the patient the conviction of power; to correct his false ideas about his stomach, his heart, or his head; to train him out of his emotionalism; to lead him into a state of mind more largely controlled by reason; and to make him find some useful and absorbing work.
This kind of mental and moral treatment has been sufficient to cure many neuroses of long standing. In cases that are helped by this method, the patient's love-force, robbed of the material out of which it has woven its disguise, and trained out of its bad habits by re-education, automatically makes its own readjustments and forces new channels for itself out into more useful activities. Very many nervous persons seem to need nothing more than this simple kind of help.
When Simple Explanation Does not Explain. For very many cases, however, this procedure, good as it is, does not go deep enough. Although it gives a sound objective education about the facts of one's body, it furnishes only the most superficial subjective knowledge of one's inner life. If the inner struggle be bitter, the competing forces will hold on to their poor refuge in the symptom, despite any number of explanations that the symptom can have no physical cause. Sometimes it is enough for a person to be shown that he is too suggestible, but often it is far more helpful for him to get an inkling as to why he likes unhealthy suggestions, and to understand something
of his starved instincts which he may learn to satisfy in better ways.
Psychological Explanation
Between the two extremes of the cases which need a real analysis and those which are cured by simple explanation, I have found the great bulk of nervous cases. To simple explanation with its highly useful information, I therefore add what might be called psychological explanation, a re-education which makes use of all that illuminating material unearthed by the explorations of hypnosis and especially of psycho-analysis. Along with correct ideas about such matters as digestion, sleep, and fatigue, I give, so far as the patient is able to understand, a comprehension of the rights of the denied instincts, the ways of the subconscious, the fettering hold of unfortunate childish habits, the various mental mechanisms by which we fool ourselves, and the ways by which we may make better adaptations.
According to the Patient. The treatment varies according to the nature of the trouble, and is somewhat dependent on the mentality of the patient. There are many people who would only be confused by being forced into a study of mental phenomena. Not being students, they would be more bewildered than helped by the details of their inner mechanisms. Others, of studious habits and inquiring minds, are encouraged to
browse at will in a library of psychotherapy and to learn all that they can from the best authorities.
In any case, I give the patients as much as they are able to take of my own understanding of the subject. There are no secrets in this method. The patient is treated as a rational human being who has nothing to lose and everything to gain by the fullest knowledge that he is able to acquire. Without forcing him to plunge in over his depth, I encourage him to understand himself to the fullest possible extent. Besides individual private conferences, we have twice a day an informal gathering of all the patients in my household—"the family" as we like to call ourselves—for a reading or talk on the various ways of the body and the mind, which need to be understood for normal living and for the cure of nerves. Very often people of only average education, long without the opportunity of study, gain in a surprisingly short time enough insight to make new adaptations and cure themselves. For this, a college education is not nearly so important as an open mind. It is because of the success of this method that I have been encouraged to reach a larger number of people by means of a book, based on the same plan of re-education.
Explanation vs. Suggestion. Re-education through this kind of explanation is simply a matter of learning the truth and acting upon it. It is a process of real enlightenment,