternating personalities; (3) a fabricated story that was to be subconsciously constructed out of material othe