Bi-location? This is now termed splitting and dissociation I think. This seems another case of dissociation in this film, due to an accident committed by Esther in which her twin sister supposedly died. Fearful of severe punishment and distraught over the loss of her sister, Esther dissociates this act from her consciousness. It is then projected from herself onto some unknown who may have possessed a part of Emily’s soul released to the unknown person by Emily’s death. Esther being unable to cope with the death of her sister but wishing she had been the one to die, assumes Emily’s part of the personality. Esther’s fevers are re-enactments of her sister’s death. The unknown person is now possessed of Esther, the weaker personality. The unknown person being unable to cope with the content of Esther’s personality, acts out the incident over and over. She has been rendered unconscious by the possession and is unable to recall the original trauma. This is termed repetition compulsion.
These possessions are achieved when one soul, say the one possessed by a mother, is split into two parts by two daughters, not necessarily twins. The original personality might have been subjected to transferences and memories of some event in the past which has come to possess two offspring. The stronger personality has split off the negative content and it is now possessed by the weaker sister. The weaker sister, unable to manage the content, begins to act out that content, revealing the cause of a potentially criminal event, acting out a film the mother has seen, or simply the personality contains scenes of a farmer burning his field customary in farming communities.
I was particularly interested in this film as I was a victim of such an incident, having set fire to the woods behind our home in Chesapeake, VA in 1964.
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