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Outwitting Our Nerves by Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury

J >> Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury >> Outwitting Our Nerves




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.]

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