Outwitting Our Nerves: A Primer of Psychotherapy

by Josephine A. Jackson; Helen M. Salisbury

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