Almost without exception it is in the home that the seeds are sown which may afterward bear the bitter fruit of hysteria, whether bearing it in childhood or not until some critical period comes in later years. It is the child who is “spoiled,” or kept by unwise parents in a state of nervous tension and excitement; the child whose sense of moral responsibility is not properly developed, and whose natural suggestibility is unduly heightened by the superstitions, fears, and eccentricities of its elders; it is such a child who, soon or late, may be counted on to manifest some hysterical taint, perhaps not of the extreme type illustrated by the cases narrated above, but nevertheless of a sort making against happiness, usefulness, and success in the world of active effort. Or, to state the situation in more detail in the words of a physician of my acquaintance:
“Hysterical children, it has been my observation, usually have neurotic parents. At first I was disposed to see in this another evidence of the dread workings of heredity. But I am now inclined to the belief that it illustrates rather the influence of environment. All children, as you know, are highly imitative. They tend to copy, with exaggerations, whatever models are placed before them, and instinctively they take their parents as their chief models. If, then, the parents are flighty, excitable, passing rapidly from extreme to extreme of mood, it is only natural that the children should be likewise. Their minds undisciplined, their will-power undeveloped, they easily fall a prey to the baneful, hysteria-producing suggestions of their unhealthy surroundings.
“To make matters worse, there is often, even among well-educated persons, an amazing disregard of the hygienic and dietetic requirements for neural stability. Children are allowed to sit up to unreasonable hours; they are permitted altogether too frequent attendance at parties, theatres, moving-picture shows, and similar places of entertainment, where they receive impressions too vivid and varied for them to absorb easily. Then, too, there is a tendency to give them at their meals an undue allowance of meat, and to permit them to drink tea, coffee, and other stimulants making for nerve disturbance.
“All the while they are living in an atmosphere of parental uneasiness and unrest. Their mothers—and perhaps their fathers also—fuss and fume over them. They delight, it may be, in ‘showing them off’ to admiring visitors, thus suggesting to the already over-impressionable little ones undue ideas of their own importance. Presently signs of trouble appear—restless sleep, ‘night terrors,’ facial ‘tics,’ possibly even full-blown attacks of hysterical convulsions, paralysis, deafness, or what not—and the neurologist has another patient on his hands.”
Surely the duty of parents is plain. To set before their children from earliest infancy examples of placidity and strength of character, to educate their will no less than their intellect, to guard them as far as possible from all harmful suggestions, to love them without idolising them, to study carefully their physical as well as their mental and moral needs—in this way, and in this way alone, can safety be had against the dread evil of hysteria and allied nervous troubles. Especially is such a course indispensable in view of the now well-demonstrated fact that a faulty upbringing may be primarily responsible for mental and nervous maladies, not of childhood but of adult life, and of a character to challenge the utmost skill of the best trained physicians. Of this, more in our next chapter.
VIII
THE MENACE OF FEAR
I have no intention of describing the ordinary, familiar phenomena of fear. These, in both their psychological and physiological manifestations, will be found adequately treated in any good text-book on the emotions. What I wish to do, rather, is to call attention to some little-known facts which find scant mention in the text-books for the excellent reason that it is only within the past few years that they have been made part of organised knowledge. Yet they are facts of the utmost significance from both a theoretical and a practical point of view; and, indeed, an understanding of them is of no less importance to the layman than to the scientist. Their discovery has made possible for the first time what may be called an applied psychology of fear—that is to say, a statement of principles the application of which will go far toward solving the problem of how to avert the evil consequences of fear without the loss of its really beneficial qualities.
That there is a certain virtue in fear requires no scientific demonstration. Fear, as everybody ought to be aware, is intrinsically one of the most useful of emotions. It is an instinct implanted in us as a prime aid in the struggle for existence. Doubtless for this reason it is, as compared with the other emotions, the earliest to make its appearance in the newborn child. Preyer, whose book, “The Mind of the Child,” is not nearly so well known in this country as it should be, puts the first manifestation of fear in an infant at the twenty-third day after birth. Other observers, including Charles Darwin, have found no indications of it until somewhat later than this. But all agree that it is the first emotion, properly so called, to show itself, and that its normal function is to instil caution and prudence in relation to objects and actions that might have destructive effects.