A person, for instance, experiences a sudden fright. Time passes, the fright is completely forgotten, or, at most, vaguely remembered. But one day unmistakable, and sometimes exceedingly peculiar, symptoms of disease appear. The victim, it may be, suffers from a strange obsession or “fixed idea,” or from a general “nervous breakdown,” or from an actual paralysis of some bodily organ, or from the development of abdominal or other enlargements resembling true organic growths.
Whatever the symptoms, the mechanism of the puzzling malady is always the same. There has been an abnormal dissociation. The ideas connected with the original shock, although submerged beneath the threshold of consciousness—in a word, forgotten—remain vividly alive in the subconscious, to act as perpetual irritants of the nervous system and in time to give rise to the appearance of the symptoms of which the sufferer complains. Often, indeed, the dissociation is instantaneous, and the appearance of the disease symptoms equally rapid.
In either case, the resultant malady is purely psychical in its origin, and can be cured only by psychical, not by physical means. What is needed is to get at the dissociated mental states—the forgotten, disease-creating memories—and reassociate them with the upper consciousness, or root them out completely by means of “suggestions” skillfully applied.
This is no fanciful theory. It is the solidest kind of fact, repeatedly tested and verified. Time and again, patients pronounced incurable by competent physicians have been taken in hand by the psychopathologists and, once their disease has been definitely traced to some dissociation, have been restored to perfect health.
For the matter of that, of course, the same thing has been done to some extent by Christian Science healers and other irregular practitioners of “mental medicine.” But the difference between all of these and the psychopathologists is just this—that the former apply the healing power of suggestion to all sorts of diseases, and without any adequate understanding of its laws and limitations, whereas the psychopathologists recognize that it is only one of several valuable medical methods, and that it is legitimately applicable only to certain maladies.
Experience has taught them, too, that even within its proper sphere of usefulness it often is of therapeutic value only after a searching scientific examination of the patient’s subconsciousness has brought to light the particular dissociated states which have to be corrected before a cure can be wrought.
Nevertheless, the range of maladies susceptible of cure by psychopathological processes is marvelously wide, and it is no exaggeration to say that the discovery of the influence exercised by the subconscious in the causation of disease is one of the most vitally significant ever made in the history of medicine.
The truth of this may readily be shown by citing a few cases illustrating some of the manifold ways in which dissociation works havoc in the human organism, and the extreme ingenuity displayed by the skilled psychopathologist in overcoming its ravages.
There was brought one day to the Parisian hospital of the Salpêtrière, the world’s greatest center of psychopathological investigation, a woman of forty, designated in the medical record of her case by the name of Justine. She was accompanied by her husband, who explained that he wished Doctor Janet to examine her because he feared that she had become insane. And, in fact, she presented the aspect of a veritable maniac. Her jet-black hair was flowing loosely over her shoulders, her eyes were fixed and glaring, her hands trembling, the muscles of her neck twitching, and she constantly made the most horrible grimaces. When Doctor Janet gently sought to question her, she buried her face in her hands, and cried:
“Oh, it is terrible to live thus! I am afraid, I am so afraid!”