The patient’s mind is occupied with his health, his fears, and his ailments. The interest he takes in his friends and acquaintances is how far they may serve his purposes of pleasure, game, health, and avoidance of fear of disease. His wife and child are regarded from a personal standpoint of his own good, otherwise they are totally ignored. When they interfere with him, or arouse his fears, he becomes impatient, angry, and furious. He claims to be the most considerate and kindest of men, brimful of humanitarian ideals. He thinks that he can accomplish more than anyone else in his circumstances. Nothing is too good for him, nobody is superior to him. As a rule things are badly conducted, he finds fault with everybody and with everything. He is driven by psychopathic furies,—discord, fear, and maddening egotism.
[CHAPTER XIX]
HYPNOIDAL TREATMENT
Psychopathic or neurotic maladies do not depend on the abnormal action of some one organ or function, but on a general condition common to all bodily and mental functions,—the fundamental primitive fear instinct which relates to life in general.
The deranged functions, cardiac, respiratory, or sexual,—fatigue, conflict, shock, repression and others are only the occasions. To regard any of these occasions as the sources of psychopathic maladies is like regarding the weather-cock as the cause of the wind. Self-preservation and the fear instinct alone form the source of all psychopathic maladies.
I adduce here a few cases which may be taken as typical:
Mrs. M. C., aged thirty-two years. Family history good; well developed physically and mentally. A year before the present trouble set in, patient suffered from a severe attack of grippe. Menstruation, which was before painless and normal in amount, became painful and scanty, accompanied by headaches, indisposition, irritability, crying spells and backache which lasted long after the menstrual period was over. The family physician ascribed the symptoms to endometritis, mainly cervical and treated her with absolute rest, fomentations, injections, scarification and dilatation of the cervix, and finally curetted the uterus. As the patient grew worse under the treatment, she was taken to a gynecologist, who after an examination suggested an operation. The operation was duly performed, with the result that the nervous symptoms became intensified, and the attacks increased in violence and duration. The turn of the nerve specialist came next. Hysteria, neurasthenia, and the more fashionable “psychasthenia” have been diagnosed by various neurologists. A year of psychoanalysis made of the patient a complete wreck, with depression, introspection and morbid self-analysis. Patient was put by neurologist under Weir Mitchell’s treatment.
When the patient came under my care, she was in mental agonies, a complete wreck. I gave up the Weir Mitchell rest treatment, sent away the nurse, released the patient from solitary bed confinement, told her to leave the sick room, to give up dieting and medicines, and to return to a normal, active life. I kept on treating her by the hypnoidal state. The patient began to improve rapidly, and finally all her physical and mental symptoms disappeared; she has continued for over six years in excellent condition of health.
A study of the case traced the fear instinct to experiences of early childhood, fears accentuated and developed into morbid states by the deleterious tendencies of the treatment, giving rise to a somatopsychosis, the physical symptoms mainly predominating.