PART III--THE MASTERY OF "NERVES"

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OUTWITTING OUR

NERVES

A PRIMER OF PSYCHOTHERAPY

BY

JOSEPHINE A. JACKSON, M.D.

HELEN M. SALISBURY

[Illustration]

NEW YORK

THE CENTURY CO.

1922

1921, by

THE CENTURY CO.

PRINTED IN U.S.A.

TO

MARY PATTERSON MANLY

A LOVER OF TRUTH

FOREWORD

"Your trouble is nervous. There is nothing we can cut out and there is

nothing we can give medicine for." With these words a young college

student was dismissed from one of our great diagnostic clinics.

The physician was right. In a nervous disorder there is nothing to cut

out and there is nothing to give medicine for. Nevertheless there is

something to be done,--something which is as definite and scientific

as a prescription or a surgical operation.

Psychotherapy, which is treatment by the mental measures of

psycho-analysis and re-education, is an established procedure in the

scientific world to-day. Nervous disorders are now curable, as has

been proved by the clinical results in scores of cases from civil

life, under treatment by Freud, Janet, Prince, Sidis, DuBois, and

others; and in thousands of cases of war neuroses as reported by Smith

and Pear, Eder, MacCurdy, and other military observers. These army

experts have shown that shell-shock in war is the same as nervousness

in civil life and that both may be cured by psycho-analysis and

re-education.

For more than a decade, in handling nervous cases, I have made use of

the findings of recognized authorities on psychopathology. Truths have

been applied in a special way, with the features of re-education so

emphasized that my home has been called a psychological

boarding-school. As the alumni have gone back to the game of life

with no haunting memories of usual sanatorium methods, but with the

equipment of a fuller self-knowledge and sense of power, they have

sent back a call for some word that shall extend this helpful message

to a larger circle.

There has come, too, a demand for a book which shall give accurate and

up-to-date information to those physicians who are eager for light on

the subject of nervous disorders, and especially for knowledge of the

significant contributions of Sigmund Freud, but who are too busy to

devote time to highly technical volumes outside their own specialties.

This need for a simple, comprehensive presentation of the Freudian

principles I have attempted to meet in this primer of psychotherapy,

providing enough of biological and psychological background to make

them intelligible, and enough application and illustration to make

them useful to the general practitioner or the average layman.

JOSEPHINE A. JACKSON.

Pasadena, California, 1921.

CONTENTS

PART I: THE STRANGE WAYS OF NERVES

CHAPTER I

PAGE

In which most of us plead guilty to the charge of "nerves."

NERVOUS FOLK 3

CHAPTER II

In which we learn what "nerves" are not and get a hint of

what they are.

THE DRAMA OF NERVES 10

PART II: "HOW THE WHEELS GO ROUND"

CHAPTER III

In which we find a goodly inheritance.

THE STORY OF THE INSTINCTS 33

CHAPTER IV

In which we learn more about ourselves.

THE STORY OF THE INSTINCTS (Continued) 51

CHAPTER V

In which we look below the surface and discover a veritable

wonderland.

THE SUBCONSCIOUS MIND 77

CHAPTER VI

In which we learn why it pays to be cheerful.

BODY AND MIND 118

CHAPTER VII

In which we go to the root of the matter.

THE REAL TROUBLE 141

PART III: THE MASTERY OF "NERVES"

CHAPTER VIII

In which we pick up the clue.

THE WAY OUT 183

CHAPTER IX

In which we discover new stores of energy and relearn the

truth about fatigue.

THAT TIRED FEELING 219

CHAPTER X

In which the ban is lifted.

DIETARY TABOOS 250

CHAPTER XI

In which we learn an old trick.

THE BUGABOO OF CONSTIPATION 278

CHAPTER XII

In which handicaps are dropped.

A WOMAN'S ILLS 300

CHAPTER XIII

In which we lose our dread of night.

THAT INTERESTING INSOMNIA 322

CHAPTER XIV

In which we raise our thresholds.

FEELING OUR FEELINGS 333

CHAPTER XV

In which we learn discrimination.

CHOOSING OUR EMOTIONS 359

CHAPTER XVI

In which we find new use for our steam.

FINDING VENT IN SUBLIMATION 379

GLOSSARY 386

BIBLIOGRAPHY 390

INDEX 393

OUTWITTING OUR NERVES

CHAPTER I

_In Which Most of Us Plead Guilty to the Charge of "Nerves."_

NERVOUS FOLK

WHO'S WHO

Whenever the subject of "nerves" is mentioned most people begin trying

to prove an alibi. The man who is nervous and knows that he is

nervous, realizes that he needs help, but the man who has as yet felt

no lack of stability in himself is quite likely to be impatient with

that whole class of people who are liable to nervous breakdown. It is

therefore well to remind ourselves at once that the line between the

so-called "normal" and the nervous is an exceedingly fine one.

"Nervous invalids and well people are indistinguishable both in theory

and in practice,"[1] and "after all we are most of us more or less

neurasthenic."[2] The fact is that everybody is a possible neurotic.

[Footnote 1: Putnam: _Human Motives_, p. 117.]

[Footnote 2: DuBois: _Physic Treatment of Nervous Disorders_, p. 172.]

So, as we think about nervous folk and begin to recognize our friends

and relatives in this class, it may be that some of us will

unexpectedly find ourselves looking in the mirror. Some of our

lifelong habits may turn out to be nervous tricks. At any rate, it

behooves us to be careful about throwing stones, for most of us live

in houses that are at least part glass.

THE EARMARKS

=Am I "Like Folks"?= Before we begin to talk about the real sufferer

from "nerves," the nervous invalid, let us look for some of the

earmarks that are often found on the supposedly well person. All of

these signs are deviations from the normal and are sure indications of

nervousness. The test question for each individual is this: "Am I

'like folks'?" To be normal and to be well is to be "like folks." Can

the average man stand this or that? If he can, then you are not normal

if you cannot. Do the people around you eat the thing that upsets you?

If they do, ten chances to one your trouble is not a physical

idiosyncrasy, but a nervous habit. In bodily matters, at least, it is

a good thing to be one of the crowd.

Many people who would resent being called anything but normal--in

general--are not at all loth to be thought "different," when it comes

to particulars. Are there not many of us who are at small pains to

hide the fact that we "didn't sleep a wink last night," or that we

"can't stand" a ticking clock or a crowing rooster? We sometimes

consider it a mark of distinction to have a delicate appetite and to

have to choose our food with care. If we are frank with ourselves,

some of us will have to admit that our own ailments seem interesting,

while the other person's ills are "merely nervous" or imaginary or

abnormal. After all, a good many of us will have to plead guilty to

the charge of nervousness.

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.

=Half-Power Engines.= These people are all supposed to be well. They

keep going--by fits and starts--and as they are used to running on

three cylinders, with frequent stops for repairs, they accept this

rate of living as a matter of course, never realizing that they might

be sixty horse-power engines, instead of their little thirty or forty.

For this large and neglected class of people psychotherapy has a

stimulating message, and for them many of the following pages have

been written.

=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.

=Various Types of Nervousness.= The psychoneuroses are of many

forms.[3] To some people "nerves" means nervous prostration,

breakdown, fatigue, weakness, insomnia, the blues, upset stomach, or

unsteady heart,--all signs of so-called neurasthenia or

nerve-weakness. To others the word "nerves" calls up memories of

strange, emotional storms that seem to rise out of nowhere, to sweep

the sky clear of everything else, and to pass as they came, leaving

the victim and the family equally mystified as to their meaning. These

strange alterations of personality are but one manifestation of

hysteria, that myriad-faced disorder which is able to mimic so

successfully the symptoms of almost every known disease, from tumors

and fevers to paralysis and blindness.

[Footnote 3: The technical term for nervousness is

_psycho-neurosis_--disease of the psyche. There are certain "real

neuroses" such as paralysis and spinal-cord disease, which involve an

organic impairment of nerve-tissue. However, as this book deals only

with psychic disturbance, we shall, throughout, use the term

_neuroses_ and _psycho-neuroses_ indiscriminately, to denote nervous

or functional disorders.]

To still other people nervous trouble means fear,--just terrible fear

without object or meaning or reason (anxiety neuroses); or a definite

fear of some harmless object (phobia); or a strange, persistent,

recurrent idea, quite foreign to the personality and beyond the reach

of reason (obsession); or an insistent desire to perform some absurd

act (compulsion); or perhaps, a deadly and pall-like depression (the

blues).

As a matter of fact, the neuroses include all these varieties, and

various shades and combinations of each. There are, however, certain

mental characteristics which recur with surprising regularity in most

of the various phases--dissatisfaction, lack of confidence, a sense of

being alone and shut in to oneself, doubt, anxiety, fear, worry,

self-depreciation, lack of interest in outside affairs, pessimism,

fixed belief in one's powerlessness, along whatever line it may be.

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

Since at least seventy-five per cent. of all the people who apply to

physicians for help are nervous patients; and since these thousands of

patients are not among the mental incompetents, but are as a rule

among the highly organized, conscientious folk who have most to

contribute to the leadership of the world, it is obviously of vital

importance to society that its citizens should be taught how to solve

their inner conflicts and keep well. In this strategic period of

reconstruction, the world that is being remodeled cannot afford to

lose one leader because of an unnecessary breakdown.

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.

CHAPTER II

_In which we learn what "nerves" are not, and get a hint of what they

are_

THE DRAMA OF NERVES

AN EXPLODED THEORY

="Nerves" not Nerves.= Pick up any newspaper, turn over a few pages,

and you will be sure to come to an advertisement something like this:

Tired man, your nerves are sick!

They need rest and a tonic to restore

their worn-out depleted cells!

No wonder people have believed this kind of thing. It has been dinned

into their ears for many years. They have read it with their breakfast

coffee and gazed at it in the street cars and even heard it from their

family physicians, until it has become part and parcel of their

thinking; yet all the time the fundamental idea has been false, and

now, at last, the theory is exploded.

So far as the modern laboratory can discover, the nerves of the most

confirmed neurotic are perfectly healthy. They are not starved, nor

depleted, nor exhausted; the fat-sheath is not wanting, there is no

inflammation, there is nothing lacking in the cell itself, and there

is no accumulation of fatigue products. Paradoxical as it may sound,

there is nothing the matter with a nervous person's nerves. The

faithful messengers have borne the blame for so long that their name

has gotten itself woven into the very language as symbolic of disease.

When we speak of nervous prostration, neurasthenia, neuroses,

nervousness, and "nerves" we mean that body and mind are behaving

badly because of functional disorder. These terms are good enough as

figures of speech, so long as we are not fooled by them; but accepting

them in their literal sense has been a costly procedure.

Thanks to the investigations of physiologist and psychologist, usually

combined in the person of a physician, "nervousness" has been found to

be not an organic disease but a functional one. This is a very

important distinction, for an organic disease implies impairment of

the tissues of the organ, while a functional disorder means only a

disturbance of its action. In a purely nervous disorder there seems to

be no trouble with what the nerves and organs are, but only with what

they do; it is behavior and not tissue that is at fault. Of course, in

real life, things are seldom as clear-cut as they are in books, and

so it happens that often there is a combination of organic and

functional disease that is puzzling even to a skilled diagnostician.

The first essential is a diagnosis as to whether it be an organic

disease, with accompanying nervous symptoms, or a functional

disturbance complicated by some minor organic trouble. If the main

cause is organic, only physical means can cure it, but if the trouble

is functional, no amount of medicine or surgery, diet or rest, will

touch it; yet the symptoms are so similar and the dividing line is so

elusive, that great skill is sometimes required to determine whether a

given symptom points to a disturbance of physical tissue or only to

behavior.

If the physician is sometimes fooled, how much more the sufferer

himself! Nausea from a healthy stomach is just as sickening as nausea

from a diseased one. A fainting-spell is equally uncomfortable,

whether it come from an impaired heart or simply from one that is

behaving badly for the moment. It must be remembered that in

functional nervousness the trouble is very real. The organs are really

"acting up." Sometimes it is the brain that misbehaves instead of the

stomach or heart. In that case it often reports all kinds of pains

that have no origin outside of the brain. Pain, of course, is

perceived only by the brain. Cut the telegraph wire, the nerve, and no

amount of injury to the finger can cause pain. It is equally true that

a misbehaving brain can report sensations that have no external

cause, that have not come in through the regular channel along the

nerve. The pain feels just the same, is every bit as uncomfortable as

though its cause were external.

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.

=Distorted Pictures.= It should not be thought, however, that the

symptoms of functional and organic troubles are identical. Hysteria

and neurasthenia closely simulate every imaginable physical disease,

but they do not exactly parallel any one of them. It may take a

skilled eye to discover the differences, but differences there are.

Functional troubles usually show a near-picture of organic disease,

with just enough contradictory or inconsistent features to furnish a

clue as to their real nature. For this reason it is important that the

treatment of the disease be solely the province of the physician; for

only the carefully trained in all the requirements of diagnosis can

differentiate the pseudo from the real, the innocuous from the

disastrous.

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

="Nerves" not Imaginary.= "But," some one says, "how can healthy

organs misbehave in this way? Something must be wrong. There must be

some cause. If 'nerves' are not physical, what are they? They surely

can't be imaginary." Most emphatically, they are real; nothing could

be more maddening than to have some one suggest that our troubles are

"mere imagination." No wonder such theories have been more popular

with the patient's family than with the patient himself. Many years

ago a physician put the whole truth into a few words: "The patient

says, 'I cannot'; his friends say, 'He will not'; the doctor says, 'He

cannot will.'" He tries, but in the circumstances he really cannot.

=The Man behind the Body.= The trouble is real; the organs do "act

up"; the nerves do carry the wrong messages. But the nerves are merely

telegraph wires. They are not responsible for the messages that are

given them to carry. Behind the wires is the operator, the man higher

up, and upon him the responsibility falls. In functional troubles the

body is working in a perfectly normal way, considering the perverted

conditions. It is doing its work well, doing just what it is told,

obeying its master. The troubles are not with the bodily machine but

with the master. The man behind the body is in trouble and he really

has no way of showing his pain except through his body. The trouble in

nervous disorders is in the personality, the soul, the realm of ideas,

and that is not your body, but _you_. Loss of appetite may mean either

that the powers of the physical organism are busily engaged in

combating some poison circulating in the blood, or that the ego is "up

against" conditions for which it has "no stomach." Paralysis may be

due to a hemorrhage into the brain tissues from a diseased blood

vessel, or it may symbolize a sense of inadequacy and defeat.

Exaggerated exhaustion, halting feet, stammering tongue, may give

evidence of a disturbed ego rather than of a diseased brain.

=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.

By way of condoning this fault it must be recognized that the five

years of medical school have been all too short to learn what is

needed of physiology and anatomy, histology, bacteriology, and the

various other physical sciences. But at last the medical schools are

realizing that they have been sending their graduates out only

half-prepared--conversant with only one half of a patient, leaving

them to fend for themselves in discovering the ways of the other half.

Many an M.D. has gone a long way in this exploration. Native common

sense, intuition, and careful study have enabled him to go beyond what

he had learned in his text-books. But in the best universities the

present-day student of medicine is now being given an insight into the

ways of man as a whole--mind as well as body. The movement can hardly

proceed too rapidly, and when it has had time to reach its goal, the

day of the long-term sentence to nervousness will be past.

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.

=All Mind and no Body.= This unsympathetic attitude, often only half

conscious on the part of the regular practitioners, has led many

thousands of people to follow will-o'-the-wisp cults, which pay no

attention to the findings of science, but which emphasize a

realization of man's spiritual nature. Many of these cults, founded

largely on untruth or half-falsehood, have succeeded in cases where

careful science has failed. Despite fearful blunders and execrable

lack of discrimination in attempting to cure all the ills that flesh

is heir to by methods that apply only to functional troubles, ignorant

enthusiasts and quacks have sometimes cured nervous troubles where the

conscientious medical man has had to acknowledge defeat.

=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.

For the last quarter-century there have been scattered groups of

physicians,--brilliant, patient pioneers,--who, recognizing man as

spirit inhabiting body, have explored the realm of man's mind and

charted its paths. These pioneers, beginning with Charcot, have been

men of acknowledged scientific training and spirit, whose word must be

respected and whose success in treating functional troubles stands out

in sharp contrast to the fumblings of the average practitioner in this

field. The results of their work have been positive, not negative.

They have not merely asserted that nervous disorders are not physical;

they have discovered what the trouble is and have found it to be

discoverable and removable in almost every case, provided only that

the right method is used.

=Ourselves and Our Bodies.= If the statement that "nervous troubles

are neither physical nor imaginary but a disease of the personality,"

sounds rather mystifying to the average person, it is only because the

average person is not very conversant with his own inner life. We

shall hope, later on, to find some definite guide-posts and landmarks

which will help us feel more at home in this fascinating realm. At

present, we are not attempting anything more than a suggestion of the

itinerary which we shall follow. A book on physical hygiene can

presuppose at least a rudimentary knowledge of heart and lungs and

circulation, but a book on mental hygiene must begin at the beginning,

and even before the beginning must clear away misconceptions and make

clear certain fundamental principles. But the gist of the whole matter

is this: in a neurosis, certain forces of the personality--instincts

and their accompanying emotions--which ought to work harmoniously,

having become tangled up with some erroneous ideas, have lost their

power of coöperation and are working at cross purposes, leaving the

individual mis-adapted to his environment, the prey of all sorts of

mental and physical disturbances.

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.

=Such Stuff as "Nerves" are Made Of.= Dr. Tom A. Williams in the

little composite volume "Psychotherapeutics" says that the neuroses

are based not on inherently weak nervous constitutions but on

ignorance and on false ideas. What, then, are some of these erroneous

ideas, these misconceptions, that cause so much trouble? We shall want

to examine them more carefully in later chapters, but we might glance

now at a few examples of these popular bugaboos that need to be slain

by the sword of cold, hard fact.

=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."

6 "Constipation is at the root of most physical ailments and is

caused by eating the wrong kind of food."

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 Count.= Ideas are not the lifeless things they may appear. They

are not merely intellectual property that can be locked up and ignored

at will, nor are they playthings that can be taken up or discarded

according to the caprice of the moment. Ideas work themselves into the

very fiber of our being. They are part of us and they _do_ things. If

they are true, in line with things as they are, they do things that

are for our good, but if they are false, we often discover that they

have an altogether unsuspected power for harm and are capable of

astonishing results, results which have no apparent relation to the

ideas responsible for them and which are, therefore, laid to physical

causes. Thinking straight, then, becomes a hygienic as well as a

moral duty.

=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.

CHARACTER AND HEALTH

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.

=It Pays to Know.= To be educated is to have the right idea and the

right emotion in the right place. To be sure, some people have so well

learned the secret of poise that they do not have to study the why nor

the how. Intuition often far outruns knowledge. It would be foolish

indeed to suggest that only the person versed in psychological lore is

skilled in the art of living. Psychology is not life; it can make no

claim to furnish the motive nor the power for successful living, for

it is not faith, nor hope, nor love; but it tries to point the way and

to help us fulfil conditions. There is no more reason why the average

man should be unaware of the instincts or the subconscious mind, than

that he should be ignorant of germs or of the need of fresh air.

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

=Counting on Ourselves.= Knowing our machine makes us better able to

handle it. For, after all, each of us is, in many ways, very like a

piece of marvelous and complicated machinery. For one thing, our

minds, as well as our bodies, are subject to uniform laws upon which

we can depend. We are not creatures of chaos; under certain conditions

we can count on ourselves. Freedom does not mean freedom from the

reign of law. It means that, to a certain extent, we can make use of

the laws. Psychic laws are as susceptible to investigation,

verification, and use as are any laws in the physical world. Each

person is so much the center of his own life that it is very easy for

him to fall into the way of thinking that he is different from all the

rest of the world. It is a healthful experience for him to realize

that every person he meets is made on the same principles, impelled by

the same forces, and fighting much the same fight. Since the laws of

the mental world are uniform, we can count on them as aids toward

understanding other people and understanding ourselves.

="Intelligent Scrutiny versus Morbid Introspection."= It helps

wonderfully to be able to look at ourselves in an objective,

impersonal way. We are likely to be overcome by emotion, or swept by

vague longings which seem to have no meaning and which, just because

they are bound up so closely with our own ego, are not looked at but

are merely felt. Unknown forces are within us, pulling us this way and

that, until sometimes we who should be masters are helpless slaves.

One great help toward mastery and one long step toward serenity is a

working-knowledge of the causes and an impersonal interest in the

phenomena going on within. Introspection is a morbid, emotional

fixation on self, until it takes on this quality of objectivity. What

Cabot calls the "sin of impersonality" is a grievous sin when

directed toward another person, but most of us could stand a good deal

of ingrowing impersonality without any harm.

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.

Psychology is not merely interested in abstract terms with long names.

It is no longer absorbed merely in states of consciousness taken

separately and analyzed abstractly. The newer functional psychology is

increasingly interested in the study of real persons, their purposes

and interests, what they feel and value, and how they may learn to

realize their highest aspirations. It is about ordinary people, as

they think and act, in the kitchen, on the street cars, at the

bargain-counter, people in crowds and alone, mothers and their babies,

little children at play, young girls with their lovers, and all the

rest of human life. It is the science of _you_, and as such it can

hardly help being interesting.

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:

Lack of adaptation to the social environment--caused by

Lack of harmony within the personality--caused by

Misdirected energy--caused by

Inappropriate emotions--caused by

Wrong ideas or ignorance.

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.

As in a Bernard Shaw play, the preface may be the most important part

of this "drama of nerves." Nor is the figure too far-fetched,

because, strange as it may seem, every neurosis is in essence a drama.

It has its conflict, its villain, and its victim, its love-story, its

practical joke, its climax, and its denouement. Sometimes the play

goes on forever with no solution, but sometimes psychotherapy steps in

as the fairy god-mother, to release the victim, outwit the villain,

and bring about the live-happily-ever-after ending.

PART II: "HOW THE WHEELS GO ROUND"

CHAPTER III

_In which we find a goodly inheritance_

THE STORY OF THE INSTINCTS

EACH IN HIS OWN TONGUE

A fire mist and a planet,

A crystal and a cell,

A jelly-fish and a saurian,

And caves where cavemen dwell;

Then a sense of law and beauty,

And a face turned from the clod;

Some call it evolution

And others call it God.[4]

If we begin at the beginning, we have to go back a long way to get our

start, for the roots of our family tree reach back over millions of

years. "In the beginning--God." These first words of the book of

Genesis must be, in spirit at least, the first words of any discussion

of life. We know now, however, that when God made man, He did not

complete His masterpiece at one sitting, but instead devised a plan by

which the onward urge within and the environment without should act

and interact until from countless adaptations a human being was made.

[Footnote 4: William Herbert Carruth.]

As the late Dr. Putnam of Harvard University says, "We stand as the

representative of a Creative Energy that expressed itself first in far

simpler forms of life and finally in the form of human instincts."[5]

And again: "The choices and decisions of the organisms whose lives

prepared the way through eons of time for ours, present themselves to

us as instincts."[6]

[Footnote 5: Putnam: _Human Motives_, p. 32.]

[Footnote 6: Putnam: _Human Motives_, p. 18.]

INTRODUCING THE INSTINCTS

=Back of Our Dispositions.= What is it that makes the baby jump at a

noise? What energizes a man when you tell him he is a liar? What makes

a young girl blush when you look at her, or a youth begin to take

pains with his necktie? What makes men go to war or build tunnels or

found hospitals or make love or save for a home? What makes a woman

slave for her children, or give her life for them if need be?

"Instinct" you say, and rightly. Back of every one of these well-known

human tendencies is a specific instinct or group of instincts. The

story of the life of man and the story of the mind of man must begin

with the instincts. Indeed, any intelligent approach to human life,

whether it be that of the mother, the teacher, the preacher, the

social worker or the neurologist, leads back inevitably to the

instincts as the starting-point of understanding. But what is

instinct?

We are apt to be a bit hazy on that point, as we are on any

fundamental thing with which we intimately live. We reckon on these

instinctive tendencies every hour of the day, but as we are not used

to labeling them, it may help in the very beginning of our discussion

to have a list before our eyes. Here, then, is a list of the

fundamental tendencies of the human race and the emotions which drive

them to fulfilment.

THE SPECIFIC INSTINCTS AND THEIR EMOTIONS (AFTER MCDOUGALL)

_Instinct_ _Emotion_

Nutritive Instinct Hunger

Flight Fear

Repulsion Disgust

Curiosity Wonder

Self-assertion Positive Self-feeling (Elation)

Self-abasement Negative Self-feeling (Subjection)

Gregariousness Emotion unnamed

Acquisition Love of Possession

Construction Emotion unnamed

Pugnacity Anger

Reproductive Instinct Emotion unnamed

Parental Instinct Tender Emotion

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.

There flows through the life of every creature a steady stream of

energy. Scientists have not been able to decide on a descriptive term

for this all-important life-force. It has been variously called

"libido," "vital impulse" or "élan vital," "the spirit of life,"

"hormé," and "creative energy." The chief business of this life-force

seems to be the preservation and development of the individual and the

preservation and development of the race. In the service of these two

needs have grown up these habit-reactions which we call instincts. The

first ten of our list belong under the heading of self-preservation

and the last two under that of race-preservation. As hunger is the

most urgent representative of the self-preservative group, and as

reproduction and parental care make up the race-preservative group,

some scientists refer all impulses to the two great instincts of

nutrition and sex, using these words in the widest sense. However, it

will be useful for our purpose to follow McDougall's classification

and to examine individually the various tendencies of the two groups.

=In Debt to Our Ancestors.= An instinct is the result of the

experience of the race, laid in brain and nerve-cells ready for use.

It is a gift from our ancestors, an inheritance from the education of

the age-long line of beings who have gone before. In the struggle for

existence, it has been necessary for the members of the race to feed

themselves, to run away from danger, to fight, to herd together, to

reproduce themselves, to care for their young, and to do various other

things which make for the well-being or preservation of the race. The

individuals that did these things at the right time survived and

passed on to their offspring an inherited tendency to this kind of

reaction. McDougall defines an instinct as "an inherited or innate

psycho-physical disposition which determines its possessor to perceive

or pay attention to objects of a certain class, to experience an

emotional excitement of a particular quality upon perceiving such an

object, and to act in regard to it in a particular manner, or at least

to experience an impulse to such action." This is just what an

instinct is,--an inherited disposition to notice, to feel, and to want

to act in certain ways in certain situations. It is the something

which makes us act when we cannot explain why, the something that goes

deeper than reason, and that links us to all other human

beings,--those who live to-day and those who have gone before.

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.

=Firing Up the Engine.= Purpose is writ large across the face of an

instinct, and that purpose is always toward action. Whenever a

situation arises which demands instantaneous action, the instinct is

the means of securing it. Planted within the creature is a tendency

which makes it perceive and feel and act in the appropriate way. It

will be noticed that there are three distinct parts to the process,

corresponding to intellect, emotion, will. The initial intellectual

part makes us sensitive to certain situations, makes us recognize an

object as meaningful and significant, and waves the flag for the

emotion; the emotion fires up the engine, pulls the levers all over

the body that release its energy and get it ready for action, and

pushes the button that calls into the mind an intense, almost

irresistible desire or impulse to act. Once aroused, the emotion and

the impulse are not to be changed. In man or beast, in savage or

savant, the intense feeling, the marked bodily changes, and the

yearning for action are identical and unchangeable. The brakes can be

put on and the action suppressed, but in that case the end of the

whole process is defeated. Could anything be plainer than that an

instinct and its emotion were never intended to be aroused except in

situations in which their characteristic action is to be desired? An

emotion is the hot part of an instinct and exists solely for securing

action. If all signs of the emotion are to be suppressed, all

expression denied, why the emotion?

But although the emotion and the impulse, once aroused, are beyond

control, there is yet one part of the instinct that is meant to be

controlled. The initial or receptive portion, that which notices a

situation, recognizes it as significant, and sends in the signal for

action, can be trained to discrimination. This is where reason comes

in. If the situation calls for flight, fear is in order; if it calls

for fight, anger is in order; if it calls for examination, wonder is

in order; but if it calls for none of these things, reason should show

some discrimination and refuse to call up the emotion.

=The Right of Way.= There is a law that comes to the aid of reason in

this dilemma and that is the "law of the common path."[7] By this is

meant that man is capable of but one intense emotion at a time. No one

can imagine himself strenuously making love while he is shaken by an

agony of fear, or ravenously eating while he is in a passion of rage.

The stronger emotion gets the right of way, obtains control of mental

and bodily machinery, and leaves no room for opposite states. If the

two emotions are not antagonistic, they may blend together to form a

compound emotion, but if in the nature of the case such a blending is

impossible, the weaker is for the time being forgotten in the

intensity of the stronger. "The expulsive power of a new affection" is

not merely a happy phrase; it is a fact in every day life. The

problem, then, resolves itself into ways of making the desirable

emotion the stronger, of learning how to form the habit of giving it

the head start and the right of way. In our chapter on "Choosing the

Emotions," we shall find that much depends on building up the right

kind of sentiments, or the permanent organization of instincts around

ideas. However, we must first look more closely at the separate

instincts to acquaint ourselves with the purpose and the ways of each,

and to discover the nature of the forces with which we have to deal.

[Footnote 7: Sherrington: _Integrative Action of the Nervous System_.]

I THE SELF-PRESERVATIVE INSTINCTS

=Hunger.= Hunger is the most pressing desire of the egoistic or

self-preserving impulse. The yearning for food and the impulse to seek

and eat it are aroused organically within the body and are behind much

of the activity of every type of life. As the impulse is so familiar,

and its promptings are so little subject to psychic control, it seems

unnecessary to do more than mention its importance.

=Flight and Fear.= All through the ages the race has been subject to

injury. Species has been pitted against species, individual against

individual. He who could fight hardest or run fastest has survived and

passed his abilities on to his offspring. Not all could be strongest

for fight, and many species have owed their existence to their ability

to run and to know when to run. Thus it is that one of the strongest

and most universal tendencies is the instinct for flight, and its

emotion, fear. "Fear is the representation of injury and is born of

the innumerable injuries which have been inflicted in the course of

evolution."[8] Some babies are frightened if they are held too

loosely, even though they have never known a fall. Some persons have

an instinctive fear of cats, a left-over from the time when the race

needed to flee from the tiger and others of the cat family. Almost

every one, no matter in what state of culture, fears the unknown

because the race before him has had to be afraid of that which was not

familiar.

[Footnote 8: Crile: _Origin and Nature of the Emotions_.]

The emotion of fear is well known, but its purpose is not so often

recognized. An emotion brings about internal changes, visceral changes

they are called, which enable the organism to act on the emotion,--to

accomplish its object. There is only so much energy available at a

given moment, stored up in the brain cells, ready for use. In such an

emergency as flight every ounce of energy is needed. The large muscles

used in running must have a great supply of extra energy. The heart

and lungs must be speeded up in order to provide oxygen and take care

of extra waste products. The special senses of sight and hearing must

be sensitized. Digestion and intestinal peristalsis must be stopped in

order to save energy. No person could by conscious thought accomplish

all these things. How, then, are they brought about?

=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.

But after flight comes concealment with the opposite bodily need, the

need for absolute silence. This is why we sometimes get the opposite

result. The heart seems to stop beating, the breath ceases, the limbs

refuse to move, all because our ancestors needed to hide after they

had run, and because we are in a very real way a part of them.

=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.

We fear not in our hearts alone, not in our brains alone, not in

our viscera alone--fear influences every organ and tissue. Each

organ or tissue is stimulated or inhibited according to its use

or hindrance in the physical struggle for existence. By thus

concentrating all or most of the nerve force on the

nerve-muscular mechanism for defense, a greater physical power is

developed. Hence it is that under the stimulus of fear animals

are able to perform preternatural feats of strength. For the same

reason, the exhaustion following fear will be increased as the

powerful stimulus of fear drains the cup of nervous energy even

though no visible action may result.... Perhaps the most striking

difference between man and animals lies in the greater control

which man has gained over his primitive instinctive reactions. As

compared with the entire duration of organic evolution, man came

down from his arboreal abode and assumed his new rôle of

increased domination over the physical world but a moment ago.

And now, though sitting at his desk in command of the complicated

machinery of civilization, when he fears a business catastrophe

his fear is manifested in the terms of his ancestral physical

battle in the struggle for existence. He cannot fear

intellectually, he cannot fear dispassionately, he fears with all

his organs, and the same

organs are stimulated and inhibited as if, instead of its being a

battle of credit, or position, or of honor, it were a physical

battle with teeth and claws.... Nature has but one means of

response to fear, and whatever its cause the phenomena are always

the same--always physical.[9]

[Footnote 9: Crile: _Origin and Nature of the Emotions_, p. 60 ff.]

* * * * *

The moral is as plain as day: Learn to call up fear only when speedy

legs are needed, not a cool head or a comfortable digestion. Fear is a

costly proceeding, an emergency measure like a fire-alarm, to be used

only when the occasion is urgent enough to demand it. How often it is

misused and how large a part it plays in nervous symptoms, both mental

and physical, will appear more clearly in later chapters.

=Repulsion and Disgust.= Akin to the instinct of flight is that of

repulsion, which impels us, instead of fleeing, to thrust the object

away. It leads us to reject from the mouth noxious and disgusting

objects and to shrink from slimy, creepy creatures, and has of course

been highly useful in protecting the race from poisons and snakes. It

still operates in the tendency to put away from us those things,

mental or physical, toward which we feel aversion or disgust. Recent

psychological discoveries have revealed how largely a neurosis

consists in putting away from us--out of consciousness,--whatever we

do not wish to recognize, and so it happens that disgust plays an

unexpected part in nervous disorders.

=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.

=Self-Abasement.= Self-assertion is aroused primarily by the presence

of others and especially of those to whom we feel in any way

superior, but when the presence of others makes us feel small, when we

want to hide or keep in the background, we are being moved by the

opposite instinct of self-abasement and negative self-feeling. It may

be either the real or the fancied superiority of the spectators that

arouses this feeling,--their wisdom or strength, beauty or good

clothes. Sometimes, as in stage-fright, it is their numerical

superiority. Bashfulness is the struggle between the two

self-instincts, assertion and abasement. Our impulse for self-display

urges us on to make a good impression, while our feeling of

inferiority impels us to get away unnoticed. Hence the struggle and

the painful emotion.

=Gregariousness.= Man has been called a gregarious animal. That is,

like the animals, he likes to run with his kind, and feels a

pronounced aversion to prolonged isolation. It is this

"herd-instinct," too, which makes man so extremely sensitive to the

opinions of the society in which he lives. Because of this impulse to

go with the crowd, ideas received through education are accepted as

imperative and are backed up by all the force of the instinct of

self-regard. When the teachings of society happen to run counter to

the laws of our being, the possibilities of conflict are indeed

great.[10]

[Footnote 10: For a thorough discussion of the importance of this

instinct, see Trotter's _Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War_.]

=Acquisition.= Another fundamental disposition in both animals and

men is the instinct for possession, the instinct whose function it is

to provide for future needs. Squirrels and birds lay up nuts for the

winter; the dog hides his bone where only he can find it. Children

love to have things for their "very own," and almost invariably go

through the hoarding stage in which stamps or samples or bits of

string are hoarded for the sake of possession, quite apart from their

usefulness or value. Much of the training of children consists in

learning what is "mine" and what is "thine," and respect for the

property of others can develop only out of a sense of one's own

property rights.

=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.

=Pugnacity and Anger.= What is it that makes us angry? A little

thought will convince us that the thing which arouses our fury is not

the sight of any special object, but the blocking of any one of the

other instincts. Watch any animal at bay when its chance for flight

has gone. The timidest one will turn and fight with every sign of

fury. Watch a mother when her young are threatened,--bear, or cat or

lion or human. Fear has no place then. It is entirely displaced by

anger over the balking of the maternal instinct of protection.

Strictly speaking, pugnacity belongs among the instincts neither of

self-preservation nor of race-preservation, but is a special device

for reinforcing both groups.

As fear supplies the energy for running, so anger fits us for

fight,--and for nothing but fight. The mechanism is almost identical

with that of fear. Brain and liver, adrenals and thyroid are the

means, but the emotion presses the button and releases the energy,

stopping all digestion and energizing all combat-muscles. The blood is

flooded with fuel and with substances which, if not used, are harmful

to the body. We were never meant to be angry without fighting. The

habit of self-control has its distinct advantages, but it is hard on

the body, which was patterned before self-control came into fashion.

The wise man, once he is aroused, lets off steam at the woodpile or on

a long, vigorous walk. He probably does not say to himself that he is

a motor animal integrated for fight and that he must get rid of

glycogen and adrenalin and thyroid secretion. He only knows that he

feels better "on the move."

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.

This, then, completes the list of self-preservative instincts, those

which are commonly called egoistic and which have been given us for

the maintenance of our own individual personal lives. But our

endowment includes another set of impulses which are no less important

and which must be reckoned with if human conduct is to be understood.

CHAPTER IV

_In which we learn more about ourselves_

THE STORY OF THE INSTINCTS (Continued)

II. THE RACE-PRESERVATIVE INSTINCTS

=Looking beyond Ourselves.= We sometimes speak of self-preservation as

though it were the only law of life, while as a matter of fact it is

but half the story. Nature has seen to it that there shall be planted

in every living creature an innate urge toward the larger life of the

race. Although the creature may never give a conscious thought to the

welfare of the race, he still bears within himself a set of instincts

which have as their end and aim, not the individual at all, but

society as a whole, and the life of generations that are to come. He

is bigger than he knows. Although he may have no notion why he feels

and acts as he does, and although he may pervert the purpose for his

own selfish end, he is continually being moved by the mighty impulse

of the race-life, an impulse which often outrivals the desire I or his

own personal existence. The craving to reproduce ourselves and the

craving to cherish and protect our young are among the most dynamic

forces in life. The two desires are so closely bound together that

they are often spoken of as one under the name of the sex-instinct, or

the family instincts. Let us look first at that part of the yearning

which urges toward perpetuating our own life in offspring.

=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.

But it is when we come to the highest level that we find even more

subtle ways planned to accomplish the desired end. Here we enter the

realm of individual initiative, for it is not now enough to leave to

external forces the joining of the two life-elements. In order to make

a new individual, father and mother must be drawn together, and so

there enters into the situation a personal relationship with all that

that implies. Because Nature has had to provide ways of drawing

individuals to one another, she has put into the higher types of life

the power of mutual attraction,--a power which in man, the highest of

all types, is responsible for many outgrowths that seem far removed

from the original purpose.

=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.

On the other hand, there is the capability of being attracted, with

all the personal relationships which spring from the power of admiring

and loving another person. The interest in others does not expend its

whole force on its primary objects,--mate and children. It flows out

into all human relationships, developing all the possibilities of

loving which mean so much in human life; the love of man for man and

woman for woman, as well as mutual love of man and woman. A force like

this, once planted, especially in the higher types of life, does not

spend all its energies in its main trunk. It sends out branches in

many directions, bearing by-products which are rich in value for all

of life.

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

=A Four-Grade School.= It is impossible to watch the growth of the

love-life of a human being, to trace its development from babyhood up

to its culmination in mating and parenthood, without a sense of wonder

at the steady purpose behind it all. We used to believe that the love

for the young girl that suddenly blooms forth in the callow youth was

an entirely new affair, something suddenly planted in him as he

developed into manhood; but now we know, thanks to the uncovering of

human nature by the painstaking investigations of the psycho-analytic

school of psychologists, that the seeds of the love-life are planted,

not in puberty, but with the beginning of life itself. Looked at in

one way, all infancy and childhood are a preparation, a training of

the love-instinct which is to be ready at the proper time to find its

mate and play its part in the perpetuation of the race. Nature begins

early. As she plants in the tiny baby all the organs that shall be

needed during its lifetime, so she plants the rudiments of all the

impulses and tendencies that shall later be developed into the

full-grown instincts. There have been found to be four periods in the

love-life of the growing child, three of them preparatory steps

leading up to maturity; periods in which the main current of love is

directed respectively toward self, parents, comrades, and finally

toward lover or mate.

=Like Narcissus.= In the first stage, the baby's interest is in his

own body. He is getting acquainted with himself, and he soon finds

that his body contains possibilities of pleasurable sensations which

may be repeated by the proper stimulation. Besides the

hunger-satisfaction that it brings, the act of sucking is pleasurable

in itself, and so the baby begins to suck his thumb or his quilts or

his rattle. Later, this impulse to stimulate the nerves about the

mouth finds its satisfaction in kissing, and still later it plays a

definite part in the wooing process; but at first the child is

self-sufficient and finds his pleasure entirely within himself. Other

regions of the body yield similar pleasure. We often find a tiny child

rubbing his genital organs or his thighs or taking exaggerated

pleasure in riding on someone's foot in order to stimulate these

nerves, which he has discovered at first merely by chance. When he

begins to run around, he loves to exhibit his own body, to go about

naked. None of this is naughtiness or perversion; it is only Nature's

preparation of trends that she will later need to use. The child is

normally and naturally in love with himself.[11] But he must not

linger too long in this stage. None of the channels which his

life-force is cutting must be dug too deep, else in later life they

will offer lines of least resistance which may, on occasion, invite

illness or perversion.

[Footnote 11: This is the stage which is technically known as

auto-eroticism or self-love.]

=In Love with His Family.= Presently Nature pries the child loose from

love of himself and directs part of his interests to people outside

himself. Before he is a year old, part of his love is turned to

others. In this stage it is natural that at first his affection should

center on those who make up his home circle,--his parents and other

members of the household. Even in this early choice we see a

foreshadowing of his future need. The normal little boy is especially

fond of his mother, and the normal little girl of her father. Not all

the love goes to the parent of the opposite sex, but if the child be

normal, a noticeably larger part finds its way in that direction.

Observing parents can often see unmistakable signs of jealousy: toward

the parent of the same sex, or the brother or sister of the same sex.

The little boy who sleeps with his mother while his father is away, or

who on these occasions gets all the attention and all the petting he

craves, is naturally eager to perpetuate this state of affairs. Many a

small boy has been heard to say that he wished his father would go

away and stay all the time,--to the horror of the parents who do not

understand. All this is natural enough, but it is not to be

encouraged. The pattern of the father or the mother must not be

stamped too deep in the impressionable child-mind. Too little love and

sympathy are bad, leading to repression and a morbid turning in of the

love-force; but too much petting, too many caresses are just as bad.

Sentimental self-indulgence on the part of the parents has been

repeatedly proved to be the cause of many a later illness for the

child. As the right kind of family love and comradeship, the kind that

leads to freedom and self-dependence, is among the highest forces in

life, so the wrong kind is among the worst. Parents and their

substitutes--nurses, sisters, and brothers--are but temporary

stopping-places for the growing love, stepping-stones to later

attachments which are biologically more necessary. The small boy who

lets himself be coddled and petted too long by his adoring relatives,

who does not shake off their caresses and run away to the other boys,

is doomed to failure, and, as we shall later see, probably to

illness.[12]

[Footnote 12: One of the best discussions of this theme is found in

the chapter "The Only or Favorite Child," by A.A. Brill, in

_Psychoanalysis_.]

In the later infantile period, the child, besides wanting to exhibit

his own body, shows marked interest in looking at the bodies of

others, and marked curiosity on sex-questions in general. He

particularly wants to know "where babies come from." If his questions

are unfortunately met by embarrassment or laughing evasion, or by

obvious lying about the stork or the doctor or the angels, his

curiosity is only whetted, and he comes to the very natural conclusion

that all matters of sex are sinful, disgusting, and indecent, and to

be investigated only on the sly. This conception cannot be brought

into harmony with the unconscious mental processes arising from his

race-instincts nor with his instinctive sense that "whatever is is

right." The resulting conflict in some four-year-old children is

surprisingly intense. Astonished indeed would many parents be if they

knew what was going on inside the heads of their "innocent" little

children; not "bad" things, but pathetic things which a little candor

would have avoided.

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.

=Gang and Chum.= At about four or five years the child leaves the

infantile stage of development, with its self-love and its intense

devotion to parents and their substitutes. He begins to be especially

interested in playmates of his own sex, to care more for the opinions

of the gang--or if it be a little girl, of the chum--than for those of

the parents. The life-force is leading him on to the next step in his

education, freeing him little by little from a too-hampering

attachment to his family. This does not mean that he does not love

his father and mother. It means only that some of his love is being

turned toward the rest of the world, that he may be an independent,

socially useful man.

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.

=The Mating-Time.= We are familiar with the changes that take place at

puberty. We laugh at the girl who, throwing off her tom-boy ways,

suddenly wants her skirts let down and her hair done up. We laugh at

the boy who suddenly leaves off being a rowdy, and turns into a

would-be dandy. We scold because this same boy and girl who have

always been so "sweet and tractable" become, almost overnight, surly

and cantankerous, restive under authority and impatient of family

restraint. We should neither laugh nor scold, if we understood. Nature

is succeeding in her purpose. She has led the young life on from self

to parents, from parents to gang or chum, and now she is trying to

lead it away from all its earlier attachments, to set it free for its

final adventure in loving. The process is painful, so painful that it

sometimes fails of accomplishment. In any case, the strain is

tremendous, needing all the wisdom and understanding which the family

has to offer. It is no easy task for any person to free himself from

the sense of dependence and protection, and the shielding love that

have always been his; to weigh anchors that are holding him to the

past and to start out on the voyage alone.

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

=When Nature's Plans Fall Through.= We have been describing the normal

course of affairs. We know that all too often the normal is not

achieved. Inner forces or outer circumstances too often conspire to

keep the young man or the young woman from the culmination toward

which everything has been moving. If the life-force cannot liberate

itself from the old family grooves to forge ahead into new channels,

or if economic demands or other conditions make postponement

necessary, then marriage is not possible. All the glandular secretions

and internal stimuli have been urging on to the final consummation,

developing physical and emotional life for an end that does not come;

or if it does come, is not sufficient to satisfy the demands of the

age-old instinct which for millions of years knew no restraint. In any

case, man finds himself, and woman herself, face to face with a

pressing problem, none the less pressing because it is in most cases

entirely unrecognized.

=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.

This having to act under changed conditions is exactly the trouble

with the reproductive instinct. Under civilization, conditions have

changed but the instinct has not. It is trying to act as it always

has acted, but civilized man wills otherwise. The change that has come

is not in the physical, external environment, but in man himself and

in the social environment which he has created. There is in man an

onward urge toward new and better things. Side by side with the desire

to live as he always has lived, there is a desire to make new

adaptations which are for the advancement of the whole race-life.

Besides the natural wish to take his desires as he finds them, there

is also the wish to modify them and use them for higher and more

socially useful ends.

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 Perpetual Feud.= There thus arises the strategic struggle

between that which the race has found good in the past and that which

the race finds good in the present. As the older race-experience is

laid in they body and built into the very fiber of the individual,

inherited as an innate impulse, it has become an integral part of

himself, an individual need rather than a social one. On the other

hand, man has, as another innate part of his being, the desire to go

with the herd, to conform to the standards of his fellows, to be what

he has learned society wants him to be. Hence the struggle, insistent,

ever more pressing, between two sets of desires within the man

himself; the feud between the past and the present, between the

natural and the social, between the selfish and the ideal. On one

side, there is the demand for instinctive satisfaction; on the other,

for moral control; on one side the demand for pleasure; on the other,

the demands of reality.[13]

[Footnote 13: "All the burdens of men or society are caused by the

inadequacies in the association of primal animal emotions with those

mental powers which have been so rapidly developed in

man-kind."--Shaler quoted by Hinkle: Introduction to Jung's

_Psychology of the Unconscious_.]

Two factors intensify the conflict. In the first place, the older

habits have the head start. Compared with the almost limitless extent

of our past history, our desire for the control of the instincts is

very new indeed. It requires the long look and the right perspective

to understand how very lately we have entered into our new conditions

and how old a habit we are trying to break. In the second place, the

larger part of the stimulus comes from within the body itself. When

studying the other instincts, we saw that the best way to control was

to refuse to stimulate when the situation was not suitable for

discharge. But with the organically aroused sex-instinct there is no

such power of choice. We may fan the flame by the thoughts we think or

the environment we seek, or we may smother the flame until it is out

of sight, but we cannot extinguish it by any act of ours. The issue

has always been too important to be left to the individual. The

stimulation comes, primarily, not by way of the mind but by way of the

body. With this instinct we cannot "stop before we begin," because

Nature has taken the matter out of our hands and begins for us.

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.

These blunders seem to lie in two directions. Assuming that it is

nearly impossible for the male to control his instincts, and that,

after all, it does not matter so much whether he does or not, society

has blinked at license in men, and thus has fostered a demoralizing,

anti-social double standard which has broken up countless homes, has

been responsible for the spread of venereal diseases, and has been

among the greatest curses of modern civilization. At the same time

society, in its efforts to maintain its standards for woman, has

taught its children, especially its girls, that anything savoring of

the word "sexual" is sinful, disgusting, and impure. To be sure, very

many women have modified their childish views, but an astonishingly

large number conserve, even in maturity, their warped ideas about the

whole subject of sex. Many a mature woman secretly believes that she,

at least, is not guilty of harboring anything so "vulgar" as a

reproductive instinct, not realizing that if this were so, she would

be, in very truth, a freak of nature.

Of course, woman is by nature as fully endowed with sex instincts as

is man. Kipling portrays the female of the species as "deadlier than

the male" in that the very framework of her constitution outlines the

one issue for which it was launched,--stanch against any attack which

might endanger the carrying on of life. Feeling the force of this

instinctive urge, she braces herself against precipitancy in response

by what seems almost a negation.

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.

=Adaptable Energy.= We neither have to give in to our over-insistent

desires nor to deny that they exist. Man has a power of adaptation.

Just when we seem to run up against a dead wall, to face an

irreconcilable conflict, we find a wonderful power of indirect

expression that affords satisfaction to all the innate forces without

doing violence to the ethical standards which have proved so necessary

for the development of character.

Hunger, which, like the reproductive instinct, is stimulated by the

changing chemistry of the body, can be satisfied only by achieving its

primary purpose, the taking of material food; but the creative impulse

to reproduce oneself possesses a unique ability to spiritualize itself

and expend its energy in other lines of creative endeavor. There seems

to be some sort of close connection between the especially intense

energy of the reproductive instinct and the modes of expression of the

instinct for construction; a connection which makes possible the

utilization of threatening destructive energy by directing it toward

socially valuable work. Just as we harness the mountain stream and use

its wild force to light our cities, or catch the lightning to run our

trolley cars, so we find man and woman--under the right

conditions--easily and naturally switching over the power of their

surplus sex-energy to ends which seem at first only slightly related

to its original aim, but which resemble it in that they too are

self-expressive and creative. If a person is able to express himself

in some real way, to give himself to socially needed work; if he can

reproduce himself intellectually and spiritually in artistic

production, in invention, in literature, in social betterment, he is

drawing on an age-old reservoir of creative energy, and by so doing is

relieving himself of inner tension which would otherwise seek less

beneficent ways of expression.

The world knew all this intuitively for a long time before it knew it

theoretically. The novelists, who are unconsciously among the best

psychologists, have thoroughly worked the vein. The average man knows

it. "He was disappointed in love," we say, "and we thought he would go

to pieces, but now he has found himself in his work"; or, "She will go

mad if she doesn't find some one who needs her." It is only lately

that science has caught up with intuition, but now the physicians and

psychologists who have had the most intimate and first-hand

acquaintance with the human heart are recognizing, to a man, this

unique power of the love-instinct and its possibilities for creative

work of every sort.[14]

[Footnote 14: Among those who have shown this connection between the

love-force and creative work are Freud, Jung, Jelliffe, White, Brill,

Jones, Wright, Frink, and the late Dr. Putnam of Harvard University,

who writes: "Freud has never asserted it as his opinion and it

certainly is not mine, that this is the only root from which artistic

expression springs. On the other hand, it is probable that all

artistic productions are partly referable to this source. A close

examination of many of them would enable any one to justify the

opinion that it is a source largely drawn upon."--_Human Motives_. p.

87.]

=Higher Levels.= Freud has called this spiritualization of natural

forces by a term borrowed from chemistry. As a solid is "sublimated"

when transformed into a gas, so a primal impulse is said to be

"sublimated" when it is diverted from its original object and made to

serve other ends. By this power of sublimation the little

exhibitionist, who loved to show himself, may become an actor; the

"cruel" boy who loved to dissect animals may become a surgeon; the

sexually curious child may turn his curiosity to other things and

become a scholar; the "born mother," if denied children of her own or

having finished with their upbringing, may take to herself the

children of the city, working for better laws and better care for

needy little ones; the man or woman whose sex-instinct is too strong

to find expression in legitimate, direct ways, may find it a valuable

resource, an increment of energy for creative work, along whatever

line his talent may lie.

There is no more marvelous provision in all life than this power of

sublimation of one form of energy into another, a provision shadowing

forth almost limitless possibilities for higher adaptations and for

growth in character. As we think of the distance we have already

traveled and the endless possibilities of ever higher excursions of

the life-force, we feel like echoing Paul's words: "He who began a

good work in you will perfect it unto the end." The history of the

past holds great promise for the future.

=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."

If "the understanding of the life force" is to be available for use,

it must be the property of the average man and woman, the fathers and

mothers of our children, the teachers and physicians who act as their

advisers and friends.[15] This chapter is intended to do its bit

toward such a general understanding.

[Footnote 15: "Appropriate educational processes might perhaps guide

this enormous impulsive energy toward the maintenance instead of the

destruction of marriage and the family. But up to the present time,

education with respect to this moral issue has commonly lacked any

such constructive method. The social standard and the individual

impulse have simply collided, and the individual has been left to

resolve the conflict, for the most part by his own resources."--G.A.

Coe: _Psychology of Religion_, p. 150.]

PARENTAL INSTINCT AND TENDER EMOTION

=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.

=Mothering the World.= Probably no instinct has so many ways of

indirect expression as this mothering impulse of protection. Aroused

by the cry of a child in distress, or by the thought of the weakness,

or need, or ill-treatment of any defenseless creature, this

mother-father impulse is at the root of altruism, gratitude, love,

pity, benevolence, and all unselfish actions.

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.

Character is what we do with our instincts. According to Freud, all

of a man's traits are the result of his unchanged original impulses,

or of his reactions against those impulses, or of his sublimation of

them. In other words, there are three things we may do with our

instincts. We may follow our primal desires, we may deny their

existence, or we may use them for ends which are in harmony with our

lives as we want them to be. As the first course leads to degeneracy,

the second to nervous illness, and the third to happy usefulness, it

is obviously important to learn the way of sublimation. Sometimes this

is accomplished unconsciously by the life-force, but sometimes

sublimation fails, and is reestablished only when the conscious mind

gains an understanding of the great forces of life. This method of

reeducation of the personality as a means of treatment in nervousness

is called psycho-therapy.

=Religion's Contribution.= If it be asked why, amid all this

discussion of instincts and motives we have made no mention of that

great energizer religion, we answer that we have by no means forgotten

it, but that we have been dealing solely with those primary tendencies

out of which all of the compound emotions are made. Man has been

described as instinctively and incurably religious, but there seems no

doubt that religion is a compound reaction, made up of

love,--sympathetic response to the parental love of God,--fear,

negative self-feeling, and positive self-feeling in the shape of

aspiration for the desired ideal of character; all woven into several

compound emotions such as awe, gratitude, and reverence.

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.

=Where We Keep Our Instincts.= It must have been impossible to read

through these two chapters on instinct without feeling that, after

all, we are not very well acquainted with ourselves. The more we look

into human nature, the more evident it becomes that there is much in

each one of us of which we are only dimly aware. It is now time for us

to look a little deeper,--to find where we keep these instinctive

tendencies with which it is possible to live so intimately without

even suspecting their existence. We shall find that they occupy a

realm of their own, and that this realm, while quite out of sight, is

yet open to exploration.

CHAPTER V

_In which we look below the surface and discover a veritable

wonderland_

THE SUBCONSCIOUS MIND

STRANGERS TO OURSELVES

=Hidden Strings.= A collie dog lies on the hearthrug. A small boy with

mischievous intent ties a fine thread to a bone, hides himself behind

a chair, and pulls the bone slowly across the floor. The dog is thrown

into a fit of terror because he does not know about the hidden string.

A Chinese in the early days of San Francisco stands spell-bound at the

sight of a cable car. "No pushee. No pullee. Go allee samee like

hellee!" He does not know about the hidden string.

A woman of refinement and culture thinks a thought that horrifies her

sensitive soul. It is entirely out of keeping with her character as

she knows it. In her misunderstanding she considers it wicked and

thrusts it from her, wondering how it ever could have been hers. She

does not know about the hidden string.

In the last two chapters we thought together about some of these

strings, examining the fibers of which they are made and learning in

what directions they pull. We found them to be more powerful than we

should have supposed, more insistent and less visible. We found that

instinctive desire is the string, the cable that energizes our every

act, but that our desires are neither single nor simple, and are but

rarely on the surface. Many of us live with them a long time, feeling

the tug, but not recognizing the string.

=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.

We find ourselves holding certain beliefs and prejudices, interested

in certain things and indifferent to others, liking some foods, some

colors and disliking others. Search our minds as we will, we find no

clue to many of these inner trends. Why?

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.

=A Real Mind.= We learn of our internal machinery by what it does. We

must infer a part of our minds which introspection does not reveal, a

mind within the mind, able to work for us even while we are unaware of

its existence. This inner mind is usually known as the subconscious,

the mind under the level of consciousness.[16] We forget a name, but

we know that it will come to us if we think about something else.

Presently, out of somewhere, there flashes the word we want. Where was

it in the meanwhile, and what hunted it out from among all our other

memories and sent it up into consciousness? The something which did

that must be capable of conserving memories, of recognizing the right

one and of communicating it,--surely a real mind.

[Footnote 16: Writers of the psycho-analytic school use the word

"unconscious" to denote the lower layers of this region, and

"fore-conscious" to denote its upper layers. Morton Prince uses the

terms "unconscious" and "conscious" to denote the different strata. As

there is still a good deal of confusion in the use of terms, it has

seemed to us simpler to use throughout only the general term

"subconscious."]

One evening my collaborator fumbled unsuccessfully for the name of a

certain well-known journalist and educator. It was on the tip of her

tongue, but it simply would not come, not even the initial letter. In

a whimsical mood she said to herself just as she went to sleep,

"Little subconscious mind, you find that name to-night." In the middle

of the night she awoke, saying, "Williams--Talcott Williams." The

subconscious, which has charge of her memories, had been at work while

she slept.

The history of literature abounds in stories of under-the-surface

work. The man of genius usually waits until the mood is on, until the

muse speaks; then all his lifeless material is lighted by new

radiance. He feels that some one outside himself is dictating. Often

he merely holds the pen while the finished work pours itself out

spontaneously as if from a higher source.

But it is not only the man of genius who makes use of these unseen

powers. He may have readier access to his subconscious than the rest

of us, but he has no monopoly. The most matter-of-fact man often says

that he will "sleep over" a knotty problem. He puts it into his mind

and then goes about his business, or goes to sleep while this unseen

judge weighs and balances, collects related facts, looks first at one

side of the question and then at the other, and finally sends up into

consciousness a decision full of conviction, a decision that has been

formulated so far from the focus of attention that it seems to be

something altogether new, a veritable inspiration.

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.

=The Submerged Nine Tenths.= The more deeply psychologists and

physicians have studied into these things, the more certainly have

they been forced to the conclusion that the conscious mind of man, the

part that he can explore at will, is by far the smaller part of his

personality. Since this is to some people a rather startling

proposition, we can do no better than quote the following statement

from White on the relation of consciousness to the rest of the psychic

life:

Consciousness includes only that of which we are _aware_, while

outside of this somewhat restricted area there lies a much wider

area in which lie the deeper motives for conduct, and which not

only operates to control conduct, but also dictates what may and

what may not become conscious. Stanley Hall has very forcibly put

the matter by using the illustration of the iceberg. Only

one-tenth of the iceberg is visible above water; nine-tenths is

beneath the surface. It may appear in a given instance that the

iceberg is being carried along by the prevailing winds and

surface currents, but if we keep our eyes open we shall sooner or

later see a berg going in the face of the wind, and, so,

apparently putting to naught all the laws of aerodynamics. We can

understand this only when we come to realize that much the

greater portion of the berg is beneath the surface and that it is

moving in response to invisible forces addressed against this

submerged portion.

Consciousness only arises late in the course of evolution and

only in connection with adjustments that are relatively complex.

When the same or similar conditions in the environment are

repeatedly presented to the organism so that it is called upon to

react in a similar and almost

identical way each time, there tends to be organized a mechanism

of reaction which becomes more and more automatic and is

accompanied by a state of mind of less and less awareness.[17]

[Footnote 17: White: _Mechanisms of Character Formation_.]

It is easy to see the economy of this arrangement which provides

ready-made patterns of reaction for habitual situations and leaves

consciousness free for new decisions. Since an automatic action,

traveling along well-worn brain paths, consumes little energy and

causes the minimum of fatigue, the plan not only frees consciousness

from a confusing number of details, but also works for the

conservation of energy. While consciousness is busy lighting up the

special problems of the moment, the vast mass of life's demands are

taken care of by the subconscious, which constitutes the bulk of the

mind. "Properly speaking, the unconscious is the real psyche."[18]

[Footnote 18: Freud: _Interpretation of Dreams_, p. 486.]

=The Heart of Psychology.= In the face of all this, it is not to be

wondered at that the problem of the subconscious has been called not

one problem of psychology but the problem. It cannot be denied that

the discoveries which have already been made as to its activities have

been of immense practical importance in the understanding of normal

conduct and in the treatment of the psycho-neuroses.

If some of the methods--such as hypnosis, automatic writing, and

interpretation of dreams--which are used to investigate its activities

seem to savor of the charlatan and the mountebank, it is because they

have occasionally been appropriated by the ignorant and the

unscrupulous. Their real setting is the psychological laboratory and

the physician's office. In the hands of men like Sigmund Freud, Boris

Sidis, and Morton Prince, they are as scientific as the apparatus of

any other laboratory and their findings are as susceptible of proof.

We may, then, go forward with the conviction that we are walking on

solid ground and that the main paths, at least, will turn into beaten

highways.

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.

The instincts form the starting-point of mind, conscious and

subconscious, and are the foundation upon which the rest is built.

They often show themselves as part of our conscious lives, but their

roots are laid deep in the subconscious from which they can never be

eradicated. This deepest-laid instinctive layer of the subconscious is

little subject to change. It represents the earlier adjustments of the

race, crystallized into habit. It takes no account of the differences

between the present and the past. It knows no culture, no reason, no

lately acquired prudence. It is all energy and can only wish, or urge

toward action. But since only those race-memories became instincts

which had proved needful to the race in the long run, they are on the

whole beneficent forces, working for the good of the race and the good

of the individual, if he learns how to handle them aright and to adapt

them to present conditions.

This instinctive urge toward action arouses in the individual an

organic response that is felt as a tension or craving and is mainly

dependent upon its own chemical constitution at the moment. Hunger is

the sensation caused by the little muscular contractions in the

stomach when the body is low in its food supply. Sudden fright is felt

as an all-gone sensation "at the pit of the stomach." What really

happens is a tightening up of the circular muscles of the

blood-vessels lying in the network of the solar plexus, and a spasm of

the muscles of the digestive tract. The hungry stomach impels to

action until satisfied; the physical discomfort in fear impels toward

measures of safety. The apparatus that is made use of by the

subconscious in carrying out this instinctive urge is called the

autonomic nervous system.[19] It regulates all the functions of

living, not only under the stress of emotion, but during every moment

of waking or sleeping.

[Footnote 19: Kempf: "The Tonus of Automatic Segments as a Cause of

Abnormal Behavior," _Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases_, January,

1921.]

=A Capable Manager.= The conscious mind could not possibly send

messages to the numerous glands that fit the body for action, nor

attend to all the delicate adjustments that enter into the process.

The conscious mind in most of us does not even know of the existence

of the organs and secretions involved, but something sends the

messages and it is something that has a remarkable likeness to mind as

we usually think of mind,--something which takes advantage of the past

and gages means to an end with a nicety that excites our wonder.

=Take no Anxious Thought.= We take food into our stomachs and forget

about it, if we are wise; and this subconscious overseer who through

millions of years of experience has learned how to digest food does

the rest. As with digestion, so with our heart-action; we lie down at

night fairly sure that there will be no break in the regular rhythm of

its beat. The subconscious overseer is "on the job" and he never

rests. No matter how hard we sleep, he never lets us forget to take a

breath; and if we trust him, he is very likely to wake us up at the

appointed time in the morning. Also, if we trust him, he carries us

off to sleep as though we were babies. Has he not had long practice in

the days before insomnia was invented?

=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.

Crile reminds us of a fact that is often noticed by surgeons. If

patients under ether are handled roughly, especially in the intestinal

region, respiration quickens and there are tremors and even convulsive

efforts which interfere with the surgeon's work. The conscious mind

cannot feel. It is asleep. But the subconscious mind, whose business

it is to protect the body, is trying to get away from injury. The body

uses up as much energy as though it had run for miles, and when the

patient wakes up, we say that he is suffering from shock. The

subconscious mind which is not affected by ether, has been exhausting

itself in a vain attempt to get the body away from harm.

=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.

PERSONAL MEMORIES

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.

=Irresistible Childhood.= An experience that is forgotten is not

necessarily lost. Although the first few years of childhood are lost

to conscious memory, these years outweigh all others in their

influence on character. The Jesuit priest was right when he said,

"Give me a child until he is six years old, and he will be a Catholic

all his life." As Frink has so ably shown, the determining factors

that enter into any adult choice, such as the choice of the Catholic

or the Protestant faith, are in a large measure made up of

subconscious memories from early childhood, forgotten memories of

Sunday-school and church, of lessons at home or passages in

books,--experiences which no voluntary effort could recall, but which

still live unrecognized in our mature judgments and beliefs. Naturally

we do not acknowledge these subconscious motives. We like to believe

that all our decisions are based on reason, and so we invent plausible

arguments for our attitudes and our actions, arguments which we

ourselves implicitly believe. This process of substituting a plausible

reason for a subconscious one is known as rationalization, a process

which every one of us engages in many times a day.

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 unconscious is our historical past. In reality the past is

preserved automatically. In its entirety probably it follows us

at every instant; all that we have felt, thought and willed from

our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is

about to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness

that would fain leave it outside.

=Spontaneous Outbursts.= "How do we know all this?" some one says.

"What is the evidence for these sweeping statements? If we cannot

remember, how can we discover these strange memories that are so

powerful but so elusive? If they are below the level of consciousness,

are they not, in the very nature of the case, forever hidden from

view, in the sphere of the occult rather than that of science?"

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.

It is a common experience to have a patient in delirium repeat

long-forgotten verses or descriptions of events that the "real man"

has lost entirely. The renowned servant-girl, quoted by Hudson, who in

delirium recited passage after passage of Hebrew, Latin, and Greek,

which she had heard her one-time master repeat in his study, is

typical of many such instances.[20]

[Footnote 20: Hudson: _The Law of Psychic Phenomena_, p. 44. Quoted

from _Coleridge's Biographia Literaria_, Vol. I, p. 117 (edit. 1847).]

A young girl of nineteen, a patient of mine, lapsed for several weeks

into a dissociated state in which she forgot all the memories and

ideas of her adult life, and returned to the period of her childhood.

She used to say that she saw things inside her head and would

accurately describe events that took place before she was two years of

age,--scenes which she had completely forgotten in her normal life.

One day when I asked her to tell me what she was seeing, she began to

talk about "little sister" (herself) and "little brother." "Little

sister and brother were the two little folks that lived with their

mother and their daddy and they were playing on the sand-pile. You

know there was only one sand-pile, not like all the ones they have

down here (at the seaside), and they had a bucket that they would put

sand in and they would dump it out again and they would make nice

things, you know; they would play with their little dog Ponto and he

was white with black and brown spots on him. Little brother had white

hair and he was bigger than little sister and he had a little waist

with ruffles down the front and around the collar and a black coat

that came down to his knees and it had two little white bands around

it. Some of the waists he wore had blue specks and some had red and

black specks in it.

"Little sister had yellow curls and she had a blue coat with jiggly

streaks of white in it, and she had a little white bonnet that was

crocheted, and she had little blue mittens on that were tied to a

string that went around her neck and down the other arm. It got pretty

cold where they lived. Little sister and little brother would go out

to the pile of leaves and jump on them and bounce and they would

crackle. The leaves came down from the trees all of a sudden when they

got tired, and they were different colors, brown and red. Little

sister could walk then but she could not walk one other time before

then; she could stand up by holding to a chair, but she could not go

herself. One morning Big Tom said 'Run to Daddy' and she went to her

daddy, and after that she always walked; they were glad and she was

glad. She walked all day long. Big Tom was a man who used to help

Daddy and little sister always liked him. He was a nice man."

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.

One night I heard the same patient talk in her sleep in the slow and

hesitating manner of a child reading phonetically from a printed page.

I soon recognized the words as those of a poem of Tagore's, called "My

Prayer," and remembered that a magazine containing the poem had been

lying on the bed during the day. When she had finished I wakened her,

saying, "Now tell me what you have been dreaming." She answered in

her childish way, "I think I do not dream." She went to sleep

immediately and again repeated the poem, word for word, without a

single mistake. Again I awakened her with the words, "Now tell me what

you have been dreaming." And again she answered, "I think I do not

dream." I said: "But yes; don't you remember you were just saying,

'When the time comes for me to go'?" (the last line of the poem). "Oh,

yes," she said, "I was seeing it, and I think I'll not go to sleep

again. It tires me so to see it."

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.

=Unearthing Old Experiences.= However, psychology does not have to

wait for buried memories to come forth of their own free will. It has

a number of successful ways of summoning them from their hiding-place

and helping them across the line into consciousness. In the hands of

skilled investigators and therapeutists, hypnosis, hypnoidization,

automatic writing, crystal-gazing, abstraction, free association,

word-association, and interpretation of dreams have all been

repeatedly successful in bringing to light memories which apparently

have been for many years completely blotted out of mind. As we become

better acquainted with these technical devices we shall find that

there are four kinds of experiences whose records are carefully stored

away in our minds. Some were always so far from the center of our

attention that we could swear they never had been ours; others,

although once present in consciousness, were so trivial and

unimportant that it seems ridiculous to suppose them conserved; others

never came into our waking minds at all and entered our lives only in

special states, such as sleep or delirium or dreams. All these we

should expect to forget; the astonishing thing is that they ever were

conserved. But there is a fourth class that is different. It is made

up of experiences that were so vital, so emotional, so closely woven

into the fiber of our being that it seems impossible that they ever

could be forgotten. Let us look at a few examples of records of all

these four kinds of experiences, examples chosen from hundreds of

their kind as illustrations of the all-embracing character of buried

memories.[21]

[Footnote 21: For further examples see Prince, _The Unconscious_;

Prince, _The Dissociation of a Personality_, and Hudson, _The Law of

Psychic Phenomena_.]

=Out of the Corners of Our Eyes.= In the first place, we are much

more observing than we imagine. We may be so interested in our own

thoughts that details of our environment are entirely lost on the

conscious mind, but the subconscious has its eyes open, and its ears.

People in hypnosis have been known to repeat verbatim whole passages

from newspapers which they had never consciously read. While they were

busy with one column, their wide-awake subconscious was devouring the

next one, and remembering it. Prince relates the story of a young

woman who unconsciously "took in" the details of a friend's

appearance:

I asked B.C.A. (without warning and after having covered her

eyes) to describe the dress of a friend who was present and with

whom she had been conversing perhaps some twenty minutes. She was

unable to do so beyond saying that he wore dark clothes. I then

found that I myself was unable to give a more detailed

description of his dress, although we had lunched and been

together about two hours. B.C.A. was then asked to write a

description automatically. Her hand wrote as follows (she was

unaware that her hand was writing):

"He has on a dark greenish gray suit, a stripe in it--little

rough stripe; black bow cravat; shirt with three little stripes

in it; black laced shoes; false teeth; one finger gone; three

buttons on his coat."

The written description was absolutely correct. The stripes in

the coat were almost invisible. I had not noticed

his teeth or the loss of a finger and we had to count the buttons

to make sure of their number owing to their partial concealment

by the folds of the unbuttoned coat. The shoe-strings I am sure

under the conditions would have escaped nearly every one's

notice.[22]

[Footnote 22: Prince: _The Unconscious_, p. 53.]

Automatic writing, the method used to uncover this subconscious

perception, is a favorite method with some investigators and is often

used by Morton Prince. The hand writes without the direction of the

personal consciousness and usually without the person's being aware

that it is writing. A dissociated person does this very easily; other

people can cultivate the ability, and perhaps most of us approach it

when we are at the telephone, busily writing or drawing remarkable

pictures while the rest of us is engaged in conversation.

The present epidemic of the Ouija board shows how many persons there

are who are able to switch off the conscious mind and let the

subconscious control the muscles that are used in writing. The fact

that the writer has no understanding of what he is doing and believes

himself directed by some outside power, in no way interferes with the

subconscious phenomenon.

=Everyday Doings.= Besides perceptions which were originally so far

from the focus of attention that the conscious mind never caught them

at all, there are the little experiences of everyday life, fleeting

thoughts and impressions which occupy us for a minute and then

disappear. Every experience is a dynamic fact and no matter how

trivial the experience may be or how completely forgotten, it still

exists as a part of the personality.

An amusing example of the everyday kind of forgotten experience

occurred during the writing of this chapter. I wrote a sentence which

pleased me very well. This is the sentence: "In the esthetic processes

of evolution they [man's desires] have sunk below the surface as soon

as formed, and have been covered over by an elastic and snug-fitting

consciousness as the skin covers in the tissues and organs of the

body." After showing this passage to my collaborator and remarking

that this figure had never been used before, I was partly chagrined

and partly amused to have her bring me the following sentence from

White and Jelliffe: "Consciousness covered over and obscured the inner

organs of the psyche just as the skin hides the inner organs of the

body from vision." My originality had vanished and I was close to

plagiarism. Indeed, if a history of plagiarism could be written, it

would probably abound in just such stories. I had read the article

containing this sentence only once, about three years before, and had

never quoted it or consciously thought of it. It had lain buried for

three years, only to come forth as an original idea of my own. Who

knows how many times we all do just this thing without catching

ourselves in the trick?

=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.

Suggestions that enter the mind during the normal sleep are also

recorded,--a fact that carries a warning to people who are in the

habit of talking of all sorts of matters while in the room with

sleeping children. I have sometimes suggested to sleeping patients

that on waking they will remember and tell me the cause of their

symptoms. The following example shows not only the conservation of

impressions gained in sleep, but also the sway of forgotten ideas of

childhood, still strong in mature years. This young woman, a trained

nurse, with many marked symptoms of hysteria, had been asked casually

to bring a book from the Public Library. She cried out in

consternation, "Oh, no, I am afraid!" After a good deal of urging she

finally brought the book, although at the cost of considerable effort.

Later, while she was taking a nap, I said to her, "You will not

remember that I have talked to you. You will stay asleep while I am

talking and while you are asleep there will come to your mind the

reasons why you are afraid to go to the Public Library. When you

waken, you will tell me all about it." Upon awakening, she said: "Oh,

do you know, I can tell you why I have always been afraid to go to the

Public Library. While I was in Parochial School, Father ---- used to

come in and tell us children to use the books out of the school

library and never to go to the Public Library." I questioned her

concerning her idea of the reason for such an injunction and what she

thought was in the books which she was told not to read. She

hesitatingly stated that it was her idea, even in childhood, that the

books dealt with topics concerning the tabooed subject of the birth of

children and kindred matters.

=Smoldering Volcanoes.= Let us now consider those emotional

experiences which seem far too compelling to be forgotten, but which

may live within us for years without giving any evidence of their

existence. Memories like these are apt to be anything but a dead past.

Many of my own patients have uncovered emotional memories through

simply talking out to me whatever came into their minds, laying aside

their critical faculty and letting their minds wander on into whatever

paths association led them. This is known as the free-association

method, and simple as it seems, is one of the most effective in

uncovering memories which have been forgotten for years. One of my

patients, a refined, highly educated woman of middle age, had suffered

for two years with almost constant nausea. One day, after a long talk,

with no suggestion on my part, only an occasional, "What does that

remind you of?" she told with great emotion an experience which she

had had at eighteen years of age, in which she had for a moment been

sexually attracted to a boy friend, but had recoiled as soon as she

realized where her impulse was leading her. She had been so horrified

at the idea of her degradation, so nauseated at what she considered

her sin, that she had put it out of her mind, denied that such a

thought had ever been hers, repressed the desire into the

subconscious, where it had continued to function unsatisfied,

unassimilated with her mature judgments. Her nausea was the symbol of

a moral disgust. Physical nausea she was willing to acknowledge, but

not this other thing. Upon reciting this old experience, with every

sign of the original shame, she cried: "Oh, Doctor! why did you bring

this up? I had forgotten it. I haven't thought of it in thirty years."

I reminded her that I couldn't bring it up,--I had never known

anything about it. With the emotional incoming of this memory and the

saner attitude toward it which the mature woman's mind was able to

take, the nausea disappeared for good. This case is typical of the

psycho-neuroses and we shall have occasion to refer to it again. The

present emphasis is on the fact that an emotional memory may be buried

for many years while it still retains the power of reappearing in more

or less disguised manifestation.

=Repressed Memories.= If we ask how so burning a memory could escape

from the consciousness of a grown woman, we are driven to the

conclusion that this forgetting can be the result of no mere quiet

fading away, but that there must have been some active force at work

which kept the memory from coming into awareness. It was not lost. It

was not passive. Out of sight was not out of mind. There must have

been a reason for its expulsion from the personal consciousness. In

fact, we find that there is a reason. We find that whenever a vital

emotional experience disappears from view, it is because it is too

painful to be endured in consciousness. Nor is it ever the pain of an

impersonal experience or even the thought of what some one else has

done to us that drives a memory out of mind. As a matter of fact, we

never expel a memory except when it bears directly on ourselves and on

our own opinion of ourselves. We can stand almost anything else, but

we cannot stand an idea that does not fit in with our ideal for

ourselves. This is not the pious ideal that we should like to live up

to and that we hope to attain some day, not the ideal that we think we

ought to have--like never speaking ill of others or never being

selfish--but the secret picture that each of us has, locked away

within him, the specifications of ourselves reduced to their lowest

terms, below which we cannot go. Energized by the instinct of positive

self-feeling, and organized with the moral sentiments which we have

acquired from education and the ideals of society, especially those

acquired in early childhood, this ideal of ourselves becomes

incorporated into our conscience and is an absolute necessity for our

happiness.

We have found that when two emotions clash, one drives out the other.

So in this case, the woman's positive self-feeling of self-respect,

combined with disgust, drove from the field that other emotion of the

reproductive instinct which was trying to get expression. Speaking

technically, one repressed the other. The woman said to herself, "No,

I never could have had such a thought," and promptly forgot it.

Needless to say, this kind of handling did not kill the impulse.

Buried in the depths of her soul, it continued to live like a live

coal, until in later years, fanned by the wind of some new experience,

it burst into flame.

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.

A considerable part of any person's subconscious is made up of

memories, wishes, impulses, which are repressed in this way. Of course

any instinctive desire may be repressed, but it is easy to understand

why the most frequently denied impulse, the instinct of reproduction,

against whose urgency society has cultivated so strong a feeling,

should be repressed more frequently than any other.[23]

[Footnote 23: See foot-note, p. 145, Chap. VII.]

=Past and Present.= It matters not, then, in what state experiences

come to us, whether in sleep or delirium, intoxication or hypnosis, or

in the normal waking condition. They are conserved and may exert great

influence on our normal lives. It matters not whether the experiences

be full of meaning and emotion or whether they be so slight as to pass

unnoticed, they are conserved. It matters not whether these

experiences be mere sense-impressions, or inner thoughts, whether they

be unacknowledged hopes or fears, undesirable moods and unworthy

desires or fine aspirations and lofty ideals. They are conserved and

they may at a later day rise up to bless or to curse us long after we

had thought them buried in the past. The present is the product of the

past. It is the past plus an element of choice which keeps us from

settling down in the despair of fatalism and enables us to do

something toward making the present that is, a help and not a

stumbling-block to the present that is to be.

SOME HABITS OF THE SUBCONSCIOUS

=The Association of Ideas.= It is only by something akin to poetic

license that we can speak of lower and higher strata of mind. When we

carry over the language of material things into the less easily

pictured psychic realm, it is sometimes well to remind ourselves that

figures of speech, if taken too literally, are more misleading than

illuminating. When we speak of the deep-laid instinctive lower levels

of mind and the higher acquired levels, we must not imagine that these

strata are really laid in neat, mutually exclusive layers, one on top

of the other in the chambers of the mind. Nor must we imagine the

mental elements of instinct, idea, and memory as jumbled together in

chaotic confusion, or in scattered isolated units. As a matter of

fact, the best word to picture the inside of our minds is the word

"group." We do not know just how ideas and instincts can group

themselves together, but we do know that by some arrangement of brain

paths and nerve-connections, the laws of association of ideas and of

habit take our mental experiences and organize them into more or less

permanent systems. Instinctive emotions tend to organize themselves

around ideas to form sentiments; ideas or sentiments, which through

repetition or emotion are associated together, tend to stay together

in groups or complexes which act as a whole; complexes which pertain

to the same interests tend to bind themselves into larger systems or

constellations, forming moods, or sides to one's character. It is not

highly important to differentiate in every case a sentiment from a

complex, or a complex from a constellation, especially as many writers

use "complex" as the generic term for all sorts of groups; but a

general understanding of the much-used word "complex" is necessary

for a comprehension of modern literature on psychology, psychotherapy

or general education.

"=What Is a Complex=?" Reduced to its lowest terms, a complex is a

group. It may be simply a group of associated movements, like lacing

one's shoes or knitting; it may be a group of movements and ideas,

like typewriting or piano-playing, which through repetition have

become automatic or subconscious; it may be merely a group of ideas,

such as the days of the week, the alphabet or the multiplication

table. In all these types it is repetition working through the law of

habit that ties the ideas and movements together into an organic

whole. Usually, however, the word complex is reserved for psychic

elements that are bound together by emotion. In this sense, a complex

is an emotional thought-habit. Frink's definition, which is one of the

simplest, recognizes only this emotional type: "A complex is a system

of connected ideas, having a strong emotional tone, and displaying a

tendency to produce or influence conscious thought and action in a

definite and predetermined direction."[24]

[Footnote 24: Frink: "What Is a Complex?" _Journal American Medical

Assoc_., Vol. LXII, No. 12, Mar. 21, 1914.]

Emotion and repetition are the great welders of complexes. Emotion is

the strongest cement in the world. A single emotional experience

suffices to bind together ideas that were originally as far apart as

the poles.

Sometimes a complex includes not only ideas, movements, and emotions,

but physiological disturbances and sensations. Some people cannot go

aboard a stationary ship without vomiting, nor see a rose, even though

it prove to be a wax one, without the sneezing and watery eyes of

hay-fever. This is what is known as a "conditioned reflex." Past

associations plus fear have so welded together idea and bodily

manifestation that one follows the other as a matter of course, long

after the real cause is removed. In such ways innumerable nervous

symptoms arise. The same laws which form healthy complexes, and,

indeed, which make all education possible, may thus be responsible for

the unhealthy mal-adaptive association-habits which lie back of a

neurosis. Fortunately, a knowledge of this fact furnishes the clue to

the re-education that brings recovery.

A complex may be either conscious or unconscious, but as it usually

happens that either all or part of its elements are below the surface,

the word is oftenest used to mean those buried systems of the

subconscious mind that influence thought or behavior without

themselves being open to scrutiny. It is these buried complexes,

memory groups, gathered through the years of experience, that

determine action in uniform and easily prophesied directions. Every

individual has a definite complex about religion, about politics,

about patriotism, about business, and it is the sum of these buried

complexes which makes up his total personality.

=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.= Another kind of displacement which seems hard to

believe possible until it is repeatedly encountered in intelligent

human beings is the process called transference, by which everybody at

some time or other acts toward the people he meets, not according to

rational standards but according to old unconscious attitudes toward

other people. Each of us carries, within, subconscious pictures of the

people who surrounded us when we were children; and now when we meet a

new person we are likely unconsciously to say to ourselves--not, "This

person has eyebrows like my mother, or a voice like my nurse," or,

"This person bosses me around as my father used to do," but, "This is

my mother, this is my nurse, this is my father." Whereupon we may

proceed to act toward that person very much as we did toward the

original person in childhood.

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.

Students of human nature have always recognized the kind of

displacement which transfers the sense of guilt from some major act or

attitude to a minor one which is more easily faced, just as _Lady

Macbeth_ felt that by washing her hands she might free herself from

her deeper stain. This is a frequent mechanism in the

psychoneuroses--not that neurotics are likely to have committed any

great crime, but that they feel subconsciously that some of their

wishes or thoughts are wicked.

=The Phenomena of Dissociation.= When an idea or a complex, a

perception or a memory is either temporarily or permanently shoved out

of consciousness into the subconscious, it is said to be dissociated.

When we are asleep, the part of us that is usually conscious is

dissociated and the submerged part takes the stage. When we forget our

surroundings in concentration or absent-mindedness, a part of us is

dissociated and our friends say that we are "not all there," or as

popular slang has it, "Nobody home." When a mood or system of

complexes drives out all other moods, one becomes "a different

person." But if this normal dissociation is carried a step farther, we

may lose the power to put ourselves together again, and then we may

truly be said to be dissociated. Almost any part of us is subject to

this kind of apparent loss. In neurasthenia the happy, healthy

complexes which have hitherto dominated our lives may be split off and

left lying dormant in the subconscious; or the power of will or

concentration may seem to be gone. In hysteria we may seem to lose the

ability to see or feel or walk, or we may lose for the time all

recollection of certain past events, or of whole periods of our lives,

or of everything but one system of ideas which monopolizes the field

of attention. Sometimes great systems of memories, instincts, and

complexes are alternately shifted in and out of gear, leaving first

one kind of person on top and then another.[25] Stevenson's _Dr.

Jekyll_ and _Mr. Hyde_ is not so fantastic a character as he seems.

Any one who doubts the ability of the mind to split itself up into two

or more distinct personalities, entertaining totally different

conceptions of life, disliking each other, playing tricks on each

other, writing notes to each other, and carrying on a perpetual feud

as each tries to get the upper hand, should read Morton Prince's

"Dissociation of a Personality," a fascinating account of his famous

case, Miss Beauchamp.

[Footnote 25: When a memory or system of memories is suddenly lost

from consciousness the person is said to be suffering from amnesia or

pathological loss of memory.]

=Internal Warfare.= Conflict, often accentuated by shock or fatigue,

represses or drives down certain ideas, perceptions, wishes, memories,

or complexes into the subconscious, where they remain, sometimes

dormant and passive but often dynamic, emotional, carrying on an

over-excited, automatic activity, freed from the control of reason and

the modifying influence of other ideas, and able to cause almost any

kind of disturbance. So long as there is team-work between the

various parts of our personality we are able to act as a unit; but

just as soon as we break up into factions with no communication

between the warring camps, so soon do we become quite incapable of

coördination or adjustment, like a nation torn by civil war. Many of

the seemingly fantastic and bizarre mental phenomena of which a human

being is capable are the result of this kind of disintegration.

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_

The fraction that could accurately show the relation of the conscious

to the unconscious part of ourselves would have such a small numerator

and such a huge denominator that we might well wonder where

consciousness came in at all.[26] Some one has likened the

subconscious to the great far-reaching depths of the Mammoth Cave, and

consciousness to the tiny, flickering lamp which we carry to light our

way in the darkness. However, ever the subconscious mind is becoming

explorable, and it may be that science is giving the tiny lamp the

revealing power of a great searchlight.

[Footnote 26: "The entire active life of the individual may be

represented by a fraction, the numerator of which is any particular

moment, the denominator is the rich inheritance of the

past."--Jelliffe: "The Technique of Psychoanalysis," _Psychoanalytic

Review,_ Vol. III, No. 2, p. 164.]

_2 Ancient yet Modern_

The lowest layers of the subconscious, represented by the instincts,

are as old as life itself, with their lineage reaching back in direct

and unbroken line to the first living things on the ooze of the ocean

floor. The higher strata are more modern, full, and accurate records

of our own lifetime, beginning with our first cry and ending with

to-day's thoughts.

_3 Primitive yet Refined_

The lowest level, representing the past of the race, is primitive like

a savage, and infantile, like a child; it is instinctive, unalterable,

and universal; it knows no restraint, no culture, and no prudence. The

higher level, the storehouse of individual experience, bears the

marks of acquired ideals, of cultivated refinement, and represents

among other things the precepts and prudence of civilized society.

_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.

_5 Organized yet Disorganizable_

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.

Nervous persons are people who are too much under the sway of the

subconscious; so, too, are some geniuses, who narrowly escape a

neurosis by finding a more useful outlet for their subconscious

energies. While the poet, the inventor, and the neurotic are likely to

be too largely controlled by the subconscious, the average man is to a

greater extent ruled by the conscious mind; and the highest type of

genius is the man whose conscious and subconscious minds work together

in perfect harmony, each up to its full power.

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.

CHAPTER VI

_In which we learn why it pays to be cheerful_

BODY AND MIND

THE MISSING LINK

=Ancient Knowledge.= People have always known that mind in some

strange way carries its moods over into the body. The writer of the

Book of Proverbs tells us, from that far-off day, that "A merry heart

doeth good like a medicine, but a broken spirit drieth the bones."

Jesus in His healing ministry always emphasized the place of faith in

the cure of the body. "Thy faith hath made thee whole," is a frequent

word on His lips, and ever since His day people have been

rediscovering the truth that faith, even in the absence of a worthy

object, does often make whole. Faith in the doctor, the medicine, the

charm, the mineral waters, the shrine, and in the good God, has

brought health to many thousands of sufferers. People have always

reckoned on this bodily result from a mental state. They have

intuitively known better than to tell a sick person that he is looking

worse, but they have not always known why. They have known that a fit

of anger is apt to bring on a headache, but they have not stopped to

look for the reason, or if they have, they have often gotten

themselves into a tangle. This is because there has always been, until

recently, a missing link. Now the link has been found. After the last

chapter, it will not be hard to understand that this connecting link,

this go-between of body and mind, is nothing else than the

subconscious mind. When we remember that it has the double power of

knowing our thoughts and of controlling our bodies, it is not hard to

see how an idea can translate itself into a pain, nor to realize with

new vividness the truth of the statement that healthy mental states

make for health, and unhealthy mental states for illness.

=Suggestion and Emotion.= There are still many gaps in our knowledge

of the ways of the subconscious, but investigation has thrown a good

deal of light on the problem. Two of the principles already discussed

are sufficient to explain most of the phenomena. These are, first,

that the subconscious is amenable to control by suggestion, and

secondly, that it is greatly influenced by emotion. Tracing back the

principles behind any example of the power of mind over body, one

finds at the root of the matter either a suggestion or an emotion, or

both. If, then, the stimulating and depressing effects of mental

states are to be understood, the first Step must be a fuller

understanding of the laws governing suggestion and emotion.

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.

Let a person faint in a crowded room, and a good per cent. of the

women present will begin to fan themselves. The room has suddenly

become insufferably close. After we have read half a hundred times

that Ivory soap floats, a fair proportion of the population is likely

to be seized with desire for a soap that floats,--not because they

have any good reason for doing so, but simply because the suggestion

has "taken." As for the harbingers of spring, they are neither the

birds nor the wild flowers, but the blooming windows of the

milliners, which successfully suggest in wintry February that summer

is coming, and that felt and fur are out of season. It is evident that

all advertising is suggestion.

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.

=Everything Suggestive.= Human beings are constantly communicating,

one to another. Sometimes they "get over" an idea by means of words,

but often they do it in more subtle ways,--by the elevation of an

eyelid, the gesture of a hand, composure of manner in a crisis, or a

laugh in a delicate situation. A suggestion is merely an idea passed

from one person to another, an idea that is accepted with conviction

and acted upon, even though there may be no logic, no reason, no proof

of its truth. It is an influence that takes hold of the mind and works

itself out to fulfilment, quite apart from its worth or

reasonableness. Of course, logical persuasion and argument have their

place in the communication of ideas; an idea may be conveyed by other

ways than suggestion. But while suggestion is not everything, it is

equally true that there is suggestion in everything. The doctor may

give a patient a very rational explanation of his case, but the

doubtful shake of the head or the encouraging look of his eye is quite

likely to color the patient's general impression. The eyes of our

subconscious are always open, and they are constantly getting

impressions, subtle suggestions that are implied rather than

expressed.

=Abnormal Suggestibility.= While everybody is suggestible, nervous

people are abnormally so. It may be, as McDougall suggests, that they

have so large an amount of submission or negative self-feeling in

their make-up that they believe anything, just because some one else

says it is true. Sometimes it is lack of knowledge that makes us

gullible, and at other times the cause of our suggestibility is

failure to use the knowledge that we have. Sometimes our ideas are

locked away in air-tight compartments with no interaction between

them. The psychologists tell us that suggestion is greatly favored by

a narrowing of the attention, a "contraction of the field of

consciousness," a dissociation of other ideas through concentration.

This all simply means that we forget to let our common sense bring to

bear counter ideas that might challenge a false one; or that worry--a

veritable "spasm of the attention"--has fixed upon an idea to the

exclusion of all others; or that through fatigue or the dissociation

of sleep or hypnosis or hysteria, our reasoning powers have been

locked out and for the time being are unable to act.

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.

=Living Its Faith.= All this gathers meaning only when we realize that

ideas are dynamic. They always tend to work themselves out to

fulfilment. The subconscious no sooner gets a conviction than it tries

to act it out. Of course it can succeed only up to a certain limit.

If it believes the stomach to have cancer, it cannot make cancer, but

it can make the stomach misbehave. One of my patients, on hearing of a

case of brain-tumor immediately imagined this to be her trouble, and

developed a pain in her head. She could not manufacture a tumor, but

she could manufacture what she believed to be the symptoms.

There was another patient who was supposed to have brain-tumor. This

young woman seemed to have lost almost entirely the power to keep her

equilibrium in walking. Her center of gravity was never over her feet,

but away out in space, so that she was continually banging from one

side of the room to the other, only saving herself from injury by

catching at the wall or the furniture with her hands. Several

physicians who had been interested in the case had found the symptoms

strongly suggestive of brain-tumor. There were, however, certain

unmistakable earmarks of hysteria, such as childlike bland

indifference to the awkwardness of the gait which was a grotesque

caricature of several brain and spinal-cord diseases, with no accurate

picture of any single one. This was evidently a case, not of actual

loss of power but a dissociation of the memory-picture of walking. The

patient was a trained nurse and knew in a general way the symptoms of

brain-tumor. When the suggestion of brain-tumor had fixed itself in

her mind she was able subconsciously to manufacture what she believed

to be the symptoms of that disease.

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.

We have already learned enough about the inner self to see in a faint

way how it works out its ideas. Since the subconscious mind runs the

bodily machinery, since it regulates digestion, the building up of

tissue, circulation, respiration, glandular secretion, muscular tonus,

and every other process pertaining to nutrition and growth, it is not

difficult to see how an idea about any of these matters can work

itself out into a fact. A thought can furnish the mental machinery

needed to fulfil the thought. Some one catches the suggestion:

"Concentration is hard on the brain. It soon brings on brain-fag and

headache." Not knowing facts to the contrary, the suggestible mind

accepts the proposition. Then one day, after a little concentration,

the idea begins to work. Whereupon the autonomic nervous system

tightens up the blood-vessels that regulate the local blood supply,

too much blood stays in the head, and lo, it aches! The next time, the

suggestion comes with greater force, and soon the habit is

formed,--all the result of an idea. It is a good thing to remember

that constant thought about any part of the body never fails to send

an over-supply of blood to that part; of course that means congestion

and pain.

=Hands Off!= By sending messages directly to an organ through the

nerve-centers or by changing circulation, the subconscious director of

our bodies can make any part of us misbehave in a number of ways. All

it needs is a suggestion of an interfering thought about an organ. As

we have insisted before, the subconscious cannot stand interference.

Sadler well says: "Man can live at the equator or exist at the poles.

He can eat almost anything and everything, but he cannot long stand

self-contemplation. The human mind can accomplish wonders in the way

of work, but it is soon wrecked when directed into the channels of

worry."[27] In other words, hands off!--or rather, minds off! Don't

get ideas that make you think about your body. The surest way to

disarrange any function is to think about it. It is a stout heart that

will not change its beat with a frequent finger on the pulse, and a

hearty stomach that will not "act up" under attention. "Judicious

neglect" is a good motto for most occasions. Take no anxious thought

if you would be well. Know enough about your body to counteract false

suggestions; fulfil the common-sense laws of hygiene,--eight hours in

bed, plenty of exercise and fresh air, and three square meals a day.

Then forget all about it. "A mental representation is already a

sensation,"[28] and we have enough legitimate sensations without

manufacturing others.

[Footnote 27: Sadler: _Physiology of Faith and Fear_.]

[Footnote 28: DuBois: _Psychic Treatment of Nervous Disorders_.]

=From Real Life.= Startling indeed are the tricks that we can play on

ourselves by disregarding these laws. A patient who was unnecessarily

concerned about his stomach once came to me in great alarm, exhibiting

a distinct, well-defined swelling about the size of a match-box in the

region of his stomach. I looked at it, laughed, and told him to forget

it. Whereupon it promptly disappeared. The first segment of the rectus

muscle had tied itself up into a knot, under the stimulus of anxious

attention.

Another patient appeared at my door one day saying, "Look here!"

Examination showed that her abdomen was swollen to the size of more

than a six-months pregnancy. As it happened, this woman had a friend

who a short time before had developed a pseudo, or hysterical

pregnancy which continued for several months. My patient, accepting

the suggestion, was prepared to imitate her. I gave her a punch or

two and told her to go and dress for luncheon. In the afternoon she

had returned to her normal size.

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.

Another patient, a young girl, complained of a definite localized

pain in her arm, and told me that she was suffering from angina

pectoris. As we do not expect to find this disease in a young person,

I asked her where she got such an idea. "Dr. ---- told me so last

May." "Did you feel the pain in this same place before that time?" I

asked. She thought a minute and then answered: "Why no, I had a pain

around my heart but I did not notice it in my arm until after that

consultation." The wise physician lets his patients describe their own

symptoms without suggesting others by the implication of his

questions.

=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.

At the base of every psycho-neurosis is an unhealthful suggestion.

This is never the ultimate cause. There are other forces at work. But

the suggestion is the material out of which those other forces weave

the neurosis. Suggestibility is one of the earmarks of nervousness. A

sensible and sturdy spirit, stable enough to maintain its equilibrium,

is a fairly good antidote to attack. "As a man thinketh in his heart,

so is he."

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.

If we look into our emotional life, we find, besides the true

emotions, with which we have become familiar in Chapter III, a great

number of feelings or feeling-tones which color either pleasurably or

painfully our emotions and our ideas. On the one hand there are

pleasure, joy, exaltation, courage, cheer, confidence, satisfaction;

and on the other, pain, sorrow, depression, apprehension, gloom,

distrust, and dissatisfaction. Every complex which is laid away in

our subconscious is tinted, either slightly or intensely, with its

specific feeling-tone.

=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.

There is another factor; painful emotions make us fall to pieces,

while pleasant emotions bind us together. We can see why this is so

when we remember that powerful emotions like fear and anger tend to

dissociate all but themselves, to split up the mind into separate

parts and to force out of consciousness everything but their own

impulse. Morton Prince in his elaborate studies of the cases of

multiple personality, Miss Beauchamp and B.C.A., found repeatedly that

he had only to hypnotize the patient and replace painful, depressing

complexes by healthy, happy ones to change her from a weak, worn-out

person, complaining of fatigue, insomnia, and innumerable aches and

pains, into a vigorous woman, for the time being completely well. On

this point he says:

Exalting emotions have an intense synthesizing effect, while

depressing emotions have a disintegrating effect. With the

inrushing of depressive memories or ideas ... there is suddenly

developed a condition of fatigue, ill-being and disintegration,

followed after waking by a return or accentuation of all the

neurasthenic symptoms. If on the other hand, exalting ideas and

memories are introduced and brought into the limelight of

attention, there is almost a magical reversal of processes. The

patient feels strong and energetic, the neurasthenic symptoms

disappear and he exhibits a capacity for sustained effort. He

becomes re-vitalized, so to speak.[29]

[Footnote 29: Prince: _Psycho-therapeutics_, Chap. I.]

In cases like this the needed strength and energy are not lost; they

are merely side-tracked, but the person feels as weak as though he

were physically ill.

BODILY RESPONSE TO EMOTIONAL STATES

=Secretions.= Let us look more carefully into some of the

physiological processes involved in emotional changes. Among the most

apparent of bodily responses are the various external secretions.

Tears, the secretion of the lachrymal glands in response to an

emotion, are too common a phenomenon to arouse comment. It is common

knowledge that clammy hands and a dry mouth betray emotion. Every

nursing mother knows that she dares not become too disturbed lest her

milk should dry up or change in character. Most people have

experienced an increase in urine in times of excitement; recently

physiologists have discovered the presence of sugar in the urine of

students at the time of athletic contests and difficult

examinations.[30] We have seen what an important role the various

internal secretions, such as the adrenal and thyroid secretions play

in fitting the body for flight and combat, and how large a part fear

and anger have in their production. Constant over-production of these

secretions through chronic states of worry is responsible for many a

distressing symptom.

[Footnote 30: Cannon.]

Most graphic evidence of the disturbance of secretions by emotion is

found in the response of the salivary and gastric glands to painful or

pleasurable thinking. As these are the secretions which play the

largest part in the digestive processes, they lead us naturally to our

next heading.

=Digestion.= Everybody knows that appetizing food makes the mouth

water, but not everybody realizes that it makes the stomach water

also. Nor do we often realize the vital place that this watering has

in taking care of our food. "Well begun is half-done," is literally

true of digestion. A good flow of saliva brings the food into contact

with the taste-buds in the tongue. Taste sends messages to the

nerve-centers in the medulla oblongata; these centers in turn flash

signals to the stomach glands, which immediately "get busy" preparing

the all-important gastric juice. It takes about five minutes for this

juice to be made ready, and so it happens that in five minutes after

the first taste, or even in some cases after the first smell, the

stomach is pouring forth its "appetite juice" which determines all the

rest of the digestive process, in intestines as well as in stomach.

Experiments on dogs and cats by Pawlow, Cannon, and others have shown

what fear and anger and even mildly unpleasant emotions do to the

whole digestive process. Cannon tells of a dog who produced 66.7 cubic

centimeters of pure gastric juice in the twenty minutes following five

minutes of sham feeding (feeding in which food is swallowed and then

dropped out of an opening in the esophagus into a bucket instead of

into the stomach). Although there was no food in the stomach, the

juice was produced by the enjoyment of the taste and the thought of

it. On another day, after this dog had been infuriated by a cat, and

then pacified, the sham feeding was given again. This time, although

the dog ate eagerly, he produced only 9 cubic centimeters of gastric

juice, and this rich in mucus. Evidently a good appetite and

attractively served food are not more important than a cheerful mind.

Spicy table talk, well mixed with laughter, is better than all the

digestive tablets in the world. What is true of stomach secretions is

equally true of stomach contractions. "The pleasurable taking of food"

is a necessity if the required contractions of stomach and intestines

are to go forward on schedule time. A little extra dose of adrenalin

from a mild case of depression or worry is enough to stop all

movements for many minutes. What a revelation on many a case of

nervous dyspepsia! The person who dubbed it "Emotional Dyspepsia" had

facts on his side.

=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.

There is a disturbance of the circulation which results in very

marked swelling and redness of the affected part. This is known as

angio-neurotic edema, or nervous swelling. I do not have to go farther

than my own person for an example of this phenomenon. When I was a

young woman I taught school and went home every day for luncheon. One

day at luncheon, some one of the family criticized me severely. I went

back to school very angry. Before I entered the school-room, the

principal handed me some books which she had ordered for me. They were

not at all the books I wanted, and that upset me still more. As I went

into the schoolroom, I found that my face was swollen until my eyes

were almost shut; it was a bright red and covered with purplish

blotches. My fingers were swollen so that I could not bend the joints

in the slightest degree. It was a day or two before the disturbance

disappeared, and the whole of it was the result of anger.

We hear much to-day about high blood pressure. They say that a man is

as old as his arteries, and now it is known that the health of the

arteries depends largely on blood pressure. Since this is a matter

that can be definitely measured at any minute, we have an easy way of

noting the remarkable effect of shifting emotions. Sadler tells of an

ex-convict with a blood pressure of 190 millimeters. It seems that he

was worrying over possible rearrest. On being reassured on this

point, his blood pressure began to drop within a few minutes, falling

20 mm. in three hours, and 35 mm. by the following day.

=Muscular Tone.= A force that affects circulation, blood pressure,

respiration, nutrition of cells, secretion, and digestion, can hardly

fail to have a marked effect on the tone of the muscles, internal as

well as external. When we remember that heart, stomach, and intestines

are made of muscular tissue, to say nothing of the skeletal muscles,

we begin to realize how important is muscular tone for bodily health.

Over and over again have I demonstrated that a courageous mind is the

best tonic. Perhaps an example from my "flat-footed" patients will be

to the point. One woman, the young mother of a family, came to me for

a nervous trouble. Besides this, she had suffered for seven or eight

years from severe pains in her feet and had been compelled to wear

specially made shoes prescribed by a Chicago orthopedist. The shoes,

however, did not seem to lessen the pain. After an ordinary day's

occupation, she could not even walk across the floor at dinner-time. A

walk of two blocks would incapacitate her for many days. She was

convinced that her feet could never be cured and came to me only on

account of nervous trouble. On the day of her arrival she flung

herself down on the couch, saying that she would like to go away from

everybody, where the children would never bother her again. She was

sure nobody loved her and she wanted to die. Within three weeks, in

ordinary shoes, this woman tramped nine miles up Mount Wilson and the

next day tramped down again. Her attitude had changed from that of

irritable fretfulness to one of buoyant joy, and with the moral change

had come new strength in the muscles. The death of her husband has

since made it necessary for her to support the family, and she is now

on her feet from eight to fourteen hours a day, a constant source of

inspiration to all about her, and no more weary than the average

person.

Flabbiness in the muscles often causes this trouble with the feet.

"The arches of the foot are maintained by ligaments between the bones,

supported by muscle tendons which prevent undue stretching of the

ligaments and are a protection against flat-foot."[31] Muscle tissue

has an abundant blood supply, while ligaments have very little and

soon lose their resiliency if unsupported. Any lack of tone in the

calf-muscles throws the weight on the less resistant ligaments and on

the cartilages placed as cushions between the bony structures of the

arch. This is what causes the pain.[32]

[Footnote 31: Grey's Anatomy--"The Articulations."]

[Footnote 32: Actual loss of the arch by downward displacement of the

bones cannot be overcome by restoring muscle-tone. The majority of

so-called cases of flatfoot are, however, in the stage amenable to

psychic measures.]

Flat-footedness is only one result of weak muscles. Eye-strain is

another; ptosis, or falling of the organs, is another. In a majority

of cases the best treatment for any of these troubles is an

understanding attempt to go to the root of the matter by bracing up

the whole mental tone. The most scientific oculists do not try to

correct eye trouble due to muscular insufficiency by any special

prisms or glasses. They know that the eyes will right themselves when

the general health and the general spirits improve. I have found by

repeated experience with nervous patients that it takes only a short

time for people who have been unable to read for months or years to

regain their old faculty. So remarkable is the power of mind.

SUMMARY

We have found that the gap between the body and the mind is not so

wide as it seems, and that it is bridged by the subconscious mind,

which is at once the master of the body and the servant of

consciousness. In recording the physical effects of suggestion and

emotion, we have not taken time to describe the galvanometers, the

weighing-machines and all the other apparatus used in the various

laboratory tests; but enough has been said to show that when doctors

and psychologists speak of the effect of mind on body, they are

dealing with definite facts and with laws capable of scientific

proof.

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.

CHAPTER VII

_In which we go to the root of the matter_

THE REAL TROUBLE

PIONEERS

=Following the Gleam.= Kipling's Elephant-child with the "'satiable

curiosity" finally asked a question which seemed simple enough but

which sent him on a long journey into unknown parts. In the same way

man's modest and simple question, "What makes people nervous?" has

sent him far-adventuring to find the answer. For centuries he has

followed false trails, ending in blind alleys, and only lately does he

seem to have found the road that shall lead him to his journey's end.

We may be thankful that we are following a band of pioneers whose

fearless courage and passion for truth would not let them turn back

even when the trail led through fields hitherto forbidden. The leader

of this band of pioneers was a young doctor named Freud.

THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH

=Early Beginnings.= In 1882, when Freud was the assistant to Dr.

Breuer of Vienna, there was brought to them for treatment a young

woman afflicted with various hysterical pains and paralyses. This

young woman's case marked an epoch in medical history; for out of the

effort to cure her came some surprising discoveries of great

significance to the open-minded young student.

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.

=A Startling Discovery.= For a time Breuer and Freud worked together,

finding that their investigations with other patients served to

corroborate their former conclusions. When it became apparent that in

every case the painful experience bore some relation to the love-life

of the patient, both doctors were startled. Along with most of the

rest of the world, they had been taught to look askance at the

reproductive instinct and to shrink from realizing the vital place

which sex holds in human life.

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."

=Freudian Principles.= Gradually, as he worked, he gathered together a

number of outstanding facts about man's mental life and about the

psycho-neuroses. These facts he formulated into certain principles,

which may be summed up in the following way.

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.

Freud was perhaps unfortunate in his choice of the word "sex," which

has so many evil connotations; but as he found no other word to cover

the field, he chose the old one and stretched its meaning to include

all the psychic and physical phenomena which spring directly and

indirectly from the great processes of reproduction and parental care,

and which ultimately include all and more than our word "love."[33]

[Footnote 33: Freud and his followers have always said that they saw

no theoretical reason why any other repressed instinct should not form

the basis of a neurosis, but that, as a matter of fact, they never had

found this to be the case, probably because no other instinct comes

into such bitter and persistent conflict with the dictates of society.

Now, however, the Great War seems to have changed conditions. Under

the strain and danger of life at the front there has developed a kind

of nervous breakdown called shellshock or war-neurosis, which seems in

some cases to be based not on the repression of the instinct of

race-preservation but on the unusual necessity for repression of the

instinct of self-preservation. Army surgeons report that wounded men

almost never suffer from shell-shock. The wound is enough to secure

the unconsciously desired removal to the rear. But in the absence of

wounds, a desire for safety may at the same time be so intense and so

severely repressed that it seizes upon the neurosis as the only

possible means of escape from the unbearable situation. In time of

peace, however, the instinct of reproduction seems to be the only

impulse which is severely enough repressed to be responsible for a

nervous breakdown.]

=Later Developments.= Little by little, the scientific world came to

see that this wild theorizer had facts on his side; that not only had

he formulated a theory, but he had discovered a cure, and that he was

able to free people from obsessions, fears, and physical symptoms

before which other methods were powerless. One by one the open-minded

men of science were converted by the overpowering logic of the

evidence, until to-day we find not only a "Freudian school," counting

among its members many of the eminent scientists of the day, but we

find in medical schools and universities courses based on Freudian

principles, with text-books by acknowledged authorities in medicine

and psychology. We find magazines devoted entirely to psycho-analytic

subjects,[34] besides articles in medical journals and even numerous

articles in popular magazines. Not only is the treatment of nervous

disorders revolutionized by these principles but floods of light are

thrown on such widely different fields of study as ancient myths and

folk lore, the theory of wit, methods of child training, and the

little slips of the tongue and everyday "breaks" that have until

recently been considered the meaningless results of chance.

[Footnote 34: _The Psychoanalytic Review_ and the _International

Journal of Psychoanalysis._]

=A Searching Question.= We find, then, that when we ask, "What makes

people nervous?" we are really asking: "What is man like, inside and

out, up and down? What makes him think, feel, and act as he does every

hour of every day?" We are asking for the source of human motives, the

science of human behavior, the charting of the human mind. It is hard

to-day to understand how so much reproach and ridicule could have been

aroused by the statement that the ultimate cause of nervousness is a

disturbance of the sex-life. There has already been a change in the

public attitude toward things sexual.

Training-courses for mothers and teachers, elementary teaching in the

schools, lectures and magazine articles have done much to show the

fallacy of our old hypersensitive attitude. Since the war, some of us

know, too, with what success the army has used the Freudian principles

in treating war-neurosis, which was mistakenly called shell-shock by

the first observers. We know, too, more about the constitution of

man's mind than the public knew ten years ago. When we remember the

insistent character of the instincts and the repressive method used by

society in restraining the most obstreperous impulse, when we remember

the pain of such conflict and the depressing physical effects of

painful emotions, we cannot wonder that this most sharply repressed

instinct should cause mental and physical trouble.

=What about Sublimation?= On the other hand, it has been stated in

Chapter IV that although this universal urge cannot be repressed, it

can be sublimated or diverted to useful ends which bring happiness,

not disaster, to the individual. We have a right, then, to ask why

this happy issue is not always attained, why sublimation ever fails.

If a psycho-neurosis is caused by a failure of an insistent instinct

to find adequate expression, by a blocking of the libido or the

love-force, what are the conditions which bring about this blocking?

The sex-instinct of every respectable person is subject to restraint.

Some people are able to adjust themselves; why not all? The question,

"What makes people nervous?" then turns out to mean: What keeps people

from a satisfactory outlet for their love-instincts? What is it that

holds them back from satisfaction in direct expression, and prevents

indirect outlet in sublimation? Whatever does this must be the real

cause of "nerves."

THE CAUSES OF "NERVES"

=Plural, not Singular.= The first thing to learn about the cause is

that it is not a cause at all, but several causes. We are so well made

that it takes a combination of circumstances to upset our equilibrium.

In other words, a neurosis must be "over-determined." Heredity, faulty

education, emotional shock, physical fatigue, have each at various

times been blamed for a breakdown. As a matter of fact, it seems to

take a number of ingredients to make a neurosis,--a little unstable

inheritance plus a considerable amount of faulty upbringing, plus a

later series of emotional experiences bearing just the right

relationship to the earlier factors. Heredity, childhood reactions,

and later experiences, are the three legs on which a neurosis usually

stands. An occasional breakdown seems to stand on the single leg of

childhood experiences but in the majority of cases each of the three

factors contributes its quota to the final disaster.

=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.

=Fixation of Habits.= Fixation is the word that expresses all

this,--fixation of childish habits. A neurotic is a person who made

such strong habits in childhood that he cannot abandon them in

maturity. He is too much ruled by the past. His unconscious emotional

thought-habits are the complexes which were made in childhood and

therefore lack the power of adaptation to mature 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.

=Precocious Emotions.= The habits which tend to become fixed too soon

seem to be of four kinds; the habit of loving, the habit of rebelling,

the habit of repressing normal instincts, and the habit of dreaming.

In each case it is the excess of feeling which causes the

trouble,--too much love, too much hate, too much disgust, or too much

pleasure in imagination. Exaggeration is always a danger-signal. An

overdeveloped child is likely to be an underdeveloped man. Especially

in the emotions is precocity to be deplored. A premature alphabet or

multiplication table is not nearly so serious as premature intensity

of feeling, nor so likely to lead later to trouble. Of course fixation

in these emotional habits does not always lead to a serious breakdown.

If the fixation is not too extreme, and if later events do not happen

to accentuate the trouble, the arrest of development may merely show

itself in certain weaknesses of character or in isolated symptoms

without developing a real neurosis.

Let us examine each of these arrested habits and the excess emotion

which sets the mold before it is ready for maturity.

=Too Much Self-Love.= In the chapter on the reproductive instinct, we

found that the natural way to learn to love is by successively loving

oneself, one's parents and family, one's fellows, and one's mate. If

the love-force gets too much pleasure in any one of these phases, it

finds it hard to give up its old love and to pass on to the next

phase. Thus some children take too much pleasure in their own bodies

or, a little later, in their own personalities. If they are too much

interested in their own physical sensations and the pleasure they get

by stimulating certain zones of the body, then in later life they

cannot free themselves from the desire for this kind of satisfaction.

Try as they may, they cannot be satisfied with normal adult relations,

but sink back into some form of so-called sex-perversion.

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.

=Too Much Family-love.= We have already spoken of the danger of

fixation in the second period, that of object-love--the period of

family relationships. The danger is here again one of degree and may

be avoided by a little knowledge and self-control on the part of the

parents. The little girl who is permitted to lavish too much love on

her father, who does not see anybody else, who cannot learn to like

the boys is a misfit. The wise mother will see that her love for her

boy does not express itself too much by means of hugs and kisses. The

mother who shows very plainly that she loves her little boy better

than she loves her husband and the mother who boasts that her

adolescent boy tells her all his secrets and takes her out in

preference to any girl--that deluded mother is trying to take

something that is not hers, and is thereby courting trouble. When her

son grows up, he may not know why, but no girl will suit him, and he

will either remain a bachelor or marry some older woman who reminds

him subconsciously of his mother. His love-requirements will be too

strict; he will be forever trying either in phantasy or in real life

to duplicate his earlier love-experiences. This, of course, cannot

satisfy the demands of a mature man. He will be torn between

conflicting desires, unhappy without knowing why, unable either to

remain a child or to become a man, and impelled to gain

self-expression in indirect and unsatisfactory ways.

Since it is not possible in this space to recite specific cases which

show how often a nervous trouble points back to the father-mother

complex,[35] it may help to cite the opinions of a few of our best

authorities. Freud says of the family complex, "This is the root

complex of the neurosis." Jelliffe: "It is the foot-rule of

measurement of success in life": by which he means that just so far as

we are able at the right time to free ourselves from dependence on

parents are we able to adjust ourselves to the world at large.

Pfister: "The attitude toward parents very often determines for a

life-time the attitude toward people in general and toward life

itself." Hinkle: "The entire direction of lives is determined by

parental relationships."

[Footnote 35: This is technically known as the Oedipus Complex.]

=Too Much Hate.= Besides loving too hard, there is the danger of

hating too hard. If it sounds strange to talk of the hatreds of

childhood, we must remember that we are thinking of real life as it is

when the conventions of adult life are removed and the subconscious

gives up its secrets.

Several references have been made to the jealousy of the small child

when he has to share his love with the parent of the same sex. For

every little boy the father gets in the way. For every little girl the

mother gets in the way. At one time or other there is likely to be a

period when this is resented with all the violence of a child's

emotions. It is likely to be very soon repressed and succeeded by a

real affection which lasts through life. But underneath, unmodified by

time, there may exist simultaneously the old childish image and the

old unconscious reaction to it, unconscious but still active in

indirect ways.

Jealousy is very often united with the natural rebellion of a child

against authority. The rebellion may, of course, be directed against

either parent who is final in authority in the home. In most cases

this is the father. As the impulse of self-assertion is usually

stronger in boys than in girls, and as the boy's impulse in this

direction is reinforced by any existing jealousy toward his father, we

find a strong spirit of rebellion more often playing a subconscious

part in the life of men than of women. The novelist's favorite theme

of the conflict between the young man and "the old man" represents the

conscious, unrepressed complex. More often, however, there is true

affection for the father, while the rebellion which really belongs to

the childish father-image is displaced or transferred to other symbols

of authority,--the state, the law, the king, the school, the teacher,

the church, or perhaps to religion and authority in general.

Anarchists and atheists naturally rationalize their reasons for

dissent, but, for all that, they are not so much intellectual pioneers

as rebellious little boys who have forgotten to grow up.

=Liking to be "Bossed."= There is a worse danger, however, than too

much rebellion, and that is too little rebellion. Sometimes this

yielding spirit is the result of an overdose of negative self-feeling

and an under-dose of positive self-feeling; but sometimes it is

over-compensation for the repressed spirit of rebellion which the

child considers wicked. Consciously he becomes over-meek, because he

has to summon all his powers to fight his subconscious insurrection.

Whether he be meek by nature or by training, he is likely to be a

failure. Everybody knows that the child who is too good never amounts

to anything. He who has never disobeyed is a weakling. Naturally

resenting all authority, the normal individual, if he be well trained,

soon learns that some authority is necessary. He rebels, but he learns

to acquiesce, to a certain degree. If he acquiesces too easily,

represses too severely his rebellious spirit, swings to the other

extreme of wanting to be "bossed," he is very likely to end as a

nervous invalid, unfitted for the battles of life. The neurotic in the

majority of cases likes authority, clings to it too long, wants the

teacher to tell him what to do, wants the doctor to order him around,

is generally over-conscientious, and afraid he will offend the "boss"

or some one else who reminds him of the father-image. All this carries

a warning to parents who cannot manage their children without

dominating their lives, even when the domination is a kindly one.

Perhaps the modern child is in more danger of being spoiled than

bullied, but analysis of nervous patients shows that both kinds of

danger still exist.

=Too Much Disgust.= The third form of excessive emotion is disgust.

The love-force, besides being blocked by a fixation of childish love

and of childish reactions toward authority, is very often kept from

free mature self-expression by a perpetuation of a childish reaction

against sex. We hardly need dwell longer on the folly of teaching

children to be ashamed of so inevitable a part of their own nature.

Disgust is a very strong emotion, and when it is turned against a part

of ourselves, united with that other strong impulse of self-regard and

incorporated into the conscience, it makes a Chinese wall of exclusion

against the baffled, misunderstood reproductive instinct, which is

thrust aside as alien.

=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."

The difference is just this. When an ungratifiable desire is honestly

faced and squarely answered, it is modified by other desires, chooses

another way of discharge, and ceases to be desire. When a desire is

repressed, it is still desire, unsatisfied, insistent, unmodifiable by

mature points of view, untouched by time, automatic, and capable of

almost any subterfuge in order to get satisfaction. A repressed desire

is buried, shut away from the disintegrating effects of sunlight and

air. While the rest of the personality is constantly changing under

the influence of new ideas, the buried complex lives on in its

immaturity, absolutely untouched by time.

=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.

Many of my patients have suffered from the effect of some such

birth-theories. One young girl, twenty years old, was greatly

afflicted with myso-phobia, or the fear of contamination. She spent

most of her time in washing her hands and keeping her hands and

clothing free from contamination by contact with innumerable harmless

objects. When cleaning her shoes on the grass, she would kneel so that

the hem of her skirt would touch the grass, lest some dust should fly

up under her clothes. After eating luncheon in the park with a girl

who had tuberculosis, she said that she was not afraid of tuberculosis

in the lungs, but asked if something like tuberculosis might not get

in and begin to grow somewhere else. Her life was full to overflowing

of such compulsive fears.

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.

Very soon after the beginning of her conversations with me, the girl

realized that her fear was really a disguised desire that something

might be planted within and grow. With her new understanding of

herself, her compulsions promptly slipped away. She began to eat and

sleep, and to live a happy, natural life.

=Chronic Repression.= It takes first-hand acquaintance with nervous

patients to realize how common are stories like these. Unnecessary

repressions based on false training are the cause of many a physical

symptom and mental distress which a little parental frankness might

have forestalled.[36]

[Footnote 36: Parents who are eager to handle this subject in the

right way are often sincerely puzzled as to how to go about it. No

matter how complete their education, it is very likely to fail them at

this critical point. For the benefit of such parents, let it be said

with all possible emphasis that the first and most important step must

be a change in their own mental attitude. If there is left within them

the shadow of embarrassment on the subject of sex, their children will

not fail to sense the situation at once. A feeling of hesitation or a

tendency to apologize for nature makes a far deeper impression on the

child-mind than do the most beautiful of half-believed words on the

subject. And this impression, subtle and elusive as it may seem, is a

real and vital experience which is quite likely to color the whole of

the child's life. If you would give your children a fair start, you

must first get rid of your own inner resistances. After that, all will

be clear sailing.

In the second place, take the earliest opportunity to bring up the

subject in a natural way. A young father told me recently that his

little daughter had asked her mother why she didn't have any lap any

more. "And of course your wife took that chance to tell her about the

baby that is coming," I said. "Oh, no," he answered, "she did nothing

of the kind. Mary is far too young to know about such things." There

are always chances if we are on the look out for them--and the earlier

the better. It has been noticed that children are never repelled by

the idea of any natural process unless the new idea runs counter to

some notion which has already been formed. The wise parent is the one

who gets in the right impression before some other child has had a

chance to plant the wrong one.

Then, too, we elders are judged quite as much by what we do not say as

by what we do. Happy is the child who is not left to draw his own

conclusions from the silence and evasiveness of his parents. The

sex-instruction which children are getting in the schools is often

good, but it usually comes too late--the damage is always done before

the sixth year.

When it comes to the exact words in which to explain the phenomena of

generation and birth each parent must naturally find his own way. The

main point is that we must tell the truth and not try to improve on

nature. If we say that the baby grows under the mother's heart and

later the child learns that this is not true, he inevitably gets the

idea that there is something not nice about the part of the body in

which the baby does grow. What could be wrong with the simple truth

that the father plants a tiny seed in the mother's body and that this

seed joins with another little seed already there and grows until it

is a real baby ready to come into the world? The question as to how

the father plants the seed need cause no alarm. If brothers and

sisters are brought up together with no artificial sense of false

modesty, they very early learn the difference between the male and the

female body. It is simple enough to tell the little child the function

of the male structure. And it is easy to explain that the seeds do not

grow until the little boy and girl have grown to be man and woman and

that the way to be well and to have fine strong children is to leave

the generative organs alone until that time. A sense of the dignity

and high purpose of these organs is far more likely to prevent

perversions--to say nothing of nervousness--than is an attitude of

taboo and silence.]

A certain amount of repression is inevitable and useful, but a

neurotic is merely an exaggerated represser. He represses so much of

himself that it will not stay down.[37] He builds up a permanent

resistance which automatically acts as a dam to his normal sex

instinct and forces it into undesirable outlets.

[Footnote 37: "A neurosis is a partial failure of repression." Frink:

_Morbid Fears and Compulsions_.]

A resistance is a chronic repression, repression that has become fixed

and subconscious, a habit that has lost its flexibility and outlives

its usefulness. It is a fixation of repression, and is built out of an

over-strong complex or emotional thought habit, acquired during

childhood, incorporated into the conscience and carried over into

maturity, where it warps judgment and interferes with normal

development because it is fundamentally untrue and at variance with

the laws of nature.

=Too Much Day-Dreaming.= The fourth habit which holds back the adult

from maturity and predisposes toward "nerves" is the habit of

imagination. It need hardly be said that a certain kind of imagination

is a good thing and one of man's greatest assets. But the essence of

day-dreaming is the exact opposite; it is the desire to see things as

they are not, but as we should like them to be,--not in order that we

may bring them to pass, but for the mere pleasure of dreaming. Instead

of turning a microscope or a telescope on the world of reality, as

positive imagination does, this negative variety refuses even to look

with the naked eye. To dream is easier than to do; to build up

phantasies is easier than to build up a reputation or a fortune; to

think a forbidden pleasure is easier than to sublimate.

"Pleasure-thinking" is not only easier than "reality-thinking,"--it is

the _older_ way.

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.

Such a statement need not shock the most sensitive conscience. The

very fact that a neurosis breaks out is proof that the phantasies are

repellent to the owners of them and are thrust down into the

subconscious as unworthy. In fact, every neurosis is witness to the

strength of the human conscience. No phantasy could cause illness. It

is the phantasy plus the repression of it that makes the trouble, or

rather it is the conflict between the forces back of the phantasy and

the repression. The neurosis, then, turns out to be a "flight from the

real," the result of a desire to run away from a difficulty. When a

problem presses or a disagreeable situation is to be faced, it is

easier to give up and fall ill than to see the thing through to the

end. Here again, we find that nervousness is a regression to the

irresponsible reactions of childhood.

=Maturity versus Immaturity.= We have been thinking of the main causes

of "nerves" and have found them to be infantile habits of loving,

rebelling, repressing, and dreaming. We have tried to show that these

habits are able to cause trouble because of their bearing on that

inevitable conflict between the ancient urge of the reproductive

instinct and the later ideals which society has acquired. If this

conflict be met in the light of the present, free from the backward

pull, of outgrown habits, an adjustment is possible which satisfies

both the individual and society. We call this adjustment sublimation.

This is rather a synthesis than a compromise, a union of the opposing

forces, a happy utilization of energy by displacement on more useful

ideas. But if the conflict has to be met with the mind hampered by

immature thinking and immature feeling; if the demands of the

here-and-now are met as if it were long ago; if unhealthy and untrue

complexes, old loves and hates complicate the situation; if to the

necessary conflict is added an unnecessary one; then something else

happens. Compromise of some kind must be made, but instead of a happy

union of the two forces a poor compromise is effected, gaining a

partial satisfaction for both sides, but a real one for neither. The

neurosis is this compromise.

LATER EXPERIENCES

=The Last Straw.= The precipitating cause may be one of a number of

things. It may be entirely within, or it may be external. Perhaps it

is only a quickening of the maturing instincts at the time of

adolescence, making the love-force too strong to be held by the old

repressions. Perhaps the husband, wife, or lover dies, or the

life-work is taken away, depriving the vital energy of its usual

outlets. Perhaps the trigger is pulled by an emotional shock which

bears a faint resemblance to old emotional experiences, and which

stimulates both the repressing and repressed trends and makes the

person at the same time say both "Yes," and "No."[38] Perhaps

physical fatigue lets down the mental and moral tension and makes the

conflict too strong to be controlled. Perhaps an external problem

presses and arouses the old habit of fleeing from disagreeable

reality. Any or all these factors may cooperate, but not one of them

is anything more than a last straw on an overburdened back. No

calamity, deprivation, fatigue, or emotion has been able to bring

about a neurosis unless the ground was prepared for it by the earlier

reactions of childhood.

[Footnote 38: "The external world can only cause repression when there

was already present beforehand a strong initial tension reaching back

even to childhood."--Pfister: _Psychoanalytic Method_, p. 94.]

THE BREAKDOWN ITSELF

="Two Persons under One Hat."= We can understand now why a neurotic

can be described in so many ways. We often hear him called an

especially moral, especially ethical person, with a very active

conscience; an intensely social being, unable to be satisfied with

anything but a social standard; a person with "finer intellectual

insight and greater sensitiveness than the rest of mankind." At the

same time we are told that a neurosis is a partial triumph of

anti-social, non-moral factors, and that it is a cowardly flight from

reality; we hear a nervous invalid called selfish, unsocial, shut in,

primitive, childish, self-deceived. Both these descriptions are true

to life. A neurosis is an ethical struggle between these two sets of

forces. If the lower set had triumphed, the man would have been merely

weak; if the higher set had been victorious, he would have been

strong. As it is, he is neither one nor the other,--only nervous. The

neurosis is the only solution of the struggle which he is able to

find, and serves the purpose of a sort of armed armistice between the

two camps.

SERVING A PURPOSE

If a neurosis is a compromise, if it is the easiest way out, if it

serves a purpose, it must be that the individual himself has a hand in

shaping that purpose. Can it be that a breakdown which seems such an

unmitigated disaster is really welcomed by a part of our own selves?

Nothing is more intensely resented by the nervous invalid than the

accusation that he likes his symptoms,--and no wonder. The conscious

part of him hates the pain, the inconvenience, and the disability with

a real hatred. It is not pleasant to be ill. And yet, as it turns out,

it is pleasanter to be ill than it is to bear the tension of

unsatisfied desire or to be undeceived about oneself. Every symptom is

a means of expression for repressed and forgotten impulses and is a

relief to the personality. It tends to the preservation of the

individual, rather than to his destruction. The nervous invalid is not

short-lived, but his family may be! It has been said that a neurosis

is not so much a disease as a dilemma. Rather might it be said that

the neurosis is a way out of the dilemma. It is a harbor after a

stormy sea, not always a quiet harbor, but at least a usable one.

Unpleasant as it is, every nervous symptom is a form of compensation

which has been deliberately though unconsciously chosen by its owner.

=Rationalizing Our Distress.= Among other things, a nervous symptom

furnishes a seemingly reasonable excuse for the sense of distress

which is behind every breakdown. Something troubles us. We are not

willing to acknowledge what it is. On the other hand, we must appear

reasonable to ourselves, so we manufacture a reason. Perhaps at the

time when the person first feels distress, he is on a railroad train.

So he says to himself, "It is the train. I must not go near the

railway"; and he develops a phobia for cars. Perhaps at the onset of

the fear he happens to have a slight pain in the arm. He makes use of

the pain to explain his distress. He thinks about it and holds on to

it. It serves a purpose, and is on the whole less painful than the

feeling of unexplained impending disaster which is attached to no

particular idea. Perhaps he happens to be tired when the conflict

first gets beyond control. So he seizes the idea of fatigue to explain

his illness. He develops chronic fatigue and talks proudly of

overwork. In every case the symptom serves a real purpose, and is,

despite its discomfort, a relief to the distressed personality.

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.

This characteristic of finding pleasure in personal ministrations is

plainly a regression to the infantile phase of life. The baby demands

and obtains the center of the stage. Later he has to learn to give it

up, but the neurotic gets the center again and is often very loth to

leave it for a more inconspicuous place.

=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 purposive character of a nervous illness is well illustrated by

two cases reported by Thaddeus Hoyt Ames.[39] A young woman, the

drudge of the family, suddenly became hysterically blind, that is, she

became blind despite the fact that her eyes and optic nerves proved to

be unimpaired. She remained blind until it was proved to her that a

part of her welcomed the blindness and had really produced it for the

purpose of getting away from the monotony of her unappreciated life at

home. She naturally resented the charge but finally accepted it and

"turned on" her eyesight in an instant. The other patient, a man,

became blind in order to avoid seeing his wife who had turned out to

be not at all what he had hoped. When he realized what he was doing,

he decided that there might be better ways of adjusting himself to his

wife. He then switched on his seeing power, which had never been

really lost, but only disconnected and dissociated from the rest of

his mind.

[Footnote 39: Thaddeus Hoyt Ames: _Archives of Ophthalmology_, Vol.

XLIII, No. 4, 1914.]

That the conscious mind has no part in the subterfuge is shown by the

fact that both patients gave up their artificial haven as soon as they

saw how they had been fooling themselves. The fact remains that every

neurosis is the fulfilment of a wish,--a distorted, unrecognized,

unsatisfactory fulfilment to be sure, but still an effort to satisfy

desire. As Frink remarks, "A neurosis is a kind of behaviour." We

always choose the conduct we like. It is a matter of choice. Does not

this answer our question as to why some people always take unhealthy

suggestions? If we take the bad one, it is because it serves the need

of a part of our being.

SIGN LANGUAGE

=Talking in Symbols.= We have several times suggested that a nervous

symptom is a disguised, indirect expression of subconscious impulses.

It is the completeness of the disguise which makes it so hard for us

to realize its true meaning. It takes a stretch of the imagination to

believe that a pain in the body can mean a pain in the soul, or that

a fear of contamination can signify a desire to bear a child. But in

all this we must not forget the primitive, childlike nature of the

instinctive life.

The savage and the child do not think as civilized man thinks. Savage

or child thinks in pictures; he acts his feelings; he groups things

according to superficial resemblances, he expresses an idea by its

opposite; he talks in symbols. We still use these devices in poetic

speech and in everyday thought. A wedding-ring stands for the marriage

bond; the flag for a nation; a greyhound for fleetness; a wild beast

for ferocity; sunrise for youth; and sunset for old age. "The essence

of language consists in the statement of resemblance. The expression

of human thought is an expression of association."[40]

[Footnote 40: Trigant Burrow: _Journal of American Medical

Association_, Vol. LXVI, No. II, 1916.]

The association may be so accidental and superficial as to seem absurd

to another person, or it may be so fundamental as to express the

universal thought of man from the beginning of time. Many of the signs

and symbols which crop out in neurotic symptoms and in normal dreams

are the same as those which appear in myths, fairy tales and folk-lore

and in the art of the earlier races.

=A Secret Code.= When the denied instincts of a man's repressed life

insist on expression, and when the shocked proprieties of his

repressing life demand conformity to social standards, the

subconscious, held back from free speech, strikes a compromise by

making use of figurative language. As Trigant Burrow says, if the

moral repugnance is very strong, the disguise must be more elaborate,

the symbols more far-fetched. The symbols of nervous symptoms and of

dreams are a "secret code," understood by the sender but meaningless

to the censoring conscience, which passes them as harmless.

=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 Wrong Kind of Symbolism.= A nervous disorder is an unfortunate

choice of symbols. Instead of spiritualizing an innate impulse, it

merely disguises it. The disguise takes a number of forms. One of the

commonest ways is to act out in the body what is taking place in the

soul. The woman with nausea converted her moral disgust into a

physical nausea, which expressed her distress while it hid its

meaning. The girl who was tired of seeing her work, and the man who

wanted to avoid seeing his wife chose a way out which physically

symbolized their real desire. A dentist once came to me with a

paralyzed right arm. He had given up his office and believed that he

would never work again. It turned out that his only son had just died

and that he was dramatizing his soul-pain by means of his body. His

subconscious mind was saying, "My good right arm is gone," and saying

it in its own way. Within a week the arm was playing tennis, and ever

since it has been busy filling teeth. There were, of course, other

factors leading up to the trouble, but the factor which determined its

form was the sense of loss which acted itself out through the body.

Sometimes, as we have seen, the disguise takes another form. Instead

of conversion into a physical symptom, it lets one idea stand for

another and displaces the impulse or the emotion to the substitute

idea. The girl with the impulse to take drugs fooled her conscience by

letting the drug-taking idea stand for the idea of conception. The

girl with the fear of contamination carried the disguise still

farther by changing the desire into fear,--a very common subterfuge.

=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.

During the analysis it was discovered that what she had been reading

on that first night was the thirteenth verse of the ninety-first

Psalm. "Thou shalt tread upon the lion and the adder. The young lion

and the dragon thou shalt trample under foot." To her the adder meant

the snake, the tempter in the Garden of Eden, and hence sex. What she

wanted to choke was her own insistent sex urge of which the child was

the symbol and the result. On later occasions she had the same sort of

hallucinations in connection with another child and on sight of a

brutish kind of man who symbolized to the subconscious mind the

sex-urge, of which she was afraid. Not so much by what her mother had

said as by what she had avoided saying, and by her expression whenever

the subject was mentioned, had she given her little daughter a

fundamentally wrong idea of the reproductive instinct. Later when the

girl was woman grown she still clung to the old conception, deploring

the sex-part of the marriage relation and feeling herself too refined

to be moved by any such sensual urge. But the strong sex-instinct

within her would not be downed. It was so insistent as to be an object

of terror to her repressing instinct, which could not bring itself to

acknowledge its presence. The fear that came to the surface was merely

a disguised and symbolic representation of this real fear which was

turning her life into a nightmare.

The nausea and vomiting in this woman seemed to be symbolic of the

disgust which she felt subconsciously at the thought of her own

sex-desires, but sometimes the physical disturbances which accompany

such phobias are the natural physical reactions to the constant fear

state. Indigestion, palpitation, and tremors are not in themselves

symbolic of the inner trouble but may be the result of an overdose of

the adrenal and thyroid secretions and the other accompaniments of

fear. In such cases the real symptom is the fear, and the physical

disturbance an incidental by-product of the emotional state. In any

case a nervous symptom is always the sign of something else--a

hieroglyph which must be deciphered before its real meaning can be

discovered.

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 Primitive.= The first class merely capitulate to their primitive

desires. They may not be nervous, but it is safe to say that they are

rarely happy. The voice of conscience is hard to drown, even when it

is not strong enough to control conduct. Happily it often succeeds in

making us miserable, when we desert the ways that have proved best for

our kind. The "immoral" person has not yet "arrived"; he simply

disregards the collective wisdom of society and gives the victory to

the primitive forces which try to keep man back on his old level. We

cannot break the ideals by which man lives, and still be happy.

=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.

=Nervous People.= To the third class belong the people who have not

finished the fight. These are the folk with "nerves," the people in

whom the conflict is fiercest because both sides are too strong. The

victory goes to neither side; the tug of war ends in a tie. Since the

energy of the nervous person is divided between the effort to repress

and the effort to gain expression, there is little left for the

external world. There is plenty of energy wasted on emotion, physical

symptoms, phantasy, or useless acts symbolizing the struggle.

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.

No nervous symptom is what it seems to be. It is an arch pretender. It

pretends to be afraid of something it does not fear at all, or to

ignore something that interests it intensely. It pretends to be a

physical disease, when primarily it has nothing to do with the body;

and the person most deluded is the one who "owns" the symptom. Its

purpose is to avoid the pain of disillusionment and to furnish relief

to a distracted soul which dares not face itself.

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"