The White Cat by Gelett Burgess — Read

I have said so much of my "plan" that it is now quite time to explain / it, for it was of the simplest. Many of the recorded cases of multiple / personality, or rather, according to a more modern interpretation of the / state, dissociated personality, had arisen, I found, from a shock, / sometimes purely physical, sometimes mental. It was my idea that in / Miss Fielding's case the process might be reversed -- that I might inhibit / her secondary self by some violent excitement. A long process of / hypnotic treatment might, I knew, effect a cure more or less stable, but / the doctor's superior knowledge and, heretofore, his superior / advantages, had made me doubt of succeeding in that way. To take her to / any competent specialist was inexpedient, for the reason that we should / meet with a steady opposition from Edna, who could do much to make such / a course impossible.

The means I intended to employ were, I must confess, brutal; I intended / to frighten Edna to within an inch of her life -- to frighten her, that / is, so that she might be afraid to reappear. This explanation is / superficial, but it conveys the idea; what really would happen, I / thought, was that Joy would "wake up" and resume permanently her normal / condition. I was not competent to explain the rationale of it; I / trusted, in a way, to the mere reversion of the processes that had been / described in similar cases of disintegrated personalities.