We have only to read the endless advertisements of cathartics and "internal baths," or to check up the quantity of laxatives sold at any drug store, to realize the wide-spread bondage to that great bugaboo constipation. He who is constipated can hardly prove an alibi to "nerves." Then there are the school-teachers and others who are worn out at the end of each year's work, hardly able to hold on until vacation; and the people who can't manage their tempers; and those who are upset over trifles; and those who are dissatisfied with life. To a certain degree, at least, all of these are nervous persons. The list grows.

The Real Sufferers. These so-called normal people are merely on the fringe of nervousness, on the border line between normality and disease. Beyond them there exists a great company of those whose lives have been literally wrecked by "nerves." Their work interrupted or given up for good, their minds harassed by doubts and fears, their bodies incapacitated, they crowd the sanatoria and the health resorts in a vain search for health. From New England to Florida they seek, and on to Colorado and California, and perhaps to Hawaii and the Orient, thinking by rest and change to pull themselves together and become whole again. There are thousands of these people—lawyers, preachers, teachers, mothers, social workers, business and professional folk of all sorts, the kind of persons the world needs most—laid off for months or years of treatment, on account of some kind of nervous disorder.

Underneath all these differing forms of nervousness are the same mechanisms and the same kind of difficulty. To understand one is to understand all, and to understand normal people as well; for in the last analysis we are one and all built on the same lines and governed by the same laws. The only difference is, that, as Jung says, "the nervous person falls ill of the conflicts with which the well person battles successfully."

Summary

There is greater need than ever for people who can keep at their tasks without long enforced rests; people who can think deeply and continuously without brain-fag; people who can concentrate all their powers on the work in hand without wasting time or energy on unnecessary aches and pains; people whose bodies are kept up to the top notch of vitality by well-digested food, well-slept sleep, well-forgotten fatigue, and well-used reserve energy. That such a state of affairs is no Utopian dream, but is merely a matter of knowing how, will appear more clearly in later chapters.

Sometimes, instead of reporting false pains, the brain misbehaves in other ways. It seems to lose its power to decide, to concentrate, or to remember. Then the patient is almost sure to fancy himself going insane. But insanity is a physical disease, implying changes or toxins in the brain cells. Functional disorders tell another story. Their cause is different, even though the picture they present is often a close copy of an organic disease.

False or nervous neuritis may feel like real neuritis (the result of poisons in the blood), but it gives itself away when it localizes itself in parts of the body where there is no nerve trunk. The exhaustion of neurasthenia sometimes seems extreme enough to be the result of a dangerous physical condition; but when this exhaustion disappears as if by magic under the proper kind of treatment, we know that the trouble cannot be in the body. Let it be said, then, with all the emphasis we can command, "nerves" are not physical. Laboratory investigation, contradictory symptoms, and response to treatment all bear witness to this fact. Whatever symptoms of disturbance there may be in pure nervousness, the nerves and organs can in no way be shown to be diseased.

The Positive Side

All Body and no Mind. At last we have begun to realize what we ought to have known all along,—that the body is not the whole man. The medical world for a long time has been in danger of forgetting or ignoring psychic suffering, while it has devoted itself to the treatment of physical disease.

In the meanwhile most physicians, lacking such knowledge and with the eye fixed largely on the body, have been pumping out the stomach, prescribing lengthy rest-cures, trying massage, diet, electricity, and surgical operations, in a vain attempt to cure a disease of the personality. Physical measures have been given a good trial, but few would contend that they have succeeded. Sometimes the patient has recovered—in time—but often, apparently, despite the treatment rather than because of it. Sometimes, in the hands of a man like Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, results seem good, until we realize that the same measures are ineffective when tried by other men, and that, after all, what has counted most has been the personality of the physician rather than his physical treatment.

No wonder that most doctors have disliked nervous cases. To a man trained in all the exactness of the physical sciences, the apparent lawlessness and irresponsibility of the psychic side of the personality is especially repugnant. He is impatient of what he fails to comprehend.

The Whole Man. But thinking people are not willing to desert science for cults that ignore the existence of these physical bodies. If they have found it unsatisfactory to be treated as if they were all body, they have also been unwilling to be treated as if they were all mind. They have been in a dilemma between two half-truths, even if they have not realized the dilemma. It has remained for modern psychotherapy to strike the balance—to treat the whole man. Solidly planted on the rock of the physical sciences, with its laboratories, physiological and psychological, and with a long record of investigation and treatment of pathological cases, it resembles the mind cure of earlier days or the assertions of Christian Science about as much as modern medicine resembles the old bloodletting, leeching practices of our forefathers.

The fact that the cause is mental while the result is often physical, should cause no surprise. In the physiological realm we are used to the idea that cause and effect are often widely separated. A headache may be caused by faulty eyes, or it may result from trouble in the intestines. In the same way, we should not be too much surprised if the cause of nervous troubles is found to be even more remote, provided there is some connecting link between cause and effect. The difficulty in this case is the apparent gulf between the realm of the spirit and the realm of the body. It is hard to see how an intangible thing like a thought can produce a pain in the arm or nausea in the stomach. Philosophers are still arguing concerning the nature of the relation between mind and body, but no one denies that the closest relation does exist. Every year science is learning that ideas count and that they count physically, as well as spiritually.

Popular Misconceptions about the Body.

1 "Eight hours' sleep is essential to health. All insomnia is dangerous and is incompatible with health. Nervous insomnia leads to shattered nerves and ultimately to insanity."

2 "Overwork leads to nervous breakdown. Fatigue accumulates from day to day and necessitates a long rest for recuperation."

3 "A carefully planned diet is essential to health, especially for the nervous person. A variety of food, eaten at the same time, is harmful. Acid and milk—for example, oranges and milk—are difficult to digest. Sour stomach is a sign of indigestion."

4 "Modern life is so strenuous that our nerves cannot stand the strain."

5 "Brain work is very fatiguing. It causes brain-fag and exhaustion."

Some of these misconceptions are household words and are so all but universally believed that the thought that they can be challenged is enough to bewilder one. However, it is ideas like this that furnish the material out of which many a nervous trouble is made. Based on a half-knowledge of the human body, on logical conclusions from faulty premises, on hastily swallowed notions passed on from one person to another, they tend by the very power of an idea to work themselves out to fulfilment.

The Power Behind Ideas

Ideas and Emotions. Ideas do not depend upon themselves for their driving-power. Life is not a cold intellectual process; it is a vivid experience, vibrant with feeling and emotion. It therefore happens that the experiences of life tend to bring ideas and emotions together and when an idea and an emotion get linked up together, they tend to stay together, especially if the emotion be intense or the experience is often repeated.

The word emotion means outgoing motion, discharging force. This force is like live steam. An emotion is the driving part of an instinct. It is the dynamic force, the electric current which supplies the power for every thought and every action of a human life.

Man is not a passive creature. The words that describe him are not passive words. Indeed, it is almost impossible to think about man at all except in terms of desire, impulse, purpose, action, energy. There are three things that may be done with energy: First, it may be frittered away, allowed to leak, to escape. Secondly, it may be locked up; this results usually in an explosion, a finding of destructive outlets. Finally, it may be harnessed, controlled, used in beneficent ways. Health and happiness depend upon which one of the three courses is taken.

Evidently, it is highly important to have a working knowledge of these emotions and instincts; important to know enough about them and their purpose to handle them rightly if they do not spontaneously work together for our best character and health. The problems of character and the problems of health so overlap that it is impossible to write a book about nervous disorders which does not at the same time deal with the principles of character-formation. The laws and mechanisms which govern the everyday life of the normal person are the same laws and mechanisms which make the nervous person ill. As Boris Sidis puts it, "The pathological is the normal out of place." The person who is master of himself, working together as a harmonious whole, is stronger in every way than the person whose forces are divided. Given a little self-knowledge, the nervous invalid often becomes one of the most successful members of society,—to use the word successful in the best sense.

If it be argued that character and health are both inherently by-products of self-forgetful service, rather than of painstaking thought, we answer that this is true, but that there can be no self-forgetting when things have gone too far wrong. At such times it pays to look in, if we can do it intelligently, in order that we may the sooner get our eyes off ourselves and look out. The pursuit of self-knowledge is not a pleasurable pastime but simply a valuable means to an end.

Knowing Our Machine

The fact that the human machine can run itself without a hitch in the majority of cases is witness to its inherent tendency toward health. People were living and living well through all the centuries before the science of psychology was formulated. But not with all people do things run so smoothly. There were demoniacs in Bible times and neurotics in the Middle Ages, as there are nervous invalids and half-well people to-day. Psychology has a real contribution to make, and in recent years its lessons have been put into language which the average man can understand.

While psychology deals with such topics as the subconscious mind, the instincts, the laws of habit, and association of ideas and suggestion, it is after all not so much an academic as a practical question. These forces govern the thought you are thinking at this moment, the way you will feel a half-hour from now, the mood you will be in to-morrow, the friends you will make and the profession you will choose, besides having a large share in the health or ill-health of your body in the meantime.

Summary

Perhaps it would be well before going farther to summarize what we have been saying. Here in a nutshell is the kernel of the subject:

Disease may be caused by physical or by psychic forces. A "nervous" disorder is not a physical but a psychic disease. It is caused not by lack of energy but by misdirected energy; not by overwork or nerve-depletion, but by misconception, emotional conflict, repressed instincts, and buried memories. Seventy-five per cent. of all cases of ill-health are due to psychic causes, to disjointed thinking rather than to a disjointed spine. Wherefore, let us learn to think right.

In outline form, the trouble in a neurosis may be stated something like this:

Working backward, the cure naturally would be:

 
Right ideas—resulting in
Appropriate emotions—resulting in
Redirected energy—resulting in
Harmony—resulting in
Readjustment to the environment.
 

If the reader is beginning to feel somewhat bewildered by these general statements, let him take heart. So far we have tried merely to suggest the outline of the whole problem, but we shall in the future be more specific. Nervous troubles, which seem so simple, are really involved with the whole mechanism of mental life and can in no way be understood except as these mechanisms are understood. We have hinted at some of the causes of "nerves," but we cannot give a real explanation until we explain the forces behind them. These forces may at first seem a bit abstract, or a bit remote from the main theme, but each is essential to the story of nerves and to the understanding of the more practical chapters in Part III.

 
THE SPECIFIC INSTINCTS AND THEIR EMOTIONS (AFTER MCDOUGALL)

These are the fundamental tendencies or dispositions with which every human being is endowed as he comes into the world. Differing in degree in different individuals, they unite in varying proportions to form various kinds of dispositions, but are in greater or less degree the common property of us all.

It is true that East is East and West is West, but the two do meet in the common foundation of our human nature. The likeness between men and between races is far greater and far more fundamental than the differences can ever be.

Internal Laboratories. In the wonderful internal laboratory of the body there are little glands whose business it is to secrete chemicals for just these emergencies. When an object is sighted which arouses fear, the brain cells flash instantaneous messages over the body, among others to the supra-renal glands or adrenals, just over the kidneys, and to the thyroid gland in the neck. Instantly these glands pour forth adrenalin and thyroid secretion into the blood, and the body responds. Blood pressure rises; brain cells speed up; the liver pours forth glycogen, its ready-to-burn fuel; sweat-glands send forth cold perspiration in order to regulate temperature; blood is pumped out from stomach and intestines to the external muscles. As we have seen, the body as a whole can respond to just one stimulus at a time. The response to this stimulus has the right of way. The whole body is integrated, set for this one thing. When fear holds the switchboard no other messages are allowed on the line, and the creature is ready for flight.

Old-Fashioned Fear. There is one passage from Dr. Crile's book which so admirably sums up these points that it seems worth while to insert it at length.

Curiosity and Wonder. Fortunately for the race, it has not had to wait until different features of the environment prove to be helpful or harmful. There is an instinct which urges forward to exploration and discovery and which enables the creature not only to adapt itself to the environment but to learn how to adapt the environment to itself. This is the instinct of curiosity. It is the impulse back of all advance in science, religion, and intellectual achievement of every kind, and is sometimes called "intellectual feeling."

Self-Assertion. It goes almost without saying that one of the strongest and most important impulses of mankind is the instinct of self-assertion; it often gets us into trouble, but it is also behind every effort toward developed character. At its lowest level self-assertion manifests itself in the strutting of the peacock, the prancing of the horse, and the "See how big I am," of the small boy. At its highest level, when combined with self-consciousness and the moral sentiments acquired from society and developed into the self-regarding sentiment, it is responsible for most of our ideas of right, our conception of what is and what is not compatible with our self-respect.

Construction. There is an innate satisfaction in making something,—from a doll-dress to a poem,—and this satisfaction rests on the impulse to construct, to fashion something with our own hands or our own brain. The emotion accompanying this instinct is too indefinite to have a name but it is nevertheless a real one and plays a large part in the sense of power which results from the satisfaction of good work well done. Later it will be seen how closely related is this impulse to the creative instinct of reproduction and how useful it can be in drawing off the surplus energy of that much denied instinct.

The wiser man does not let himself get angry in the first place unless the situation calls for fight. However, the fight need not be a hand-to-hand combat with one's fellow man. William James has pointed out that there is a "moral equivalent for war," and that the energy of this instinct may be used to reinforce other impulses and help overcome obstacles of all sorts. A good deal of the business man's zest, the engineer's determination, and the reformer's zeal spring from the fight-instinct used in the right way. As James, Cannon, and others have pointed out, the way to end war may be to employ man's instinct of pugnacity in fighting the universal enemies of the race—fire, flood, famine, disease, and the various social evils—rather than let it spend its force in war between nations. Even our sports may be offshoots of the fight-instinct, for McDougall holds that the play-tendency has its root in the instinct of rivalry, a modified form of pugnacity. Evidently fighting-blood is a useful inheritance, even to-day, and rightly directed is a necessary part of a complete and forceful personality.

Watching Nature Work. It is wonderful, indeed, to watch Nature in the long process of Evolution, as she adapts her methods to the growing complexity of the organism. With a variety and ingenuity of means, but always with the same steady purpose, she works from the lowest levels,—where there is no true reproduction, only multiplication by division,—on through the beginning of reproduction proper, where a single parent produces the offspring; then on to the level where it takes two parents of different structure to produce a new organism, and sex-life begins. At first Nature does not even demand that father and mother shall come near each other. In the water, the female of this type lays an egg, and the male, guided by his instinct, swims to it and deposits his fertilizing fluid. In plant life, bird and bee, attracted by wonderfully planned perfumes and color and honey, are called in to carry the pollen from male to female cell.

The Love-Motif. On the one hand, there is the persistent desire to be attractive, which manifests itself in the subtlest ways. How many of the yearnings and activities of human life have their roots in this ancient and honorable desire! The love of pretty clothes,—however it may seem to be motivated and however it may be complicated by other motives,-draws its energy, fundamentally, from the same need that provides the gay plumage and limpid song of the bird or the painted wings of the butterfly.

Many of our richest relationships, our best impulses, and our most firmly fixed social habits spring from the family instincts of reproduction and parental care. The social life of our young people, so well calculated to bring young men and women together; all the beauty of family life and, as we shall later see, all the broader benevolent activities for society in general, are energized by the same love-instincts which form so large a part of human nature.

Learning to Love

Alongside the rudimentary impulses of showing and looking, there is developed another set of trends which Nature needs to use later on, the so-called sadistic and masochistic impulses, the desire to dominate and master and even to inflict pain, and its opposite impulse which takes pleasure in yielding and submitting to mastery. These traits, harking back to the time when the male needed to capture by force, are of course much more evident in adolescence and especially in love-making, but have their beginning in childhood, as many a mother of cruel children knows to her sorrow. In adolescence, when sex-differentiation is much more marked, the dominating impulse is stronger in the boy and the yielding impulse in the girl; but in little children the differentiation has not yet begun.

This period between infancy and puberty is known as the latency period. All interest in sex disappears, repressed by the spontaneously developing sense of shame and modesty and by the impact of education and social disapproval. The child forgets that he was ever curious on sex-matters and lets his curiosity turn into other, more acceptable channels.

At this time of change, the chemistry of the body plays an important part in the development of the mental traits; all half-developed tendencies are given power through the maturing of the sex-glands, which bind them into an organization ready for their ultimate purpose. The current is now turned on, and the machinery, which has been furnished from the beginning, is ready for its task. After a few false starts in the shape of "puppy love," the mature instinct, if it be successful, seeks until from among the crowd it finds its mate. It has graduated from the training-school and is ready for life.

Civilization's Problem

Blundering Instincts. The older a person is, the more fixed are his habits. Now, an instinct is a race-habit and represents the crystallized reactions of a past that is old. Whatever has been done over and over again, millions of times, naturally becomes fixed, automatic, tending to conserve itself in its old ways, to resist any change and to act as it has always acted. This conserves energy and works well so long as conditions remain the same. But if for any reason there comes a change, things are likely to go wrong. By just so far as things are different, an automatic habit becomes a handicap instead of a help.

As the race has found through long experience that monogamy is to be preferred to promiscuous mating; that the highest interests of life are fostered by loyalty to the institution of the family; that the careful rearing of several children rather than the mere production of many is in the long run to be desired; and that a single standard of morality is practicable; so society has established for its members a standard which is in direct opposition to the immeasurable urge of the past. To make matters worse, there have at the same time grown up in many communities a standard of living and an economic competition which still further limit the size of the family and the satisfaction of the reproductive impulse.

The Bulwark We Have Built

With the competing forces so strong and the issues so great, it is not to be wondered at that society has had to build up a massive bulwark of public opinion, to establish regulations and fix penalties that are more stringent than those imposed in any other direction. Nor is it remarkable that in its effort to protect itself, society has sometimes made mistakes.

Just as we lean well in when riding around a corner, in order to keep ourselves from falling out, so by an "over-compensation" for what is unconsciously felt to be danger woman increases her feeling of safety by setting up a taboo on the whole subject of sex. It is time that we freed our minds from the artificial and perverted attitude toward this dominant impulse; time to rescue the word "sex" from its implications of grossness and sensuousness, and to recognize the instinct in its true light as one of the necessary and holy forces of life, a force capable of causing great damage, but also holding infinite possibilities for good if wisely directed.

Society only gets its members into trouble when, even by implication, it attempts to deny its natural make-up, and allows little children to grow up with the false idea that one of their strongest impulses is to be shunned by them as a thing of shame. We cannot dam back the flood by building a bulwark of untruth, and then expect the bulwark to hold.

When Sublimation Fails. But in the meantime we cannot congratulate ourselves too heartily. Sublimation too often fails. There are too many nervous wrecks by the way, too many weak indulgers of original desires, too many repressed, starved lives with no outlet for their misunderstood yearnings; and, as we shall see, too many people who, in spite of a big lifework, fail to find satisfaction because of unnecessary handicaps carried over from their childhood days. "Society's great task is, therefore, the understanding of the life-force, its manifold efforts at expression and the way of attaining this, and to provide as free and expansive ways as possible for the creative energy which is to work marvelous things for the future."

Until They Can Fly. Only half of Nature's need is met by the reproductive instinct. Her carefulness in this direction would be largely wasted without that other impulse which she has planted, the impulse to protect the new lives until they are old enough to fend for themselves. The higher the type of life and the greater the future demands, the longer is the period of preparation and consequent period of parental care. This fact, coupled with man's power for lasting relationships through the organization of permanent sentiments, has made the, bond between parent and child an enduring one. Needless to say, this relationship is among the most beautiful on earth, the source of an incalculable amount of joy and gain. However, as we have already suggested, there lurks here, as in every beneficent force, a danger. If parents forget what they are for, and try to foster a more than ordinary tie, they make themselves a menace to those whom they most love. Any exaggeration is abnormal. If the childhood bond is over-strong, or the childhood dependence too long cultivated, then the relationship has overstepped its purpose, and, as we shall later see, has laid the foundation for a future neurosis.

There is still a great difference of opinion as to how man's spiritual nature came into being; still discussion as to whether it developed out of crude beginnings as the rest of his physical and mental endowment has developed, or whether it was added from the outside as something entirely new. Be that as it may, the fact remains that man has as an innate part of his being an altruistic tendency, an unselfish care for the welfare of others, a relationship to society as a whole,—a relationship which is the only foundation of health and happiness and which brings sure disaster if ignored. The egoistic tendencies are only a part of human nature. Part of us is naturally socially minded, unselfish, spiritual, capable of responding to the call to lose our lives in order that others may find theirs.

Summary

Civilized man as he is to-day is a product of the past and can be understood only as that past is understood. The conflicts with which he is confronted are the direct outcome of the evolutional history of the race and of its attempt to adapt its primitive instincts to present-day ideals.

It goes almost without saying that religion, if it be vital, is one of the greatest sources of moral energy and spiritual dynamic, and that it is and always has been one of the greatest aids to sublimation that man has found. A force like the Christian religion, which sets the highest ideal of character and makes man want to live up to it, and which at the same time says, "You can. Here is strength to help you"; which unifies life and fills it with purpose; which furnishes the highest love-object and turns the thought outward to the good of mankind—such a force could hardly fail to be a dynamic factor in the effort toward sublimation. This book, however, deals primarily with those cases for which religion has had, to call science to her aid in order to find the cause of failure, to flood the whole subject with light, and to help cut the cords which, binding us to the past, make it impossible to utilize the great resources that are at hand for all the children of men.

There's a Reason. We take our thoughts and feelings and actions for granted, without stopping very often to wonder where they come from. But there is always a reason. When the law of cause and effect reaches the doorsill of our minds, it does not stop short to give way to the law of chance. We wake up in the morning with a certain thought on top. We say it "just happens." But nothing ever just happens. No thought that ever comes into our heads has been without its history,—its ancestors and its determining causes. But what about dreams? They, at least, you say, have no connections, no past and no future, only a weird, fantastic present. Strange to say, dreams have been found to be as closely related to our real selves, as interwoven with the warp and woof of our lives as are any of our waking thoughts. Even dreams have a reason.

The answer is simple. The cause is hidden below the surface. If we try to explain ourselves on the basis of the open-to-inspection part of our minds, we must come to the conclusion that we are queer creatures indeed. Only by assuming that there is more to us than we know, can we find any rational basis for the way we think and feel and act.

We must infer the subconscious from what it does. Things happen,—there must be a cause. Some of the things that happen presuppose imagination, reason, intelligence, will, emotion, desire, all the elements of mind. We cannot see this mind, but we can see its products. To deny the subconscious is to deny the artist while looking at his picture, to disbelieve in the poet while reading his poem, and to doubt the existence of the explosive while listening to the report. The subconscious is an artist, a poet, and an explosive by turns. If we deny its existence, a good portion of man's doings are unintelligible. If we admit it, many of his actions and his afflictions which have seemed absurd stand out in a new light as purposeful efforts with a real and adequate cause.

Ancestral Memories

Race-Memories. An individual as he stands at any moment is the product of his past,—the past which he has inherited and the past which he has lived. In other words, he is a bundle of memories accumulated through the experience of the race, and through his own experience as a person. Some of these memories are conscious, and these he calls his, while others fail to reach consciousness and are not recognized as part of his assets.

First Aid to the Injured. In times of infection or injury, this subconscious manager is better than any doctor. The doctors say with truth that they only assist nature. If the infection is internal, antitoxins are produced within the body. If the injury is external, like a cut, the messages fly, and white blood-corpuscles are marshaled to take care of poisons and build up the tissue. If the injury is of the kind that needs rest, the subconscious doctor knows it. He therefore causes pain and rigidity, in order to induce us to hold the injured part still until it is restored.

A Tireless Servant. When the conscious mind undertakes a job, it is always more or less subject to fatigue. But the subconscious after its long practice seems never to tire. We say that its activities have become automatic. With all its inherited skill, the subconscious, if left to itself, can be depended upon to run the bodily machinery without effort and without hitch. The only things that can interfere with its work are the wrong kind of emotions and the wrong kind of suggestions from the conscious mind. Barring these, it goes its way like a trusty servant, looking after details and leaving its master's mind free for other things. Having been "in the family" for generations, it knows its business and resents any interference with its duties or any infringement of its rights.

No man, then, comes into this world without inheritance: he receives from his ancestors two goodly sets of heirlooms, the instincts and the mechanism which carries on bodily functions. This is the capital with which man starts life; but immediately he begins increasing this capital, adding memories from his own experience to the accumulated race-records.

No more startling secret has been unearthed by science than the discovery of the length and minuteness of our memories. No matter how much one may think he has forgotten, the tablets of his mind are closely written with records of infinitesimal experiences, shadowy sensations, old happenings which the conscious self has lost entirely and would scarcely recognize as its own. Many of these brain records, or neurograms, as Prince calls them, are never aroused from their dormant conditions. But others, aroused by emotion or association of ideas, may after years of inactivity, come forth again either as conscious memories or as subconscious forces, or even as physiological memories,—bodily repetitions of the pains, palpitations, and tremors of old emotional experiences.

It is indeed true that the child is father to the man. Those first impressionable years, when we believed implicitly whatever any one told us and when through ignorance we reacted emotionally to ordinary experiences, are molding us still, making us the men and women we are to-day, coloring with childish ideas many of the attitudes of our supposedly reasoning life. Bergson says:

The answer to these questions is determined by one important fact; the line between the conscious and subconscious minds does not always remain in the same place; the "threshold of consciousness" is sometimes displaced, automatically allowing these buried memories to come to the surface. In sleep and delirium, in trance and hallucination, in hysteria and intoxication, the tables are turned; the restraining hand of the conscious mind is loosened and the submerged self comes forth with all its ancient memories.

The mother verified this scene of the first walking, saying that it had occurred on her own wedding-anniversary when the child was twenty-three months old.

While she was awake she had no recollection of having seen the poem and was indeed in her dissociated state quite incapable of understanding its meaning. Asleep, she saw every word as plainly as if the page had been before her eyes.

The distorted pictures of dreams are always made of the material which past experiences have furnished and which have in many cases been dropped out of consciousness for years only to rise out of their long oblivion when the conscious mind has been put to sleep.

Back-Door Memories. There are other kinds of memories which hide in the subconscious, memories of experiences which have not come in by the front door, but have entered the mind during special states, such as sleep, delirium, intoxication, or hypnosis. What is known as post-hypnotic suggestion is the functioning of a suggestion received during hypnosis and emerging later as an impulse without being recognized as a memory. A man in a hypnotic state is told that at five o'clock he will take off his clothes and go to bed, without remembering that such a suggestion has been given him. He awakens with no recollection of the suggestion, but at five o'clock he suddenly feels impelled to go to bed, even though his unreasonable desire puts him into a highly embarrassing position. The suggestion, to be thus effective, must have been conserved somewhere in his mind outside of consciousness.

In this case the wish had originally flashed into awareness for an instant, but very often the impulse never gets into consciousness at all. The upper layers of the subconscious, where the acquired ideals live, automatically work to keep down any desires which are thought to be out of keeping with the person as he knows himself. He then would emphatically deny that such desires had ever had any place in his life.

Freud has called this repressing force the psychic censor. To get into consciousness, any idea from the subconscious must be able to pass this censor. This force seems to be a combination of the self-regarding and herd-instincts, which dispute with the instinct for reproduction the right to "the common path" for expression.

Some Habits of the Subconscious

Displacement. Association or grouping is, then, an intrinsic power of mind; but as all life seems to be built on opposites—light and darkness, heat and cold, love and hate—so mind, which is capable of association, is capable also of displacement or the splitting apart of elements which belong together. There is such a thing as the simple breaking up of complexes, when education or experience or neglect separate ideas and emotions which had been previously welded together; but displacement is another matter. Here there is still a path between idea and emotion; they still belong to the same complex, but the connection is lost sight of. The impulse or emotion attaches itself to another substitute idea which is related to the first but which is more acceptable to the personality. Sometimes the original idea is forgotten; repressed, or dissociated into the subconscious, as in anxiety neurosis; and sometimes it is merely shorn of its emotional interest and remembered as an unrelated or insignificant idea, as in compulsion neurosis.

Transference is subconsciously identifying one person with another and behaving toward the one as if he were that other. Analysis has discovered that many a man's hostile attitude toward the state or religion or authority in general, is nothing more than this kind of displacement of his childhood's attitude toward authority in the person of his perhaps too-domineering father. Many a woman has married a husband, not for what he was in himself, but because she unconsciously identified him with her childish image of her father.

However, nature has a remarkable power for righting herself, and it is only under an accumulation of unfortunate circumstances that there appears a neurosis, which is nothing more than a functioning of certain parts of the personality with all the rest dissociated. We shall later inquire more fully into the causes that lead up to such a result and shall find that the mechanisms involved are these processes of organization and disorganization by which mind is wont to group together or separate the various elements within its borders.

Summary

Gathering up our impressions, we find a number of outstanding qualities which we may summarize in the following way:

The Subconscious is:

1   Vast yet Explorable

4   Emotional yet Intellectual

Our records of the past are not dead archives, but living forces—persistent, urging, dynamic and emotional. They give meaning to new experiences, color our judgments, shape our beliefs, determine our interests, and, if wrongly handled, make their way into consciousness as neurotic symptoms.

However, the subconscious is not all emotion. It is a mind capable of elaborate thought, able to calculate, to scheme, to answer doubts, to solve problems, to fabricate the purposeful, fantastic allegories of dreams and to create from mere knowledge the inspired works of genius.

But the subconscious has one great limitation, it cannot reason inductively. Given a premise, this mind can reason as unerringly as the most skilful logician; that is, it can reason deductively, but it cannot arrive at a general conclusion from a number of particular facts. However, except for inductive reasoning and awareness, the subconscious seems to possess all the attributes of conscious mind and is in fact an intellectual force to be reckoned with.

The subconscious mind is a highly organized institution, but like all such institutions it is liable to disorganization when rent by internal dissension. Ordinarily it keeps its ideas and emotions, its complexes and moods in fairly accurate order, but when upset by emotional warfare, it gets its records confused and falls into a chaotic state which makes regular business impossible.

6   Masterful yet Obedient

The subconscious, which is master of the body, is in normal life the servant of consciousness. One of its outstanding qualities is suggestibility. Since it cannot reason from particulars to a general conclusion it takes any statement given it by consciousness, believes it implicitly and acts accordingly.

The pilot wheel of the ship is, after all, the conscious mind, insignificant in size when compared with the great mass of the vessel, but all-powerful in its ability to direct the course of the voyage.

If, as many believe, the next great strides of science are to be in this direction, it may pay some of us to be pioneers in learning how to make use of these undeveloped riches of memory, organization, and surplus energy. The subconscious, which can on occasion behave like a very devil within us, is, when rightly used, our greatest asset, the source of powers whose appearance in the occasional individual has been considered almost superhuman, but which prove to be characteristically human, the common inheritance of the race of man.

The Contagion of Ideas

One of the most important points about the subconscious mind is its openness to suggestion. It likes to believe what it is told and to act accordingly. The conscious mind, too,—proud seat of reason though it may be,—shares this habit of accepting ideas without demanding too much proof of their truth. Even at his best, man is extremely susceptible to the contagion of ideas. Most of us are even less immune to this mental contagion than we are to colds or influenza; for ideas are catching. They are such subtle, insinuating things that they creep into our minds without our knowing it at all; and once there, they are as powerful as most germs.

The training of children, also, if it is done in the right way, is largely a matter of suggestion. The little child who falls down and bumps his head is very likely to cry if met with a sympathetic show of concern, while the same child will often take his mishaps as a joke if his elders meet them with a laugh or a diverting remark. Unlucky is the child whose mother does not know, either consciously or intuitively, that example and contagion are more powerful—and more pleasant—than command and prohibition.

It was through experiments on hypnotized subjects that scientists first learned of the suggestibility of the subconscious mind. In hypnosis a person can be made to believe almost anything and to do almost anything compatible with the safety and the moral sense of the individual. The instinct of self-preservation will not allow the most deeply hypnotized person to do anything dangerous to himself; and the moral complexes, laid in the subconscious, never permit a person to perform in earnest an act of which the waking moral sense would disapprove. Within these limits, a person in the dissociated hypnotic state can be made to accept almost any suggestion. We found in the last chapter how open to suggestion is a person in normal sleep. Of the dissociation of hysteria we shall have occasion to speak in later chapters. Although all these special states heighten suggestibility, we must not forget how susceptible each of us is in his normal waking state.

By injecting a keen sense of disapprobation and skepticism into the hitherto placidly accepted state of disability, by flashing a mirror on the physical and moral attitudes which she was assuming, I was able to rob the pathological complex of its (altogether unconscious) pleasurable feeling-tone, and to restore to its former strength and poise a personality of exceptional native worth and beauty. After a few weeks at my house she was able to walk like a normal person and went back to her work, for good.

Another woman, suffering from chronic constipation, was firmly convinced that her bowels could not move without a cathartic, which I refused to give. However, I did give her some strychnine pills, carefully explaining that they were not for her intestines and that they would have no effect there. She did not believe me, and promptly began to have an evacuation every day. It seems that sometimes two wrong ideas are equal to a right one.

If doctors fully realized the power of suggestion, they would be more careful than they sometimes are about suggesting symptoms by the questions they ask their patients.

A patient of mine with locomotor-ataxia suffered from the usual train of symptoms incident to that disease. It turned out, however, that many of the symptoms had been suggested by the questions of former physicians who had asked him whether he had certain symptoms and certain disabilities. The patient had answered in the negative and then promptly developed the suggested symptoms. When I told him what had happened, these false symptoms disappeared leaving only those which had a real physical foundation.

Autosuggestion. Of course we must remember that an idea cannot always work itself out immediately. Conditions are not always ripe. It often lies fallow a long time, buried in the subconscious, only to come up again as an autosuggestion, a suggestion from the self to the self. If some one tells us that nervous insomnia is disastrous, and we believe it, we shall probably store up the idea until the next time that chance conditions keep us awake. Then the autosuggestion "bobs up," common sense is side-tracked, we toss and worry—and of course stay awake. An autosuggestion often repeated becomes the strongest of suggestions, successfully opposing most outside ideas that would counteract it,—reason enough for seeing to it that our autosuggestions are of the healthful variety.

Why Feelings Count

The Emotions Again. It seems impossible to discuss any psychological principle without finally coming back to the subject of emotions. It truly seems that all roads lead to the instincts and to the emotions which drive them. And so, as we follow the trail of suggestion, we suddenly turn a corner and find ourselves back at our starting-point—the emotional life. Like all other ideas, suggestions get tied up with emotions to form complexes, of which the driving-power is the emotion.

Emotions—Tonic and Poisonous. All this is most important because of one vital fact; joyful emotions invigorate, and sorrowful emotions depress; pleasurable emotions stimulate, and painful emotions burden; satisfying emotions revitalize, and unsatisfying emotions sap the strength. In other words, our bodies are made for courage, confidence, and cheer. Any other atmosphere puts them out of their element, handicapped by abnormal conditions for which they were never fashioned. We were written in a major key, and when we try to change over into minor tones we get sadly out of tune.

Circulation. It is not the heart only that pumps the blood through the body. The tiny muscles of the smallest blood-vessels, by their elasticity are of the greatest importance in maintaining an even flow, and this is especially influenced by fear and depression. Blushing, pallor, cold hands and feet, are circulatory disturbances based largely on emotions. Better than a hot-water bottle or electric pads are courage and optimism. A patient of mine laughingly tells of an incident which she says happened a number of years ago, but which I have forgotten. She says that she asked me one night as she carried her hot-water bottle to bed, "Doctor, what makes cold feet?" and that I lightly answered "Cowardice!" Whereupon she threw away her beloved water-bag and has never needed it since.

Summary

We have emphasized the fact that downcast and fearful moods have an immediate effect on the body; but after all, most people know this already. What they do not know is the real cause of the mood. When a nervous person finds out why he worries, he is well on the way toward recovery. An understanding of the cause is among the most vital discoveries of modern science.

The discussion, so far, has merely prepared us to plunge into the heart of the question: What is it that in the last analysis makes a person nervous, and how may he find his way out? This question the next two chapters will try to answer.

It was found that each of this girl's symptoms was related to some forgotten experience, and that in every case the forgetting seemed to be the result of the painfulness of the experience. In other words, the symptoms were not visitations from without, but expressions from within; they were a part of the mental life of the patient; they had a history and a meaning, and the meaning seemed in some way to be connected with the patient's previous attitude of mind which made the experience too painful to be tolerated in consciousness. These previous ideas were largely subconscious and had been acquired during early childhood. When by means of hypnosis a great mass of forgotten material was brought to the surface and later made plain to her consciousness, the symptoms disappeared as if by magic.

Breuer dropped the work, and after an interval Freud went on alone. He was resolved to know the truth, and to tell what he saw. When he reported to the world that out of all his hundreds of patients, he had been unable, after the most careful analysis, to find one whose illness did not grow from some lack of adjustment of the sex-life, he was met by a storm of protest from all quarters. No amount of evidence seemed to make any difference. People were determined that no such libel should be heaped on human nature. Sex-urge was not respectable and nervous people were to be respected.

Despite public disapproval, the scorn of other scientists, and the resistance of his own inner prejudices, Freud kept on. He was forced to acknowledge the validity of the facts which invariably presented themselves to view. Like Luther under equal duress, he cried: "Here I stand. I can do no other."

1 There is no chance in mental life; every mental phenomenon—hence every nervous phenomenon—has a cause and meaning.

2 Infantile mental life is of tremendous importance in the direction of adult processes.

3 Much of what is called forgetting is rather a repression into the subconscious, of impulses which were painful to the personality as a whole.

4 Mental processes are dynamic, insisting on discharge, either in reality or in phantasy.

5 An emotion may become detached from the idea to which it belongs and be displaced on other ideas.

6 Sex-interests dominate much of the mental life where their influence is unrecognized. The disturbance in a psycho-neurosis is always in this domain of sex-life. "In a normal sexual life, no neurosis." If a shock is the precipitating cause of the trouble, it is only because the ground was already prepared by the sex-disturbance.

The Causes of "Nerves"

Born or Made? It used to be thought that neurotics, like poets, were born, not made. Heredity was considered wholly responsible, and there seemed very little to do about it. But to-day the emphasis on heredity is steadily giving way to stress on early environment. There are, no doubt, such factors as a certain innate sensitiveness, a natural suggestibility, an intensity of emotion, a little tendency to nervous instability, which predispose a person to nerves, but unless the inborn tendency is reinforced by the reactions and training of early childhood, it is likely to die a natural death.

Childhood Experiences

Early Reactions. Freud found that a neurotic is made before he is six years old. When by repeated explorations into the minds of his patients, he made this important discovery, he at first believed that the disturbing factor was always some single emotional experience or shock in childhood,—usually of a sexual nature. But Freud and later investigators have since found that the trouble is not so often a single experience as a long series of exaggerated emotional reactions, a too intense emotional life, a precocity in feeling tending toward fixation of childhood habits, which are thus carried over into adult life.

We saw in Chapter IV that Nature takes great pains to develop in the child the psychic and physical trends which he will need later on in his mature love-life, and that this training is accomplished in a number of well-defined periods which lead from one to the other. If, however, the child reacts too intensely, lingers too long in any one of these phases, he lays for himself action lines of least resistance which he may never leave or to which he may return during the strain and stress of adult life.

In either case, the neurotic is a grown-up child. He may be a very learned, very charming person, but he is nevertheless dragging behind him a part of his childhood which he should have outgrown long ago. Part of him is suffering from an arrest of development,—not a leg or an arm but an impulse.

Let us examine each of these arrested habits and the excess emotion which sets the mold before it is ready for maturity.

Perhaps it is another phase of self-love which holds the child too much. If, like Narcissus, he becomes too fond of looking at himself, is too eager to show off, too desirous of winning praise, then forever after he is likely to be self-conscious, self-centered, thinking always of the impression he is making, unable ever to be at leisure from himself. He is fixed in the Narcissistic stage of his life, and is unadapted to the world of social relations.

Restraint versus Denial. Repression is not merely restraint. It is restraint plus denial. To the clamoring instinct we say not merely, "No, you may not," but "No, you are not. You do not exist. Nothing like you could belong to me." The woman with nausea (Chapter V) did not say to herself: "You are a normal, healthy woman, possessed of a normal woman's desires. But wait a while until the proper time comes." Controlled by an immature feeling of disgust, she had said: "I never thought it. It cannot be."

Childish Birth-theories. When a child's questions about where babies come from are met by evasions, he is forced to manufacture his own theories. His elders would laugh if they knew some of these theories, but they would not laugh if they knew how often the childish ideas, wide of the truth, furnish the material for future neuroses. Frink tells the story of a young woman who had a compulsion for taking drugs. Although not a drug-fiend in the usual sense, she was constantly impelled to take any kind of drug she could obtain. It was finally revealed that during her childhood she had tried hard to discover how babies were made, and had at last concluded that they grew in the mother as a result of some medicine furnished by the doctor. The idea had long been forgotten, only to reappear as a compulsion. The natural desire for a child was strong in her, but was repressed as unholy in an unmarried woman. The associated childish idea of drug-taking was not repellent to her moral sense and was used as a substitute for the real desire to bear a child.

As opportunity offered itself from day to day, I would catch her compulsive ideas in the very act of expressing themselves, and would pin her down as to the association and the source of her fear, always taking care not to make suggestions or ask leading questions. She was finally convinced out of her own mouth that her real fear was the idea of something getting into her body and growing there. Then she told how she had questioned her mother about the reproductive life and had been put off with signs of embarrassment. For a long time she had been afraid to walk or talk with a boy, because, not knowing how conception might occur, she feared grave consequences.

Children gratify many of their desires simply by imagining them gratified. Much of the difficulty of later life might be avoided if the little child could be taught to work for the accomplishment of his pleasures rather than to dream of them. The normal child gradually abandons this "pleasure-thinking" for the more purposeful thinking of the actual world, but the child who loiters too long in the realm of fancy may ever after find it hard to keep away from its borders. His natural interest in sex, if artificially repressed, is especially prone to satisfy itself by way of phantasy.

Turning back to Phantasy. In later life, when the love-force for one reason or another becomes too strong to be handled either directly or indirectly in the real world, there comes the almost irresistible impulse to regress to the infantile way and to find expression by means of phantasy. After long experience Freud concluded that phantasy lies at the root of every neurosis. Jung says that a sex-phantasy is always at least one determiner of a nervous illness, and Jelliffe writes that the essence of the neurosis is a special activity of the imagination.

Later Experiences

Serving a Purpose

A neurosis is a subconscious effort at adjustment. Like a physical symptom, it is Nature's way of trying to cure herself. It is an attempt to get equilibrium, but it is an awkward attempt and hardly the kind that we would choose when we see what we are doing.

Securing an Audience. Besides furnishing relief from too intense strain, a nervous breakdown brings secondary advantages that are at most only dimly recognized by the individual. One of the most intense cravings of the primitive part of the subconscious is for an audience; a nervous symptom always secures that audience. The invalid is the object of the solicitous care of the family, friends, physician, and specialist. Pomp and ceremony, so dear to the child-mind, make their appeal to the dissociated part of the personality. The repressed instincts, hungry for love and attention, delight in the petting and special care which an illness is sure to bring. Secretly and unconsciously, the neurotic takes a certain pleasure in all the various changes that are made for his benefit,—the dismantling of striking clocks, the muffling of household noises, the banishing of crowing roosters, and the changes in menu which must be carefully planned for his stomach.

Capitalizing an Illness. Then, too, a neurosis provides a way of escape from all sorts of disagreeable duties. It can be capitalized in innumerable ways,—ways that would horrify the invalid if he realized the truth. Much of the resentment manifested against the suggestion that the neurosis is psychic in origin is simply a resistance against giving up the unconsciously enjoyed advantages of the illness. An honest desire to get well is a long step toward cure.

The Right Kind of Symbolism. Sublimation itself is merely a symbolic expression of basic impulses. It follows the line of our make-up, which naturally and fundamentally is wont to let one thing stand for another and to express itself in indirect ways. Sublimation says: "If I cannot recreate myself in the person of a child, I will recreate myself in making a bridge, or a picture, or a social settlement,—or a pudding." It says: "If I cannot have my own child to love, I will adopt an orphan-asylum, or I will work for a child-labor law." It merely lets one thing stand for another and transfers all the passions that belong to the one on to the other, which is the same thing as saying that it gives vent to its original desire by means of symbolic expression.

The Case of Mrs. Y. There came to me a short time ago a little woman whose face showed intense fright. For several months she had spent much of the time walking the floor and wringing her hands in an agony of terror. In the night she would waken from her sleep, shaking with fear; soon she would be retching and vomiting, although she herself recognized the fact that there was nothing the matter with her stomach.

Part of the time her fear was a general terror of some unknown thing, and part of the time it was a specialized fear of great intensity. She was afraid she would choke her son, to whom she was passionately devoted. During the course of the treatment, which followed the lines of psycho-analysis to be described in the next chapter, I found that this fear had arisen one evening when she was lying reading by the side of her sleeping child. Suddenly, without warning, she had a sort of mental picture of her own hands reaching out and choking the boy. Naturally she was terrified. She jumped out of bed, decided that she was losing her mind and went into a hysterical state which her husband had great trouble in dispelling. After that she was afraid to be left alone with her children lest she should kill them.

Summary

Three Kinds of People. Absurd as it sounds, "nerves" turn out to be a question of morals; a neurosis, an affair of conscience; a nervous symptom an unsettled ethical struggle. The ethical struggle is not unusual; it is a normal part of man's life, the natural result of his desire to change into a more civilized being. The people in the world may be divided into three classes, according to the way they decide the conflict.

The Salt of the Earth. The second class of people decide the conflict in a way that satisfies both themselves and society. They give the victory to the higher trends and at the same time make a lasting peace by winning over the energy of the undesirable impulses. By sublimation they divert the threatening force to useful work and turn it out into real life, using its steam to make the world's wheels go round. Their love-force, unhampered by childish habits, is free to give itself to adult relationships or to express itself symbolically in socially helpful ways.

A neurotic is a normal person, "only more so." His impulses are the same impulses as those of every other person; his complexes are the same kind of complexes, only more intense. He is an exaggerated human being. He may be only slightly exaggerated, showing merely a little character-weakness or a slight physical symptom, or he may be so intensified as to make life miserable for himself and everybody near him. It is quantity, not quality, that ails him, for he differs from his steady-going neighbor not in kind but in degree. More of him is repressed and a larger part of him is fixed in a childish mold.

Tricking Ourselves. A neurosis is a confidence game that we play on ourselves. It is an attempt to get stolen fruit and to look pious at the same time,—not in order to fool somebody else but to fool ourselves.

Although the true meaning of a symptom is hidden, there is fortunately a clue by which it can be traced. Sometimes it takes the art of a psychic detective to follow the clues down, down through the different layers of the subconscious mind, until the troublesome impulses and complexes are found and dragged forth,—not to be punished for breaking the peace but to be led toward reconciliation. But "that is another story," and belongs to another chapter. We are approaching THE WAY OUT.

PART III—THE MASTERY OF "NERVES"

Since there are as many married neurotics as single, it is evident that even marriage is not a sure preventive of nervousness. License, on the other hand, can satisfy only a part of the individual's craving. Freud insists that the sex-instinct has a psychic component as well as a physical one, and that it is this psychic part which is most often repressed. He maintains that for complete satisfaction there must be psychic union between mates, and that gratification of the physical component of sex when dissociated from psychic satisfaction, results in an accumulation of tension that reacts badly on the whole organism.

Remaking Ourselves. As a matter of fact, the science of psychotherapy or mental treatment is simply the science of re-education,—a process designed to break up old unhealthy complexes which disrupt the forces of the individual, and to build up healthy complexes which adjust him to the social world and enable him to use his energy in useful ways.

Fortunately, minds can be changed. It is easier to make over an unhealthy complex than to make over a weak heart, to straighten out a warped idea than to straighten a bent back. Remarkable indeed have been some of the transformations in people who are supposed to have passed the plastic period in life. While it is true that some persons become "set" in middle life, and almost impervious to new ideas, it is also true that a person at fifty has more richness of experience upon which to draw, more appreciation of the value of the good, than has a person at twenty. If he really wants to change himself, he can do wonderful things by re-education.

Various Methods. As there are a number of schools of medicine, so there are a number of distinct methods of psychotherapy, each with its own theories and methods of procedure, and each with its ardent supporters. These methods may be classified into two groups. The first group includes those methods, hypnosis and psycho-analysis, which make a thorough search through the subconscious mind for the buried complexes causing the trouble, and might, therefore, be called "re-education with subconscious exploration." The other group, includes so-called explanation and suggestion, or methods of "re-education without subconscious exploration," which content themselves with making a general survey and building up new complexes without going to the trouble of uncovering the buried past. Although the theory and the technique vary greatly, the aim of all these methods is the same,—the readjustment of the individual to life.

Hypnosis. The method by which most of the important early discoveries were made is hypnosis, or artificial sleep, a method by which the conscious mind is dissociated and the subconscious brought to the fore. It was through hypnosis that Freud, Janet, Prince, and Sidis made their first investigations into the nature of nervousness and worked their first cures. With the conscious mind asleep and its inhibitions out of the way, a hypnotized patient is often able to remember and to disclose to the physician hidden complexes of which he is unaware when awake. Hypnosis may thus be a valuable aid to diagnosis, enabling the physician to determine the cause of troublesome symptoms. He may then begin to make suggestions calculated to break up the old complexes and to build new ones, made up of more healthful ideas, desirable emotions and happy feeling-tones. As we have seen, a hypnotized subject is highly suggestible. His counter-suggestions inactivated, he believes almost anything told him and is extremely susceptible to the doctor's influence.

Since nervousness is a state of exaggerated suggestibility and abnormal dissociation, many psychologists believe that it is unwise to employ a method which heightens the state of suggestibility and encourages the habit of dissociation. They feel that it is wiser to use less artificial methods which rest on the rational control of the conscious mind and make the patient better acquainted with his own inner forces and more permanently able to cope with new manifestations of those forces. They believe that the character of the patient is strengthened and his morale raised by methods which increase the sovereignty of reason and decrease the role of unreasoning suggestibility.

In this way, thoughts in consciousness and in the upper layers of the subconscious are connected by a series of associations, forming links in invisible chains that lead to the deepest, most repressed ideas. Even a dissociated complex has some connection with the rest of the mind, if we only have the patience to discover it. Therefore, by adopting a passive attitude, by simply letting his thoughts wander, by talking out to the physician everything that comes to his mind without criticizing or calling any thought irrelevant or far-fetched, and without rejecting any thought because of its painful character, the patient is helped to trace down and unearth the troublesome complex which may have been absolutely forgotten for many years. He is helped to relive the childhood experiences back of the over-strong habits which lasted into maturity.

The trouble is that he has overlooked the word "disguised." Like wit and some figures of speech, a dream says something different from what it means. It deals in symbols. Its "manifest content" may be merely a fantastic and impossible scene without apparent rhyme or reason, but the "latent content," the hidden meaning, always expresses some urgent personal problem. Although the dream may seem to be impersonal and unemotional, it nevertheless deals in every case with some matter of vital concern to the dreamer himself. It is a condensed and composite picture of some present problem and of some related childish repressed wish which the experiences of the preceding day have aroused.

As Frink says, a dream is like a cartoon with the labels omitted—absolutely unintelligible until its symbols are interpreted. Although some dreams whose symbolism is that which man has always used, can be easily understood by a person who knows, many dreams are meaningless, even to an experienced analyst, until the patient himself furnishes the labels by telling what each bit of the picture brings to his mind. The dream, as a rule, merely furnishes the starting-point for free association.

One of my patients blocked on the word "long." Instead of saying "short" or "pencil" or "road" or "day" or any other word which might naturally be associated with "long," she laughed and said that no word would come. Finally an emotional memory came to light. It seems that this woman had been courted by a man whom she unconsciously loved, but whom she had "turned down" because she was ambitious for a career. After the man had moved to another town, my patient heard that he was engaged to another girl. She then realized that she loved him and began to long for him with her whole heart. The meaningful word "long" thus led us to one of the emotional memories for which we were seeking.

During an analysis a patient of mine who had a mother-in-law situation on her hands told me a dream of the night before. "I dreamed that my mother-in-law, who has really been very ill, was taken with a sinking-spell. I rushed to the telephone to call the doctor, but found to my terror that I could not remember his number." "What is his number?" I asked, knowing that she ought to know it perfectly. "Two-eight-nine-six," she answered at once. The number really was 2876. Asleep and awake, her repressed desire for release from the mother-in-law's querulous presence was attempting to have its way. In the dream, she avoided calling the doctor by forgetting his number entirely. Awake, she evaded the issue by remembering a wrong number. In the dream she thinly disguised her desire by displacing the anxious emotion from the sense of her own guilty wishes to the idea of the mother-in-law's death. When confronted with this interpretation, the woman readily acknowledged its truth.

Psycho-analysis is not a process of addition, but one of subtraction. Like a surgical operation, it undoes the results of old injuries, removes foreign material, and gives nature a chance to develop freely in her own satisfactory way.

Re-education without Subconscious Exploration

The subconscious makes its own deductions. If resistances are not too strong it is often possible to introduce healthy ideas by way of the conscious reason, to break up old habits, and make over the mentality without going to the trouble of uncovering some of the reactions which are responsible for the difficulty.

This kind of mental and moral treatment has been sufficient to cure many neuroses of long standing. In cases that are helped by this method, the patient's love-force, robbed of the material out of which it has woven its disguise, and trained out of its bad habits by re-education, automatically makes its own readjustments and forces new channels for itself out into more useful activities. Very many nervous persons seem to need nothing more than this simple kind of help.

Psychological Explanation

Between the two extremes of the cases which need a real analysis and those which are cured by simple explanation, I have found the great bulk of nervous cases. To simple explanation with its highly useful information, I therefore add what might be called psychological explanation, a re-education which makes use of all that illuminating material unearthed by the explorations of hypnosis and especially of psycho-analysis. Along with correct ideas about such matters as digestion, sleep, and fatigue, I give, so far as the patient is able to understand, a comprehension of the rights of the denied instincts, the ways of the subconscious, the fettering hold of unfortunate childish habits, the various mental mechanisms by which we fool ourselves, and the ways by which we may make better adaptations.

In any case, I give the patients as much as they are able to take of my own understanding of the subject. There are no secrets in this method. The patient is treated as a rational human being who has nothing to lose and everything to gain by the fullest knowledge that he is able to acquire. Without forcing him to plunge in over his depth, I encourage him to understand himself to the fullest possible extent. Besides individual private conferences, we have twice a day an informal gathering of all the patients in my household—"the family" as we like to call ourselves—for a reading or talk on the various ways of the body and the mind, which need to be understood for normal living and for the cure of nerves. Very often people of only average education, long without the opportunity of study, gain in a surprisingly short time enough insight to make new adaptations and cure themselves. For this, a college education is not nearly so important as an open mind. It is because of the success of this method that I have been encouraged to reach a larger number of people by means of a book, based on the same plan of re-education.

Freud illustrates the difference between suggestion and psycho-analysis by saying that suggestion is like painting and psycho-analysis like sculpture. Painting adds something from the outside, plastering over the canvas with extraneous matter, while sculpture cuts away the unnecessary material and reveals the angel in the marble. So suggestion covers over the real trouble by crying, "Peace, peace, when there is no peace." Without attempting to remove the cause, it says to the patient: "You have no pain. You are not tired. You will sleep to-night. You will be cheerful." Sometimes the suggestion works and sometimes it does not, but at best the relief is likely to be a mere temporary makeshift. The symptom may be relieved, but the character is not changed and therefore no permanent relief is assured. It is far better for a nervous person to say to himself, "There is something wrong and I am going to find it," than to keep repeating over and over, "There is nothing wrong," and so on through a list of half-believed autosuggestions.

The "Bullying Method." Sometimes, to be sure, explanation is not enough. The brain paths between the associated ideas are so deeply worn that no amount of persuasion avails. It is easy for the doubter to say: "Well, that sounds very well, but my case is different. I have tried over and over again and I know." With people of this sort, an ounce of demonstration is worth a pound of argument.

By way of illustration we might mention the man who couldn't eat eggs. To be sure, he had tried many times but always had suffered the most intense cramps in his stomach, and no amount of talk could make him believe that an egg was not poison to him. I took the straight road of simply proving to him that he was mistaken, and had him eat an egg. After a time of apprehension and retching, he vomited the egg, thinking, of course, that he had proved his point. To his astonishment, I said, "Now, let's go and eat another." With great consternation, he finally complied, evidently expecting to die on the spot; but as I immediately prescribed a game of tennis, he scarcely had time to think of the pain, which in fact failed to appear. However, as he thereafter insisted on eating four eggs a day,—with eggs at top-notch price I decided that the joke was on the doctor!

Some people enjoy being martyrs. They love to tell about the terrible strain they have been under, the amount of work they have done, or the number of times they have collapsed. One of my patients gave every evidence of satisfaction as he told about his various breakdowns. "The last time I was ill," or "That time when I was in the sanatorium," were frequent phrases on his lips. Finally, after I had asked him if he would boast about the number of times he had awkwardly fallen down in the street, and had shown him that a neurosis is not really a matter to be proud of, he saw the point and stopped taking pleasure in his mistakes.

As Putnam says, the slogan of the suggestion-school of psychotherapy has always been, "You can do better if you try"; while that of the psycho-analytic school is, "You can do better when you know." Refuting the old adage, "Where ignorance is bliss 'tis folly to be wise," the best methods of psychotherapy insist that the first step in any thorough-going attempt to change oneself must be the great step of self-knowledge. As the conflicts which result in "nerves" are always far beyond those mental regions which are open to scrutiny, a real self-knowledge requires an examination of the half-conscious or wholly unconscious longings which are usually ignored. A real understanding of self comes only when one is willing, to analyze his motives until he sees the connection between them and his nervous symptoms, which are but the symbolic gratification of desires he dares not acknowledge.

The Future Hope. Much has been said about the cure of a neurosis. There are enough people already in the maze of nervousness to warrant the setting up of numerous signs reading, "This way out." But after all, is not a blocking of the way in of vastly more importance? As it is always easier to prevent than to cure, so it is easier to train than to reform. If re-education is the cure, why is not education the ounce of prevention which shall settle the problem for all time?

If the general public understood what "nerves" are, it is hardly conceivable that there could be so many breakdowns as there are at present. If a man's family and friends, to say nothing of himself, understood what he is doing when he suddenly collapses and has to quit work, it is not likely that he would choose that way out of his difficulties.

Most important of all, when parents know that the foundation of nervousness is laid in childhood, they will see to it that their children are started right on the road to health. When fathers and mothers realize that an over-strong bond between parents and children is responsible for a large proportion of nervous troubles, most of them will make sure that such exaggeration is not allowed to develop.

Again Professor James says:

Physiological Fatigue

Fatigue, not Exhaustion. In the first place, then, fatigue very seldom means a lack of strength or an exhaustion of energy. The average man in the course of a lifetime probably never knows what it is to be truly exhausted. If he should become so tired that he could in no circumstances run for his life, no matter how many wild beasts were after him, then it might seem that he had drained himself of all his store of energy. But even in that case, a large part of his fatigue would be the result of another cause.

Besides the products of combustion, there are always to be washed away some broken-down particles from the tissues themselves, which, like all machinery, are being continuously worn out and repaired. By chemical tests in the laboratory, the physiologist finds that a muscle which has recently been in violent exercise contains among other things carbon dioxid, urea, creatin, and sarco-lactic acid, none of which are found in a rested muscle. Since all this debris is acid in reaction and since we are "marine animals," at home only in salt water or alkaline solution, the cells must be quickly washed of the fatigue products, which, if allowed to accumulate, would very soon poison the body and put out the fires.

If through some flaw in the machine, waste products do pile up, they destroy the machine. If the heart leaks or the blood-cells fail in their carrying-power, or if lungs, kidneys or skin are out of repair, there is sometimes an accumulation of fatigue products which poisons the whole system and ends in death. But the person with tuberculosis or heart trouble does not usually allow this to happen. The body incapacitated by disease limits its activities as closely as possible within the range of its power to take care of waste matter. Even the sick body does not carry about its old toxins. The man who had not eliminated the poisons of a month-old effort would not be a tired man. He would be a dead man.

The whole arrangement illustrates the wonderful provisions of Nature. Although each individual is continuously manufacturing enough carbonic-acid gas to kill himself in a very few minutes, he need not be alarmed for fear that he may forget to expel his own poisons. Nobody can hold his breath for more than a few minutes. The naughty baby sometimes tries, but when he begins to get black in the face, he takes a breath in spite of himself. The presence of carbonic-acid gas in the circulation automatically regulates breathing, and the greater the amount of gas the deeper the breath. The faster we burn the faster we blow. As with breathing, so with all the rest of elimination and repair. The body dares not get behind.

One day after a long walk my little daughter said that she could go no farther and waited to be carried. But she soon spied a dog on ahead and ran off after him with new zest. She followed the dog back and forth, running more than a mile before she reached home, and then in the exuberance of her spirits, ran around the house three times.

"Decent Hygienic Conditions." If fatigue products cannot pile up, why is extra rest ever needed? Because there is a limit to the supply of fuel. If the fat-supply stored away for such emergencies finally becomes low, we may need an extra dose of sleeping and eating in order to let the reservoirs fill again. But this never takes very long. The body soon fills in its reserves if it has anything like common-sense care. The doctrine of reserve energy does not warrant a careless burning of the candle at both ends. It presupposes "decent hygienic conditions,"—eight hours in bed, three square meals a day, and a fair amount of fresh air and exercise.

In the second place, fatigue shows itself to be closely bound up with emotions and instincts. The great releasers of energy are the instincts. What but the mothering instinct and the love of country could uncover all those unsuspected reserves of Dr. Girard-Mangin and others of her kind? What is it but the enthusiasm for work which explains the indefatigable energy of Edison and Roosevelt? If the wrong kind of emotion locks up energy, the right kind just as surely unlocks great stores which have hitherto lain dormant. If most people live below their possibilities, it is either because they have not learned how to utilize the energy of their instinctive emotions in the work they find to do, or because some of their strongest instincts which are meant to supply motive power to the rest of life are locked away by false ideas and unnecessary repressions, and so fail to feed in the energy which they control. In such a case, the "spring tonic" that is needed is a self-knowledge which shall release us from hampering inhibitions and set us free for enthusiastic self-expression.

What of the Nervous Invalid? If the normal man lives constantly below his maximum, what shall we say of the nervous invalid? Fatigability is the very earmark of his condition. In many instances he seems scarcely able to raise his hand to his head. Sometimes he can scarcely speak for weariness. Frequently to walk a block sends him to bed for a week. I once had a patient who felt that she had to raise her eyelids very slowly for fear of over-exertion. She could speak only about two or three words a day, the rest of the time talking in whispers. She could not raise a glass to her lips if it were full of water, but could manage it if only half full. A person nearly dead with some fatal disease does not appear more powerless than a typical neurasthenic.

Stories of Real People. Perhaps if we look over the stories of a few people who have been members of my household, we may work our way to an understanding of the truth. We give only the barest outline of the facts, thinking that the cumulative effect of a number of cases will outweigh a more detailed description of one or two. The most casual survey shows that whatever it was that burdened these fine men and women, it was not lack of energy. No matter how extreme had been their exhaustion, they were able at once, without rest or any other physical treatment, to summon strength for exertions quite up to those of a normal person.

The second point that stands out clearly to any one acquainted with these inner histories is the conviction that in each case the trouble was related in some way to the unsatisfied love-life, to the insistent and thwarted instinct of reproduction. In some cases no search was made for the cause. The simple explanation that there was no lack of power was sufficient to release inhibited energy. But in every case where the cause was sought, it was found to be some outer lack of satisfaction, or some inner repression of the love-force.

Making Her Own Discoveries. Then there was Miss B. who for four years had been "exhausted." She had such severe pains in her legs that she was almost helpless. If she sewed for half an hour on the sewing machine, she would be in bed for two weeks. Although she was engaged to be married, she could not possibly shop for her trousseau. Two years before, a very able surgeon had been of the opinion that the pain in the legs was caused by an ovarian tumor. He removed the tumor, assuring the patient that she would be cured. However, despite the operation and the force of the suggestion, the pains persisted.

Afraid of Heat. Professor X., of a large Eastern college, had been incapacitated for four years with a severe fatigue neurosis and an intense fear of heat. Constantly watching the weather reports, he was in the habit of fleeing to the Maine coast whenever the weather-prophet predicted warm weather. After a short re.ëducation, he discovered that his fatigue was symbolic of an inner feeling of inadequacy, and that it bore no relation to his body. Discarding his weariness and throwing all his energies into the Liberty Loan Campaign, he found himself speaking almost continuously throughout one of the hottest days in the history of California, with the thermometer standing at 107 degrees. After that he had no doubt as to his cure.

Empty Hands. Miss Y., a fine woman of middle age, suffering from extreme fatigue could neither sleep nor eat. She could only weep. She had spent her life taking care of an invalid girl who had recently died. Now her hands were empty. Like many a mother whose family has grown up, she had no outlet for her mothering instinct, and her sense of impotency expressed itself in the only way it knew how,—through her body. As there is never any lack of unselfish work to be done, or of people who need mothering, she soon found herself and learned how to sublimate her energy in useful activities.

Left-over Habits. Often a state of fatigue is the result of a carried-over habit. One of my patients, a young girl, had several years before been operated on for exophthalmic goiter. This is a disease of the thyroid gland, and is characterized by rapid heart, extreme fatigue, and numerous other symptoms. Although this girl's goiter had been removed, the symptoms still persisted. She could not walk nor do even a little work, like wiping a few dishes. I took her down on the beach, let her feel her own pulse and mine and then ran with her on the sand. Again I let her feel our pulses and discover for herself that hers had quickened no more than was normal and had slowed down as soon as mine. After a few such lessons, she was convinced that her symptoms were reverberations for which there was no longer any physical cause.

In cases like this the exaggeration proves the counterfeit. Nobody could have been so down and out physically without dying. The exaggeration secures attention and gives the little satisfaction to the natural desires which are denied expression, and which gain an outlet through habit along the lines previously worn by the real disease. Many a person is still suffering from an old pain or an old disability whose cause has long since disappeared, but which is stamped on the mind and believed in as a present reality. Since the sensation is as real as ever, it is sometimes very hard to believe that it is not legitimate, but if the person is intelligent, a little explanation and re-education usually suffices.

The college students who break down are not wrecked by intellectual work. In some cases, one strong factor in their undoing is the strain and readjustment necessary because of the discrepancies between some of their deepest religious beliefs and the truth as they learn it in the class-room. The other factors are merely those which play their part in any neurosis.

In any work, it is the feeling of strain which tells, the emotionalism and feeling sorry for oneself because one has a hard job. It is wonderful what a sense of power comes from the simple idea that we are equal to our tasks.

False Neuritis. Miss T. was suffering from fatigue and very severe pains in her arms, pains which were supposed to be the result of real neuritis, but which did not correspond to the physiological picture of that disease. A consultation revealed the fact that her love-instinct had been repeatedly stimulated, and then at the last, when it had expected satisfaction, had been disappointed. A discussion of her life, its inner forces, and her future aims helped to pull her together again and give her instinct new outlets. The pains and the fatigue disappeared at once.

Locked-up Energy. We do not know just how the soul can make its pain so intensely real to the body, but we do know that any conviction on the part of the subconscious mind is quickly expressed in the physical machine. A conviction of pain or of powerlessness is very soon converted into a feeling which can scarcely be denied. The mere suggestion that the body is overworked is enough to make it tired.

Avoid the Rest-Cure. It is a healthful sign that the rest-cure is fast going out of style. Wherever it has helped a nervous patient, the real curative agent has been the personality of the doctor and the patient's faith in him. The whole theory was based on ignorance of the cause of nerves. People suffering from "nervous exhaustion" are likely to be just as "tired" after a month in bed as they were before. Why not? Physical fatigue is quickly remedied, and what can rest do after that? What possible effect can rest have on the fatigue of a discouraged instinct? Since the best releaser of energy is enthusiasm, don't try to get that by lying around in bed or playing checkers at a health resort.

If you are chronically and perpetually fatigued, or if you tire more easily than the other people you know, consult a competent physician and let him look you over. If he tells you that you have neither tuberculosis, heart trouble, Bright's disease, nor any other demonstrable disease, that you are physically fit and "merely nervous," give yourself a good shake and commit the following paragraphs to memory.

A CATECHISM FOR THE WEARY ONE

Organic Trouble. Unfortunately, there are a few real organic causes for trouble. There are a few cancers of the stomach and a certain number of ulcers. But if the patients whom I have seen are in any way typical, the ulcers that really are cannot compare in number with the ulcers that are supposed to be. Patients go to physicians with so many tales of digestive distress that even the best doctors are fooled unless they are especially alert to the ways of "nerves." They must find some explanation for all the various functional disturbances which the patients report, and as they are in the habit of taking only the body into account, they find the diagnosis of stomach ulcer as satisfactory as any.

There is, of course, such a thing as an enlarged or sagging stomach. But it is only in the rarest of cases that such a condition leads to any functional disturbances unless complicated by suggestion. In most cases a person can go about his business as happily as ever unless he gets the idea that ptosis must inevitably lead to pain and discomfort.

Aside from a few organic difficulties, there is almost no real disease of the stomach. Its misdoings are not matters of food and chemistry, muscle-power and nerve supply, but are the end results of slips in the mental and emotional life of its owner.

Because it is so adaptable and sturdy, the stomach lends itself readily to these devices for gaining self-expression; but the danger lies in bringing the process of digestion into conscious attention which interferes with automatic functioning. Still further, the disregard of physiological chemistry is likely to deprive the body of food-stuffs which it requires.

What We Need to Eat

The Essence of Dietetics. To the layman the average discussion of food principles is, to say the least, confusing. Dealing largely, as it does, with unfamiliar terms like carbohydrate and hydrocarbon and calories, it is hard to translate into the terms of the potatoes left over from dinner and the vegetables we can afford to buy. But the practical deductions are not at all difficult to understand. Boiled down to their simplest terms, the essential principles may be stated in a few sentences. The body must secure from the food that we eat, tissue for its cells, energy for immediate use or to be stored for emergency, mineral salts, vitamins, water and a certain bulk from fruits and vegetables,—this latter to aid in the elimination of waste matter.

What the Market Affords. The moral from all this is plain. The human body needs all the foods which are ordinarily served on the table. Whenever, through fad or through fear, we leave out of our diet any standard food, we are running a risk of cutting the body down on some element which it needs. They say that variety is the spice of life. In the matter of food it is more than that, it is the essence of life. Eat everything that the market affords and you will be sure to be well nourished. If you leave out meat you will make your body work overtime to secure enough tissue material from other foods. If you leave out white bread, you will lose one of the greatest sources of energy. If you leave out tomatoes and cucumbers and strawberries, you deprive your body of the salts and vitamins which are essential.

The Fear of Mixtures. There are many people who can without flinching face almost any single food, but who quail before mixtures. Perhaps there is no notion which is more firmly entrenched in the popular mind than this fear of certain food-combinations, acquired largely from the advertisements of certain so-called "food specialists."

The most persistent idea is the fear of acid and milk. It is interesting to watch the new people when they first come to my table. Confronted with grape-fruit and cream at the same meal, or oranges and milk, or cucumbers and milk, they eat under protest, in consternation over the disastrous results that are sure to follow. Out of all these scores of people, many of whom are supposed to have weak stomachs, I have never had one case of indigestion from such a combination. When a person knows that the stomach juices themselves include hydrochloric acid which is far more acid than any orange or grapefruit, that the milk curdles as soon as it reaches the stomach, and that it must curdle if it is to be digested, he has to be very "set" indeed if he is to cling to any remnant of fear.

The Fear of Certain Foods

There may be such a thing as physical idiosyncrasies for certain foods. I have often heard of them, but I have never seen one. I have often challenged my patients to show me some of the "spells" which they say invariably follow the eating of certain foods, but I have almost never been given an exhibition. The man who couldn't eat eggs did throw up once, but he couldn't do it a second time. Many people have threatened to break out with hives after strawberries. One woman triumphantly brought me what looked like a nice eruption, but which proved to be the after-results of a hungry flea! After that she ate strawberries,—without the flea and without the hives.

Among my stomach-patients there were two men, brothers-in-law, immigrants from the Austrian Tyrol, and now resident in one of the cow-boy states. Leonardo spoke little English, and though Giovanni understood a very little, he spoke only Italian.

During the conversation I said, "I suppose Giovanni imitated you in this mistaken fear about your health." The reply was, "No, I got it off him!" Nearly two hours later he exclaimed in astonishment: "Why, that milk hasn't come up! Maybe I am cured!" "Of course you are cured," I answered; "there never was anything really the matter with your stomach, so you are cured as soon as you think you are."

Another patient, a teacher of domestic science in a big Eastern university, had lived on skimmed milk and lime-water from Easter to Thanksgiving. Several attempts to enlarge the dietary by adding cream or white of egg had only served to increase the sense of discomfort. Finding nothing in the history of the case to warrant a diagnosis of organic disease of the stomach, I served her plate with the regular dinner, bidding her have no hesitancy even over the pork chops and potato chips. She gained nine pounds in weight the first week, and in two and a half months was forty pounds to the good.

Common Ailments

"Gas on the Stomach." We all know people who suffer from "gas." Indeed, very few of us escape an occasional desire to belch after a hearty meal. But the person with nervous indigestion rolls out the "gas" with such force that the noise can sometimes be heard all over the house. He may keep this up for hours at a time, under the conviction that he is freeing himself from the products of fermenting food. He may exhibit a well-bloated stomach as proof of the disastrous effect of certain articles of diet. The gas and the bloating are supposed to be the sign and the seal of indigestion, a positive evidence that undigested food is fermenting in the stomach.

When the food enters the stomach it necessarily displaces air, which normally comes out automatically and noiselessly. But if, through fear or attention, a certain set of muscles contract, the pent-up air may come forth awkwardly and noisily or it may stay imprisoned until we take measures to let it out. A hearty laugh is as good as anything, but if that cannot be managed, we may have to resort to a cup of hot water which gives the stomach a slap and makes it let go. Two belches are enough to relieve the pressure. After that we merely go on swallowing air and letting it out again, a habit both awkward and useless.

Some people are fond of the popular remedy of hot water and soda. Their faith in its efficacy is likely to be increased by the good display of gas which is sure to follow. As any cook knows, soda and acid always fizz. The soda is broken up by the hydrochloric acid of the stomach and forms salt and carbon dioxid, a gas. However, as the avowed aim of the remedy is the relief of gas rather than its manufacture, and as the soda uses up the hydrochloric acid needed in digestion, the practice cannot be recommended as reasonable.

Biliousness. The stomach is not the only part of the body concerning which we lack proper confidence. Next to it the liver is the most maligned organ in the whole body. Although the liver is about as likely to be upset in its process of secreting bile as the ocean is likely to be lacking in salt, many an intelligent person labels every little disturbance "biliousness" and lays it at the door of his faithful, dependable liver.

As a matter of fact, the liver is liable to injury from virtually but three sources—alcohol, bacterial infection, and cancer—and even a liver hardened by alcohol goes on secreting bile as usual. The patient dies of dropsy but not of "liver complaint."

Some people act as if they thought bile were a poison. On the contrary, it is a very useful digestant; it aids in keeping down the number of harmful bacteria and helps to carry the food from intestines to blood. Every day the liver manufactures at least a pint of this important fluid. The body uses what it needs and stores the surplus for reserve in the gall-bladder. The flow is continuous and, despite all appearances to the contrary, there is no such thing as a torpid or an over-active liver.

One of the favorite habits of certain people is the taking of calomel and salts. After such a dose they view with satisfaction the green character of the stools and conclude that they have rid themselves of a great amount of harmful matter. As a matter of fact, the greater part of the coloring in the stools is from the calomel itself, changed in the intestines from one salt of mercury to another. Any excess bile is the result of the irritating action of the calomel on the intestinal wall, an irritation which makes the bowel hurry to cast out this foreign substance without waiting for the bile to be absorbed as usual.

If the popular notions about biliousness are ill founded, what then causes the disturbances which undoubtedly do occur and which show themselves in attacks of nausea or sick headache? The answer can be given in a word of four letters; a coated tongue, a bilious attack and a sick headache are all the outcome of a mood. Stocks have gone down or the wife is cranky or the neighbors are hateful. Adrenalin and thyroid secretions are poured out as the result of emotion; digestion is stopped, circulation disturbed, and the whole apparatus thrown out of gear.

The moral of all this is plain. If a sick-headache is the result of an emotional spasm of the blood-vessels, the obvious cure is a change of the emotion. Some people manage it by going to a party or a picnic, others by ignoring the symptoms and keeping on with their work. A woman physician whom I know was in the midst of a violent headache when called out on an obstetrical case. She felt sorry for herself, but went on the case. In the strenuous work which followed, she quite forgot the headache, which disappeared as if by magic.

There once came to me an elderly woman, the wife of a poor minister. She was suffering from attacks of nausea, which recurred every five to ten days with intense pain through the eyes, and with photo-phobia or fear of light. I found that she had by dint of heroic efforts raised a large and promising family on the salary of an itinerant minister—from four hundred to six hundred a year! All the time she had been feeling sorry for herself because her husband did not appreciate her. One day, after reading one of his letters which seemed to show an utter lack of appreciation of all that she was doing, she fell down in the field beside her plow, paralyzed. From that time on she had been more or less of an invalid, continually nursing her grudge and complaining that she ought not to have been made to bear so many children.

After I had heard this plaint over and over for about a week, I said: "Perhaps you ought not to have had that little daughter, the little ewe-lamb. Maybe she was one too many." "Oh, no," came the quick response. "I couldn't have spared her." Then I went down the line of the fine stalwart sons. Perhaps she could have spared John or Tom or Fred? Finally she saw the whole matter in a different light,—saw herself as a queen among women, the mother of such a family.

I put her on the roof to sleep, on account of her fear of light. Only once did she start a headache, which I quickly nipped in the bud by making her get up and dress. She had come to stay "three months or four,—if I get along well." At the end of four weeks she left, an apparently well woman. The last I heard of her she was stumping the state for temperance, the oldest of an automobile party of speakers, and the sturdiest physically. With the emotional grievance, disappeared also the physical effects in stomach and head.

A certain minister suffered constantly from a dull pain in his head, besides having violent headaches every few days. He started in to have a bad spell the day after his arrival at my house. As I was going out of the door, he caught my sleeve. "Doctor," he said, "would it be bad manners to run away?" "Manners?" I answered. "They don't count, but morals, yes." He stayed—and that was his last bad headache. Both chronic and periodic pains disappeared for good.

One woman who had suffered from bad headaches for eighteen years lost them completely under a process of re-education. On the other hand, I have had patients who were not helped at all. The principles held good in their cases, but they were simply not able to lose the old habit of tightening up the body under emotion.

Loss of Appetite. A nervous patient with a good appetite is "the exception that proves the rule." The neurotic is usually under weight and often complains that he feels satiated almost as soon as he begins to eat. Loss of appetite may, of course, mean that the body is busy combating toxins in the blood, but in a nervous person it usually means a symbolic loss of appetite for something in life, a struggle of the personality against something for which he has "no stomach." Psycho-analysis often reveals the source of the trouble, and a little bullying helps along the good work. By simply taking away a harmful means of expression, we may often force the subconscious mind to find a better language.

Summary

Since the stomach seems to be an organ which is much better fitted to care for food than to care for a depressing emotion or a false idea, it seems far more sensible to change our minds than to keep enlarging our list of eatables which are taboo.

MENU

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday

A Calm Spirit                 Plenty of Good Cheer
A Varied Diet                 Commonsense
Good Cooking
Judicious Neglect of Symptoms
Forgetfulness of the Digestive Process
A Little Accurate Knowledge
A Determination to
BE LIKE FOLKS

An Oft-told Tale. Sooner or later, then, the neurotic, whether he calls himself a neurotic or not, is very likely to begin worrying over his diet or his sedentary occupation. He imagines himself the victim of autointoxication, afflicted with paralysis of the colon or dearth of intestinal secretions. He leaves off eating white bread, berries, cheese, chocolate, and many another innocent food, and insists on a diet of bran-biscuit, flaxseed breakfast-foods, prunes, spinach, cream, and olive-oil with doses of mineral oil between meals. In all probability, he begins a course of massage or he starts to take extra long walks and to exercise night and morning, pulling his knees up to his chin and touching his fingers to his toes. When all these measures fail, he gives in to the morning enema or the nightly pill, in imminent danger of succumbing to a life-long habit.

The Truth About Constipation

Around the colon is a thick network of little blood vessels, all of which lead straight to the liver, the storehouse of the body. After the food is fully digested, it is passed through the thin intestinal wall into these tiny vessels and carried away to liver and muscles for storage or for immediate use.

Food, not Poison. The colon is not a cesspool but a digestive and assimilating organ. Its content is not poison but food. Active elimination is important not so much because delay causes autointoxication or poisoning as because too large a mass is hard to manage and irritates the intestinal wall. The problem is not so much one of toxicology as of simple mechanics. If Nature had put within the body five feet of tubing which could easily become a cesspool and a breeder of poison, it is not at all likely that she would have laid alongside an elaborate system of blood vessels leading not out to the kidneys but into the storehouse of the liver; and if civilized man's changed manner of living had so upset Nature's plans as easily to transform his internal machinery into a chronic source of danger, we may be sure that he would long ago have gone the way of the unfit and succumbed to his own poisons.

Cathartics and Enemas. He who makes a practice of flushing out his intestinal tract with high enemas and internal baths is like a person who eats a good dinner and then proceeds to wash out his stomach. In the mistaken idea that he is making himself clean, he is washing what was never intended to be washed and robbing the body of the nutrition which it needs. And the man who persists in the pill habit is making a worse mistake, adding insult to injury and forcing the mucous membrane to toughen itself against such malicious attacks.

Cathartics and Operations. Even in emergencies, the use of purgatives as a routine measure is happily decreasing year by year. For many years I have deplored the use of purgatives before and after operations. That other practitioners are coming to the same conclusion is witnessed by a number of papers recently read in medical societies condemning purgation at the time of operation.

A few months later this same woman had to undergo a much more serious operation for multiple fibroids of the uterus and removal of the appendix. This time I advised the surgeon against the use of any purgative, and he took my remarks so seriously that he did not even allow an enema to be given. This time the patient showed no signs of exhaustion and had very few gas pains. I firmly believe that the day will soon come when a patient under operation, or a patient after childbirth, will no longer be depleted by a weakening and dehydrating cathartic and by a period of starvation, at a time when he needs all the energy he can summon.

A Question of Evacuation. Much of the misconception about constipation arises from the mistaken idea that this is a disorder of the whole intestine or at least of the whole colon. As a matter of fact, the trouble is almost wholly in the rectum. There is no trouble with the general traffic movement, but only with the unloading at the terminus. In my experience, the patient reports that he feels the fecal mass in the lower part of the rectum, but that he is unable to expel it. Examination by finger or by X-ray reveals a mass in the rectal pouch. If there is a piling up of freight further back on the line, it is only because the unloading process has been delayed at the terminus.

Meddlesome Interference. In the natural state the little human, like the other animals, empties his bowel whenever the fecal mass enters the lower portion of the rectum. The presence of the mass in the rectum constitutes a call to stool which is responded to as unthinkingly as is the desire for air in the taking of a breath. But the tiny child soon has to learn to control some of his natural functions. At the lower end of the rectum there is a purse-string muscle called the Sphincter-ani, an involuntary muscle which may with training be brought partly under voluntary control. Under the demands of civilization, the baby learns to tighten up this muscle until the proper time for evacuation. Then, if he be normal, he lets go, the muscles higher up contract and the bowel empties itself automatically, as it always did before civilization began.

Just as people often find it hard to let go the bladder muscle and urinate when in a hurry or under observation, and just as an apprehensive woman in childbirth tightens up the purse-string muscle of the womb, so the little child, or the grown up who catches the suggestion of difficulty in the bowel movement, loses the trick of letting go. Instead of merely exercising control by temporarily inhibiting the function, he tries to carry through the process itself by voluntary control—and fails. Constipation is a perfect example of the power of suggestion, and of the troublesome effect of a fear-idea in the realm of automatic functions.

Food and Constipation

Once the sense of power comes, once the mind forgets to be doubtful or afraid, then the old automatic habit invariably reasserts itself. Meddlesome interference may throw the mechanism out of gear, but fortunately it cannot strip the gears. Constipation is an inhibition or restraint of function, but is never a loss of function. No one is too old, no one is too fixed in the bad habit to relearn the old trick. I have had a good many patients with chronic constipation, but I have never had one who failed to learn. Real conviction speedily brings success, and in many cases success seems to outrun conviction. So efficient is Nature if she has only half a chance!

A Fifty-year Habit. Another old lady was not quite so easily convinced. She ridiculed the idea that her son of fifty, who had been "constipated in his cradle" could be cured of his lifelong habit, but he was cured. As long as there is life and the light of reason, so long may Nature's functions be reëstablished.

A Record History. When Miss H. first came to my house, she told a story that was almost incredible. She said that for many months she had been taking eight tablespoonfuls of mineral oil three times a day besides a cathartic at night, and an enema in the morning. No wonder she was a little dubious over such mild treatment as mine seemed to be!

Constipation was only one of this young woman's troubles. She could not sleep and was so fatigued that she believed herself at the end of her physical capital. When she first came to me she had tears in her eyes most of the time and used to confide to various people that she was sure she was a patient that I could not cure,—a very common belief among nervous invalids! She was sure that I did not understand her case, and that she could not get anything out of this kind of treatment.

Living up to a Suggestion. Mrs. T. had not had a natural movement of the bowels in twenty-five years. After the birth of a child, twenty-five years before, her physician had told her that her muscles had been so badly torn in labor that they could not carry through a natural movement. After that she had never gone a day without a pill or an enema. I explained to her that when any muscle of the rectum is injured in childbirth, it is the sphincter-ani, and that since this is the muscle whose contraction holds back the bowel content, its injury would tend to over-free evacuation rather than to constipation. She saw the point and within two or three days regained her old power of spontaneous evacuation.

1 Eat three square meals a day.

2 Drink when thirsty, having conveniently at hand the facilities for drinking.

3 Heed the call to stool as you heed the call of hunger. When the stool passes the little valve between the upper and lower portions of the rectum, it gives the signal that the time for evacuation has come. If this signal is always heeded, it will automatically start the machinery that leads to evacuation. If it is persistently ignored because one is too busy, or because the mind is filled with the idea of disability, the call very soon fails to rise to the level of consciousness. The feces remain in the rectum, and the bad habit is begun.

4 Choose a regular time and keep that appointment with yourself as regularly as possible. In all the activities of Nature, there is a rhythm which it is well to observe.

5 Take time to acquire the habit. Do not be in a hurry. Do not strain. No amount of effort will start the movement. Just let it come of itself.

Summary

If you would have in a nutshell an epitome of the truth about constipation, indigestion, insomnia, and the other functional disturbances common to nervous folk, you can do, no better than to commit to memory and store away for future reference that choice limerick of the centipede, which so admirably sums up the whole matter of meddlesome interference:

"Since the War." Nothing is quite the same since the war. Among other things we have learned that many of our so-called handicaps were nothing but illusions,—base libels on the female body. Under the stern necessity of war the women of the world discovered that they could stand up under jobs which have until now been considered quite beyond their powers. Society girls, who were used to coddling themselves, found a new joy in hard and continuous work; middle-aged women, who were supposed to be at the time of life when little could be expected of them, quite forgot themselves in service. Ambulance drivers, nurses, welfare workers, farmerettes, Red-Cross workers, street-car conductors and "bell-boys," revealed to themselves and to the world unsuspected powers of endurance in a woman's body. Although some of the heavier occupations still seem to be "man's work," better fitted for a man's sturdier body, we know now that many of these disabilities were merely a matter of tradition and of faulty training.

"Nerves" Again. Despite the organic disturbances which may beset the reproductive organs, and despite the havoc wrought by venereal diseases, it may be said with absolute assurance that the majority of feminine ills are the result neither of the natural frailty of the female body, nor even of man's infringement of the social law, but are the direct result of false suggestion and of false attitudes toward the facts of the reproductive life. The trouble is less a difficulty with the reproductive organs than a difficulty with the reproductive instinct. "Something wrong" with the instinct is translated by the subconscious mind into "something wrong" with the related generative organs, and converted into a physical pain.

That this relation has always been dimly felt is shown by the fact that the early Greeks called nervous disorders hysteria, from the Greek word for womb. It is only lately, however, that the blame has been put in the right place and the trouble traced to the instinct rather than to the organs of reproduction.

No one who thoroughly knows human nature would attempt to deny that woman is as strongly endowed as man with the great urge toward the perpetuation of the race, or that she has had to repress the instinct more severely than has man. The man insists on knowing that the children he provides for are his own children. Whatever the degree of his own fidelity, he must be sure that his wife is true to him. Thus has grown up the insistence that, no matter what man does, woman, if she is to be counted respectable, shall control the urge of the instinct and live up to the requirements of continence set for her by society.

Young men are not so often taught to repress, but neither are they taught to swing their vital energies into altruistic channels through sublimation. Since the woman of his class will not marry him until he has money, the young man too often satisfies his undirected instincts in a commercial way. The statistics of venereal diseases prove that here, as elsewhere, goods subject to barter are subject to contamination. In a late marriage, too often a contaminated body accompanies the material possessions which the standards of society have demanded of a husband.

The Menstrual Period

Potential Motherhood. Among the normal phenomena of a woman's life is the recurring cycle of potential motherhood. Every three or four weeks a new ovum or egg matures in the ovary and undergoes certain chemical changes, which send into the blood a substance called a hormone. This hormone is a messenger, stimulating the mucous membrane of the womb into making its velvet pile longer and softer, and its nutrient juices more abundant in readiness for the ovum.

During sleep the social inhibitions are felt less distinctly and the sleeper dreams love-dreams woven from messages coming up from all the minute nerve-endings in the expectant reproductive organs. But if no germ-cell travels up the womb-canal and tube to meet and impregnate the ovum, the womb-lining rejects the egg as chemically unfit. All the furbishings are loosened from the walls and slowly cast out, constituting the menstrual flow. The phenomenon as a whole is a physiological function and should be accompanied by a sense of well-being and comfort as is the exercise of any other function, such as digestion or muscular activity. Only too often, however, it is dreaded as an unmitigated disaster, a time for giving up work or fun and going to bed with a hot-water bottle until "the worst is over." Let us see how this perversion comes about.

This recoil of fear interferes with the circulation in the functioning organs, just as fear blanches the face or hinders digestion. There is several times as much blood in the stomach when it is full of food as there is between meals, but we do not for this reason fancy that we have a pain after each meal. There is more blood in the generative organs during their functioning, but this means pain only when fear ties up the circulation and causes undue congestion. Fear acts further on the sturdy muscle of the womb, tying it up into just such knots as we feel in the esophagus when we say that we have a lump in the throat. It is safe to say that ninety-five cases of painful menstruation out of every hundred are caused by fear and by the expectation of pain. The cysts and tumors responsible for pain are so rare as to be fairly negligible, when compared with these other causes.

Sometimes before the period begins, a girl feels blue and upset for a day or two, a sign that the instinct is getting discouraged. The whole body is saying, "Get ready, get ready," but it has gotten ready many times before, and to no purpose. Unsatisfied striving brings discouragement. What reaches consciousness is a feeling of pessimism and a general dissatisfaction with life as a whole. If, instead of giving in to the blues or going to bed and predicting a pain, the girl finds other outlets for her energy, she finds that after all, her instinct may be satisfied in indirect ways and that she has strangely come into a new supply of vim.

The Ounce of Prevention. If young girls had wiser counselors in their mothers and physicians, the misconception would never occur, and such an indirect outlet would not be needed; the organic sensations incident to puberty and the recurring menstrual period would have something of the significance of the annunciation to Mary, bringing wonder and a sense of well-being.

When your little daughter arrives at maturity, give her a joyous initiation into the noble order of women. She will welcome the new function as a badge of womanhood and as a harbinger of wonderful things to come.

The result of this confidential talk may seem fanciful to any one but an eye-witness. We had only a week's association, but the depression ceased, the furtive look and deprecatory manner were replaced by a joyous buoyancy. In a few weeks the thin neck and awkward body rounded out into the symmetry which usually precedes the establishment of puberty, but which was delayed in this case until the unconscious conflict resolved itself.

The "Change of Life"

Another Phantom Peril. As the young girl is taught to fear the menstrual period, so the older woman is taught to dread the time when the periods shall cease. Despite the general enlightenment of this day and age, the menopause or "change of life" is all too frequently feared as a "critical period" in a woman's life, a time of distressing physical sensations and even of danger to mental balance.

As a matter of fact, the menopause is a physiological process which should be accomplished with as little mental and physical disturbance as accompanies the establishment of puberty. The same internal secretion is concerned in both. When the function of ovulation ceases the body has to find a new way to dispose of the internal secretion of the ovary. Its presence in the blood is the cause of the sudden dilatation of the blood-vessels that is known as the "hot flash."

One source of trouble in the menopause is that it comes at a time in a woman's life when she is likely to have too much leisure. In no way can a woman so easily handicap her body at this time as by stopping work and being afraid. Those women who have to go on as usual find themselves past the change almost before they know it,—unless they consider themselves abused, and worry over the necessity for working through such a "critical time."

Three Rules. Here are a few pointers which have have been of help to a number of women:

1 Remember that this is a physiological process and therefore abundantly safeguarded by Nature. If you don't expect trouble you will not be likely to find it.

3 Do everything in your power to keep from the public the knowledge that you are no longer a potential mother. If you are past forty, do not mop your face or gasp for breath or carry a fan to the theater! Shun attention and fear, and you will be surprised at the ease with which the "change" is effected.

Nature's Last Chance. While we are on the subject of the middle-aged woman, it may be well to mention a phenomenon sometimes noticed in the early forties. Often an "old maid" who has considered herself settled for life in her bachelor estate, suddenly takes to herself a husband. (I use the verb advisedly!) Mothers who have thought their child-bearing days long past sometimes find themselves pregnant. "The child of her old age" is not an uncommon occurrence. Unmarried women who have "kept straight" all their lives sometimes go down before temptation at this late time. There is a reason. It is as though Nature were making a last desperate attempt to produce another life before it is too late, speeding up all the internal secretions and flashing insistent messages throughout the whole organism.

Other Troubles

A skilled surgeon can cut almost anything out of a person's body, but he cannot cut out an instinct. It sometimes takes great skill to determine whether the trouble is an organic affection or a functional disturbance caused by the misdirected instinct of reproduction. Often, however, the clinical pictures are so different as to leave no room for doubt, provided the diagnostician has his eyes open and is not over-persuaded by the importunity of the poor neurotic, who insists that the surgeon shall remove her appendix, her gall-bladder, her genital organs, and her tonsils, and who finally comes back that he may have a whack at the operation scar.

As it happened, this young woman and her husband came to call on me one afternoon just before the baby was expected. During the visit she began to show signs of being in labor. Again she was in terror. Again I explained the phenomena of labor, telling her that the womb-contractions are caused by the presence in the blood of a chemical secretion (hormone) which continues its good work as long as there is a state of confidence, but which sometimes stops under fear or apprehension. I explained that these womb-efforts are a peristaltic movement, a contraction of the upper muscles and a letting go of the purse-string muscle at the mouth of the womb, and that fear only tends to tie up this purse-string muscle, making a difficult process out of one which was intended by Nature to be much more simple. She seemed to understand and to lose a good deal of her fright.

I give this account for what it is worth, without of course contending that labor could always be as easy as this. It happened that this girl was a normal, healthy woman and that there were no complications of any kind in the process of childbirth. A right attitude of mind could not have corrected any physical difficulty, but it did seem to help her let go of her fear, which would of itself have caused long and painful labor.

A patient once told me that when her first baby came, she happened to be out in the country where she had to call in a doctor whom she did not know. He was an uncouth sort of fellow who inspired fear rather than confidence. She soon found that labor stopped whenever he came into the room, and started again when he went out. She had the good sense to send him out and complete her labor with only the help of her mother. Unfortunate is the obstetrician who does not know how to inspire a feeling of confidence in his patients. Even childbirth may be mightily helped or hindered by the mother's state of mind.

A woman's body has more stability than she knows. It is sometimes out of order, but it is more often misunderstood; usually it is an unobtrusive and satisfactory instrument, quite fit for its daily tasks. The average woman is really well put together. We hear about the ones who have difficulty, but not about the great majority who do not. We notice the few who are upset during the menopause, and forget all the others. To be comfortable and efficient most of the time is, after all, merely to be "like folks."

The special functions which Nature has been perfecting in a woman's body are as a rule, easily carried through unless complicated by false ideas or by fear.

If the woman who has no organic difficulty but who still finds herself handicapped by her body, will cease being either resigned to her languishing lot or envious of her stalwart brothers; if instead she will set out to learn how to be efficient as a woman, she will find that many of her ills are not the blunders of an inefficient Creator, but are home-made products, which quickly vanish in the light of understanding.

A Harmless Habit

Long-Lived Insomniacs. A man of my acquaintance once said in all seriousness and with evident alarm: "I am following in the footsteps of my mother. She lived to be seventy years old and she had insomnia all her life." If this man had been preaching a sermon on the harmlessness of chronic insomnia, he could not have chosen a better text, but he seemed just as much concerned about himself as if his mother had died from the effects of three months' wakefulness. People can live healthy lives during twenty or thirty years of insomnia because chronic insomnia is nothing more or less than a habit, and "habit spells ease." The brain cells are not irritated by either internal or external stimuli; there is no effort to keep awake; virtually no energy is expended,—except in restless tossing and worry. If the body is kept still and emotion eliminated, fatigue products are washed away and the reserves are filled in with perfect ease.

It is true that a person sometimes chooses to wake up and do his constructive planning in the night. This kind of thought does bring fatigue, up to a certain point. After that the body hastens its rate of repair or automatically goes to sleep. Activity of this kind is always a matter of choice. He who really prefers sleep will shut the drawers containing the day's business and leave them shut until morning.

What Causes the Fatigue

Tossing and Fretting. The thing that tires is not the insomnia but the emotion over the insomnia. If people who fail to sleep are perpetually fagged out, it is not from loss of sleep, but from worry and tossing. Often they spend a good deal of the night feeling sorry for themselves. They turn and toss, exclaiming with each turn: "Why don't I sleep? How badly I shall feel to-morrow! What a night! What a night!" Such a spree of emotionalism can hardly fail to tire, but it is not fair to blame the insomnia.

How to Go to Sleep

This woman had tried every doctor she could think of, including the splendid S. Weir Mitchell. Her insomnia had become a preoccupation with her, her chief thought in life. All I did was to explain to her that her body had been getting all the sleep it needed, and that neither body nor mind was in the least run down after twenty years of sleeplessness. "When you cease being interested in your insomnia, it will go away, although from a health standpoint it matters very little whether it does or not." We had two conversations on the subject, and a week later she came back to tell me that she was sleeping eight hours a night.

One woman had had insomnia for thirty years. After I had explained to her that her body had adjusted itself to this way of living and that she need not try to get more sleep, she snored so loud all night and every night that the rest of the family began to complain!

Keeping Account. A bright young college graduate came to me for a number of ailments, chief among them being sleeplessness. She was also overcome by fatigue, having spent four months in bed. A four-mile walk in the cañon and a few other such outings soon dispelled the fatigue, but the insomnia proved more obstinate. After she had been with me for a week or two, I took her aside one day for a little talk. "Well?" I said as we sat down. Then she began: "Sunday night I was awake from half-past one to four, Monday from twelve to one, Tuesday from one to three, Wednesday from two to four, Thursday—" By this time she became aware of the quizzical expression on my face and began to be embarrassed. Then she stopped and laughed. "Well," she said, "I did not know that I was paying so much attention to my sleep." She was bright enough to see the point at once, gave up her preoccupation in the all-absorbing topic and promptly forgot to have any trouble with so natural a function as sleep.

The Purpose of Insomnia

Like all nervous symptoms, insomnia is not an affliction but an indulgence. Somehow, and in ways unknown to the conscious mind, it brings a certain amount of satisfaction to a part of the personality. No matter how unpleasant it may be, no matter how much we consciously fear it, something inside chooses to stay awake.

Summary

Nervous insomnia is something which a part of us makes use of and another part fears. It is a mistake on both sides. Although not in the least dangerous, the habit can hardly be considered a satisfactory form of amusement. Nature has provided a better way to spend the night, a way to which she speedily brings us when we choose to let her do it.

We do not have to ask for sleep as for a special boon which may be denied. We simply have to lie down in trust, expecting to be carried away like a child. If our expectation is not at once realized we can still trust, as with relaxed mind and body we lie in calm content, knowing that Nature is, minute by minute, restoring us for another day.

"But," says the sensitive person, "are we not born either violins or drums? Is not heredity rather than choice to blame? And what can a person do about it?" These questions are so closely bound up with the problems of nervous symptoms of indigestion, fatigue, a woman's ills, hysterical pains and sensations, and with all the problems of emotional control, that we shall do well to look more carefully into this question of sensibility, which is really the question of the relation of the individual to his environment.

Selecting Our Sensations

Paying Attention. If a human being had to give conscious attention to every stimulus from the outer world and from his own body, to every signal which flashes itself along his sensory nerves to his brain, he would need a different kind of mind from his present efficient but limited apparatus. As it is, there is an admirable provision for taking care of the messages without overburdening consciousness. The stream of messages never stops, not even in sleep. But the conscious mind has its private secretary, the subconscious, to receive the messages and to answer them.

Out of this constant rush of stimuli our man gives attention to only the smallest fraction. Whatever is interesting to him, that he sees and hears and feels. All other sensations he passes by as indifferent. Unless they come with extraordinary intensity, they do not get over into his consciousness at all.

Thresholds and Sensations. The importance of these principles is obvious. The next chapter will show more of their influence on ideas and emotions; but for the present we will consider their lessons in the sphere of the physical. Psychology speaks here in no uncertain terms to physiology. Whoever becomes fascinated by the processes of his own body is bound to magnify the sensations from those processes, until the most insignificant message from the subconscious becomes a distressing and alarming symptom. The person whose mental ear is strained to catch every little creaking of his internal machinery can always hear some kind of rumble. If he deliberately lowers his thresholds to the whole class of stimuli pertaining to himself, there is small wonder that they sweep over the boundaries into consciousness with irresistible force.

The real cause back of most cases of chronic sensitiveness is an abnormal desire for attention. Sometimes this love of attention arises from an under-developed instinct of self-assertion, or "inferiority complex." If there is a sense of inadequacy, a feeling of not being so important as other people, a person is quite likely to over-compensate by making himself seem important to himself and to others in the only way he knows. All unconsciously he develops an extreme sensitiveness which somehow heightens his self-regard by making him believe himself finely and delicately organized, and by securing the notice of his associates.

In any case there is likely to develop a general overreaction to all outside stimulation, a hypersensitiveness to some particular kind of stimulus, or a chronic hysterical pain which somehow serves the personality in ways unknown to itself. No one "feels his feelings" unless, despite all discomfort, he really enjoys them. A hard statement to accept perhaps, but one that is repeatedly proved by a specialist in "nerves"!

Determining Causes

Accidental Association. In many cases, the form which the sensitiveness takes is merely a matter of accident. Often it is based on some small physical disability, as when a slight tendency to take cold is magnified into an intense fear of fresh air.

Facing the Facts. Whatever the motives and whatever the determining causes, hypersensibility is in any case a feeling of feelings which is not warranted by the present situation. Hypersensitiveness is never anything but a makeshift kind of satisfaction. Despite certain subconscious reasoning, it does not make one more important nor more beloved. Neither does it furnish a real expression for that great creative love-instinct whose outlet, if it is to bring satisfaction, must be a real outlet into the external world. An understanding of the motives is helpful only when it makes clear that they are short-sighted motives and that the real desires back of them may be satisfied in better ways.

Some Lowered Thresholds

"Danger-Signals" without the Danger. There was the man who had queer feelings all over his body, especially in his head and stomach, and who considered these sensations as danger-signals warning him to stop. This man had worked up from messenger boy to a position next to the president in one of the transcontinental railroad systems. On the appearance of these "danger-signals" he had tried to resign but had been given a year's leave of absence instead. Half the year had gone in rest-cure, but he was still afraid to eat or work, and believed himself "done for." After three weeks of re-education he saw that instead of having overdrawn his capital, he had in another sense overdrawn his sensations. He went away as fit as ever, finished his leave of absence doing hard labor on his farm, and then went back to even harder tasks, working for the Government in the administration of the railroads during the war. He is still at work.

Her sisters had inveigled her to my house under false pretenses, calling it a boarding-house and omitting to mention that I was a doctor, because "she guessed she knew more about her case than any doctor." For the first week I got in only one sentence a day,—just before I slipped out of the door after taking in her "liquid nourishment." But at the end of the week I announced that thereafter her meals would be served in the dining-room. When she found that there was to be no more liquid nourishment, she had to appear at the family table. After that it was only a short time before she was at home, cooking for her sisters. When she saw the role she had been unconsciously playing, she could hardly wish to go on with it.

A Subconscious Association. Mr. D.'s case admirably illustrates the return of symptoms through an unconscious association. He was a lawyer, prominent in public affairs of the Middle West, who had been my patient for several weeks and who had gone home cured of many striking disabilities. Before he came to me, he had given up his public work and was believed by all his associates to be afflicted with softening of the brain, and "out of the game" for good. From being one of the ablest men of his State, he had fallen into such a condition that he could neither read a letter nor write one. He could not stand the least sunshine on his head, and to walk half a mile was an impossibility. He was completely "down and out" and expected to be an invalid for the rest of his life.

Dr. B——, when he came to me, was the most wrapped-up man I had ever met. He had on two suits of underwear, a sweater, a vest and suit coat, an overcoat, a bear-skin coat and a Jaeger scarf—all in Pasadena in May!

Besides this fear of cold, he was suffering from a hypersensitiveness of several other varieties. So sensitive was his skin that he had his clothes all made several sizes too big for him so that they would not make pressure. He was so aware of the muscles of the neck that he believed himself unable to hold up his head, and either propped it with his hands or leaned it against the back of a chair.

Miss Y—— had worn cotton in her ears for a year or two because she had once had an inflammation of the middle ear, and believed the membrane still sensitive to cold. There was Miss E——, whose underwear always reached to her throat and wrists and who spent her time following the sun; and Dr. I——, who never forgot her heavy sweater or her shawl over her knees, even in front of the fire. The procession of "cold ones" is almost endless, but always they find that their sensitiveness is of their own making and that it disappears when they choose to ignore it.

This sister, the wife of a minister in the Middle West, had a constant pain in her eyes, compelling her to hold them half-shut all the time. When she was approached about coming to me, she said indignantly, "If that doctor thinks that my trouble is nervous, she is much mistaken," and then proceeded to get well. Once the subconscious mind gets the idea that its game is recognized, it is very apt to give it up, and it can do this without loss of time if it really wants to.

Pain at the Base of the Brain. Of all nervous pains, that in the back of the neck is by all odds the most common. It is rare indeed to find a nervous patient without this complaint, and among supposedly well folk it is only too frequent. Indeed, it almost seems that in some quarters such a pain stands as a badge of the fervor and zeal of one's work.

Pain in the spine and neck is an example of exaggerated sensibility or over-awareness. Since all messages from every part of trunk and limb must go through the spinal cord, and since very many of them enter the cord in the region of the neck and shoulder blades, it is only natural that an over-feeling of these messages should be especially noticed in this zone.

Sometimes a false emotionalism adds to the discomfort by tensing the whole muscular system and making the messages more intense. When a social worker or a business man gets tense over his work or ties himself into knots over a committee meeting, he not only foolishly wastes his energy but makes his nerves carry messages that are more urgent than usual. Then if he is on the look-out for sensations, he all the more easily becomes aware of the central station in the spine where the messages are received. By centering his attention on this station and tightening up his back-muscles, he increases this over-awareness and easily gets himself into the clutch of a vicious habit.

Various Pains. Tender spots may appear in almost any part of the body. There was the girl with the sore scalp, who was frequently so sensitive that she could not bear to have a single hair touched at its farthermost end, and who could not think of brushing her hair at such a time. There was the man whose wrists and ankles were so painful that the slightest touch was excruciating; the woman with the false sciatica; the man with the so-called appendicitis pains; and the man with the false neuritis, who always wore jersey coats several sizes too large. Each one of these false pains was removed by the process of re-education.

A fine, efficient missionary from the Orient had been so overcome with fatigue that he was forced to give up all work and return to this country. He had been with me for a while and was again ready to go to work. He came one day with a radiant face to bid me good-by. "Why are you so joyous?" I asked. "Because," he answered, "before I came home I was so fatigued that it used me up completely just to see the native servants pack our luggage. Now we are taking back twice as much, and I not only packed it all myself but made the boxes with my own hands. No more fatigue for me!"

Stopping Our Ears. Roosters seem to be a perpetual source of annoyance to the folk whose thresholds are not under proper control. But as roosters seem to be necessary to an egg-eating nation, it seems simpler to change the threshold than to abolish the roosters. There was one woman who complained especially about being disturbed by early-morning Chanticleers. I explained that the crowing called for no action on her part, and that therefore she should not allow it to come into consciousness. "Do you mean," she said, "that I could keep from hearing them?" As it happened, she was sitting under the clock, which had just struck seven. "Did you hear the clock strike?" I asked. "No," she said; "did it strike?"

Summary

There are two kinds of people in the world,—masters and puppets. There is the man in control of his thresholds, at leisure from himself and master of circumstance, free to use his energy in fruitful ways; and there is the over-sensitive soul, wondering where the barometer stands and whether people are going to be quiet, feeling his feelings and worrying because no one else feels them, forever wasting his energy in exaggerated reactions to normal situations.

Hard as it is to believe, we do choose our emotions. We like emotion as we do salt in our food, and too often we choose it because something in us likes the savor, and not because it leads to the character or the conduct that we know to be good.

The Power of Choice

Whether we believe it or not, and whether we like it or not, the fact remains that we ourselves decide which of all the possible emotions we shall choose, or we decide not to press the button for any emotion at all.

The Test of Feeling. The psychologist to-day has a sure test of character. He says in substance: "Tell me what you feel and I will tell you what you are. Tell me what things you love, what things you fear, and what makes you angry and I will describe with a fair degree of accuracy your character, your conduct, and a good deal about the state of your physical health."

Since this test of emotion is fundamentally sound, it is not surprising that the nervous man is in a state of distress. Indigestion, fatigue, over-sensibility, sound like problems in physiology, but we cannot go far in the discussion of any of them without coming face to face with the emotions as the real factors in the case. When we turn to the mental characteristics of nervous folk, we even more quickly find ourselves in the midst of an emotional disturbance. Worried, fearful, anxious, self-pitying, excitable, or melancholy, the nervous person proves that whatever else a neurosis may be, it is, in essence, a riot of the emotions.

But it is not the nervous person only who needs a better understanding of his emotional life. The well man also gets angry for childish reasons; he is prejudiced and envious, unhappy and suspicious for the very same reason as is the nervous man. Since the working-capital of energy is limited to a definite amount, the control of the emotions becomes a central problem in any life,—a deciding factor in the output and the outcome, as well as in comfort and happiness by the way.

Nothing is harder for the average man to believe than this fact that he really has the power to choose his emotions. He has been dissatisfied with himself in his past reactions, and yet he has not known how to change them. His anger or his depression has appeared so undesirable to his best judgment and to his conscious reason that it has seemed to be not a part of himself at all but an invasion from without which has swept over him without his consent and quite beyond control.

Most of the confusion comes from the fact that we know only a part of ourselves. What we do not consciously enjoy we believe we do not enjoy at all. What we do not consciously choose we believe to be beyond our power of choice,—the work of the evil one, or the natural depravity of human nature, perhaps; but certainly not anything of our choosing.

The point is that a human being is so constituted that he can, without knowing it, entertain at the same time two diametrically opposite desires. The average person is not so unified as he believes, but is, in fact, "a house divided against itself."

The words of the apostle Paul express for most of us the truth about ourselves: "For what I would, that I do not; but what I hate that I do." What Paul calls the law of his members warring against the law of his mind is simply what we call to-day the instinctive desires coming into conflict with our conscious ideal.

These hidden desires are of several different kinds, when squarely looked at. Some of the cravings are found to be childish, and so out of keeping with our real characters that we could not possibly hold on to them as conscious desires. Others turn out to be so natural and so inevitable that we wonder how we could ever have imagined that they ought to be repressed. Still others, legitimate in themselves, but denied because of outer circumstances, are found to be easily satisfied in indirect ways which bear no resemblance to their old unfortunate forms of outlet.

The way to get rid of an undesirable emotion is not by working at the emotion itself, but by realizing that this is merely an offshoot of a deeper root, hidden below the surface. The great point is to recognize this deeper root.

Childish Anger. It helps to know that uncalled-for anger is a defense reaction—a sort of camouflage or smoke cloud which we throw out to hide from ourselves and others the fact that we are being worsted in an argument, or being shown up in an undesirable light. Better than any amount of weeping over a hot temper is an understanding of the fact that when we fly into unseemly rage we are usually giving indulgence to a childhood desire to run away from unpleasant facts and to cover up our own faults.

To be sure there are many cases in which an assumed cheerfulness and courage do have a mighty effect on the inner man. The forces of the personality are not set, but plastic, and are constantly acting and interacting upon one another. Surface habits do influence the forces below the surface. William James's advice, "Square your shoulders, speak in a major key, smile, and turn a compliment," is good for most occasions, but sometimes even a little understanding of the cause is far more effective.

Simultaneous with the fear lest these repressed desires should not be satisfied, there is an intense fear lest they should. The more insistent the repressed desire, and the more it seems likely to break through into consciousness, the keener the anguish of the ethical impulses. Abnormal fear, however it may seem to be externalized, always implies at the bottom a fear of something within. There is no truth which is harder to believe on first hearing but which grows more compelling with further knowledge, than this truth that an exaggerated fear always implies a desire which somehow offends the total personality. When we observe the various distressing phobias, such as the common fear of contamination, a woman's fear to undress at night, a fear that the gas was not turned off, or that one's clothing is out of order; fear lest the exact truth has not been told, or that the uttermost farthing of one's obligations has not been met,—then we may know that there is something in the fear situation which either directly or symbolically refers to some hidden desire; a desire which the individual would not for the world acknowledge to himself, but which is too keen to be altogether repressed.

It is possible to imagine a situation in which a man would be physically unable to do what he wanted to do. Bound by physical cords, held by prison walls, or weakened by illness, he might be actually unable to carry out his desires. But apart from physical restraint, it is hard to imagine a situation in real life in which a person does not actually do what he wants to do; that is, what in the circumstances he wants to do. This is simply saying in another way that we act in accordance with the emotion which is at the moment strongest.

Will Is Choice. Just here we can imagine an earnest protest: "But why do you ignore the human will? Why do you try to make man the creature of feeling? A high-grade man does—not what he wants to do but what he thinks he ought to do. In any person worthy of the adjective 'civilized' it is conscience, not desire, which is the motive power of his life."

Imagine another soldier in the same situation; with him fear seems uppermost. His knees shake and his legs want to carry him in the wrong direction, but he still goes forward. And he goes forward, not so much because there is no other possibility as because, in the circumstances, he really wants to. All his life, and especially during his military training, he has been filled with ideals of loyalty and courage. More than he fears the guns of the enemy or of his firing-squad does he fear the loss of his own self-respect and the respect of his comrades. Greater than his "will to live" is his desire to play the man. There is conflict, and the desire which seems at the moment weaker is given the victory because it is reinforced by that other permanent desire to be a worthy man, brave, and dependable in a crisis. He goes forward, because in the circumstances, he really wants to, but in this case we say that he had to use his will.

Parents and teachers who try to "break a child's will" and to punish every evidence of independence and self-assertion little know that they are undermining the foundations of morality itself, and doing their utmost to leave the child at the mercy of his chance whims and emotions. There can be no strength of character without self-regard, and self-regard is built on the instinctive desire of self-assertion.

Education and Religion. It is easy to see how important education is in this process of giving the right content to the self-regarding sentiment. The child trained to regard "temper" as a disgrace, self-pity as a vice, over-sensitiveness as a sign of selfishness, and all forms of exaggerated emotionalism as a token of weakness, has acquired a powerful weapon against temptation in later life. Indulgence in any of these forms of gratification he will regard as unworthy and out of keeping with his personality.

Nor is the connection between alcoholism and emotionalism so far-fetched as it seems. Psycho-analytic investigations have repeatedly revealed the fact that both are indulged in because they remove inhibitions, give vent to repressed desires, and bring a sense of life and power which has somehow been lost in the normal living. Both kinds of spree are followed by the inevitable "morning after" with its proverbial headache, remorse, and vows of repentance but despite all this, both are clung to because the satisfaction they bring is too deep to be easily relinquished.

Jung has pointed out how frequently introversion or turning in of the life-force is brought about by the painfulness of present reality and by the lack of the power of adaptation to things as they are. But this lack always has its roots in childhood. The woman who is shocked at the thought of sex is the little girl who reacted too strongly to early impressions. The man of forty who is disgruntled because he is not made manager of a business created by others is the little boy who was jealous of his father and wanted to usurp his place of power. The man who suffers from a sense of inferiority because his friend has a handsomer or more intellectual wife is the same little boy who strove with his father for possession of the mother, the most desired object in his childish environment. The measure of escape from these childish attitudes means the measure of success in life.

Sublimation the Key Word. In the prevention and in the cure of nervous disorders there is one factor of central importance, and that factor is sublimation—or the freeing of sex-energy for socially useful, non-sexual ends. To sublimate is to find vent for oneself and to serve society as well; for sublimation opens up new channels for pent-up energy, utilizing all the surplus of the sex-instinct in substitute activities. When the dynamic of this impulse is turned outward, not inward, it proves to be one of man's greatest possessions, a valuable contribution of energy to creative activities and personal relationships of every kind.

Along Nature's Lines. If the psychologist is asked what kind of task this is to be, he answers that each person must decide for himself his own life-work. An individual may not know why, but he does know that there are certain things which he most likes to do. Sublimation is more readily accomplished if his energy is directed toward self-chosen interests. Parents or teachers or physicians who try to force another person into any definite plan of action are making a grievous blunder. Help may be given toward self-knowledge and the understanding of general principles, but advice should never be specific.

In woman, the dominant force is the nurturing instinct. Child and man of her own come first, but when these are lacking, to paraphrase Kipling, in default of closer ties, she is wedded to convictions; Heaven help him who denies! Only as a career opens up full vent for this nurturing instinct, will it provide satisfactory substitute in sublimation. Its natural trend can be seen in the recent tidal wave of social legislation—for prohibition, child-labor laws, sanitation, recognition and control of venereal disease, acknowledgment of paternity to the illegitimate child.

Since the women of the day, in numbers up to the million, have been compelled to sacrifice both man and unformed babe to the grim Juggernaut of war, this nurturing urge may press hard against many of the social and business barriers now impeding its flow. But if society understands and readjusts these barriers, making it possible for its citizens—women as well as men—to approximate the natural instinctive bent, it will not only save itself much unrest but will also go far toward preventing the spread of nervous invalidism.

That which a nervous invalid most needs is a redirection of energy. Since, in spite of appearances, there is never any real lack of energy, no time is needed for the making of strength, and a cure can take place just as soon as the inner forces allow the energy to flow out in the right direction. Sometimes, indeed, an outer change may start the inner process. Often the "work cure" does cure; occasionally the sudden necessity to earn one's living or to mother a little child frees the life-force from its old preoccupation and forces it into other channels. In most cases, however, the nervous invalid is suffering not from lack of opportunities for outside interest but from an inner inability to meet the opportunities which present themselves. The great change that has to be made is not in external conditions and habits but in the hidden corners of the mind; a change that can be accomplished only by self-knowledge and re-education.

But if self-knowledge is the first step in any cure, so self-giving must be the final step. Sooner or later in the life of every nervous invalid there comes a time when nothing will serve to unify his disorganized forces but steady and unswerving responsibility for a good stiff piece of work. Happy for him that this is so and that he is living in a day when science no longer tells him to fold his hands and wait.

Autonomic nervous system: The vegetative nervous system which controls vital functions,—as digestion, respiration, circulation.

Censor: A hypothetical faculty of the fore-conscious mind which resists the emergence into consciousness of questionable desires.

Common path: In physiology, the final route over which response is made to physical stimulation; similarly in psychology, the one outlet for the finally dominant impulse.

Compensation: Exaggerated manifestation of one character-trend as a defense against its opposite which is painfully repressed; relief in substitute symptom formation.

Complex: A group of ideas held together by emotion (usually referring to a group which is wholly or in part unconscious).

Compulsion: A persistent compelling impulse to perform some seemingly unreasonable (but really substitute or symbolic) act, or to hold some irrational fear or idea; an emotional force which has been separated from the original idea.

Conflict: (Special) Struggle between instincts (unconscious).

Displacement: 1. Transposition of an emotion from its original idea to one more acceptable to the personality. 2. The shifting of emphasis, in dreams, from essential to less significant elements.

Dissociation: 1. The state of being shut out from taking active part (applied to a group of ideas), as in normal forgetfulness. 2. (Abnormal) An exaggerated degree of separation of groups of ideas, with loss to the personality of the forces or memories which these groups contain, as in double personality.

Fixation: Establishment in childhood of over-strong habit-reactions.

Free Association: A device for uncovering buried complexes by letting the mind wander without conscious direction.

Homo-sexual: The quality of being more attracted by an individual of the same sex (abnormal) than by one of the opposite sex (hetero-sexual, normal).

Hysteria: That form of functional nervous disorder which manifests itself in physical symptoms; an attempt to dramatize unconscious repressed desires.

Inhibition: Restraint (Special) limitation of function, physical or ideational, due to unconscious emotional attitudes.

Libido: Life-force, élan vital, or (restricted) the energy of the sex-instinct.

Obsession: A compulsive idea inaccessible to reason.

Oedipus Complex: Over-strong bond between mother and son, or (more loosely) between father and daughter.

Over-determined: Used of an impulse made over-strong by lack of discharge, with accumulation of emotional tension from added factors.

Phobia: A persistent, unreasoning fear of some object or situation.

Psycho-neurosis: "A perversion of normal (psychic) reactions," (Prince); a general term for functional dissociation of the personality, resulting in: psychasthenia—disturbed ideation; neurasthenia—disturbed emotions; hysteria—disturbed motor or sensory activity.

Psychotherapy: Treatment by psychic or mental measures.

Rationalization: The process of substituting a plausible, false explanation for a repressed, unconscious desire.

Repression: Expulsion from consciousness of a pain-provoking mental process.

Resistance: The force which impedes the return of a repressed complex to consciousness.

Subconscious: That part of the mind of which one is unaware; the storehouse of memories ancestral and personal.

Suggestion: The process by which any idea, true or false, takes hold of one; the idea may enter the mind consciously or unconsciously, through reason or through impulse.

Symbol: An object or an attitude which stands for an ides or a quality; (Special) that which stands for or represents some unconscious mental process.

Threshold (door-sill): A figure which represents the level of the barrier erected by the mind against the perception of an idea or sensation.

Transference: Unconscious identification of a present personal relationship with an earlier one, with conveyance of the earlier emotional attitudes (hostile or affectionate) to the present relationship.

Books on the General Laws of Body and Mind

Cannon, Walter B: Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage.

Crile, George W.: The Origin and Nature of the Emotions.

Coe, George Albert: The Psychology of Religion.

Hudson, Thomas Jay: The Law of Psychic Phenomena.

Janet, Pierre: The Major Symptoms of Hysteria; The Mental State of Hystericals.

James, William: Psychology; Talks to Teachers on Psychology; Varieties of Religious Experience.

Jastrow, Joseph: The Subconscious.

Kempf, Edward J.: The Tonus of Autonomic Segments in Psychopathology.

Long, Constance: Psychology of Fantasy.

McDougall, William: Social Psychology.

Mosher, Clelia Duel: Health and the Woman Movement.

Phillips, D.E.: Elementary Psychology.

Prince, Morton: The Unconscious; The Dissociation of a Personality; My Life as a Dissociated Personality.

Sherrington, Charles L.: The Integrative Action of the Nervous System.

Sidis, Boris: The Foundations of Normal and Abnormal Psychology; Psychopathological Researches.

Tansley, A.G.: The New Psychology.

Thomson, William Hanna: Brain and Personality.

Proceedings of the International Conference of Women Physicians. (National Board, Y.W.C.A., 600 Lexington Avenue, New York City.)

Books on Mental Hygiene

Brown, Charles R.: Faith and Health.

Bruce, H. Addington: Scientific Mental Healing.

Cabot, Richard: What Men Live By; Social Service and the Art of Healing.

DuBois, Paul: The Psychic Treatment of Nervous Disorders.

Huckel, Oliver: Mental Medicine.

James, William: Vital Reserves.

Prince, Morton, and others: Psychotherapeutics.

Sadler, William S.: The Physiology of Faith and Fear.

Books on Psycho-Analysis

Brill, A.A.: Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis.

Emerson, L.E.: Nervousness.

Freud, Sigmund: The Interpretation of Dreams; The Psychopathology of Everyday Life; Wit and the Unconscious; Selected Papers and Sexual Theory; A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis.

Frink, H.W.: Morbid Fears and Compulsions.

Hitschmann, E.: Freud's Theories of the Neuroses.

Jung, Carl G.: The Psychology of the Unconscious; Analytical Psychology.

Jones, Ernest: Psycho-analysis; Treatment of the Neuroses, Including Psychoneuroses—in Modern Treatment of Nervous and Mental Diseases—White and Jelliffe.

Pfister, Oskar: The Psychoanalytic Method.

Putnam, James Jackson: Addresses on Psychoanalysis—Human Motives.

Tridon, André: Psychoanalysis.

White, William A.: The Mechanisms of Character Formation.

Journals Devoted to the Subject of Nervous Disorders

Journal of Abnormal Psychology, published in Boston.

Psychoanalytic Review, published in Washington, D.C.

International Journal of Psychoanalysis, published in London.

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