Outwitting Our Nerves: A Primer of Psychotherapy

by Josephine A. Jackson; Helen M. Salisbury

be the result of mental labor.

The college students who break down are not wrecked by intellectual work. In some cases, one strong factor in their undoing is the strain and readjustment necessary because of the discrepancies between some of their deepest religious beliefs and the truth as they learn it in the class-room. The other factors are merely those which play their part in any neurosis.

Re-educating the Teacher. School-teachers are prone to believe themselves worn out from the mental work and the strain of the strenuous life of teaching. Many a fine, conscientious teacher has come to me with this story of overwork. But the school-teacher is as easily re-educated as is any one else. I usually begin the process by stating that I taught school myself for ten years and can speak from experience. After I explain that there is no physical reason why the teachers of some cities are fagged out at the end of nine months while those in other cities whose session is longer can hold on for ten months, and stenographers who lead just as strenuous a life manage to exist with only a two-weeks' vacation, they begin to see that perhaps after all they have been fooling themselves by a suggestion, "setting" themselves for just so long and expecting to be done up at the end of the term. Many of these same teachers have gone back to their work

with a new sense of "enough and to spare" and some of them have written back that they have passed triumphantly through especially trying years with no sense of depletion.

In any work, it is the feeling of strain which tells, the emotionalism and feeling sorry for oneself because one has a hard job. It is wonderful what a sense of power comes from the simple idea that we are equal to our tasks.

Sudden Relief. The story of Mr. V. illustrates Professor James's statement that often the fatigue gets worse up to a certain critical point, and then suddenly passes away. Mr. V. was another patient who was "physically exhausted." When the rest of "the family" went clamming on the beach, he felt himself too weak for such exertions, so I left him on the sand to hold the bag while the rest of us dug for clams. The minute I turned my back he disappeared. I found him lying flat on his back, resting, behind the bulk-head. I decided that he needed the two-mile walk home and we all set out to walk. "Doctor, this is cruel. It is dangerous. My knees can never stand this. I shall be ill!" ran the constant refrain for the first mile. Then things went a bit better. Toward the last he found, to his absolute astonishment, that the fatigue had entirely rolled away. The last half-mile he accomplished with perfect ease. Needless to say, he

never again complained of physical exhaustion.

False Neuritis. Miss T. was suffering from fatigue and very severe pains in her arms, pains which were supposed to be the result of real neuritis, but which did not correspond to the physiological picture of that disease. A consultation revealed the fact that her love-instinct had been repeatedly stimulated, and then at the last, when it had expected satisfaction, had been disappointed. A discussion of her life, its inner forces, and her future aims helped to pull her together again and give her instinct new outlets. The pains and the fatigue disappeared at once.

Something Wrong. These cases are chosen at random and are typical of scores of others. In no single case was the trouble feigned or imaginary or unreal. But in every case it was a mistake. The sense of loss of muscular power was really a sense of loss of power on the part of the soul. Some inner force was reaching out, reaching out after something which it could never quite attain. As it happened, in every case that I analyzed, the force which felt itself defeated and inadequate was the thwarted instinct of reproduction. Like a man pinned to the ground by a stronger force, it felt itself most helpless while struggling the hardest. Just as we feel a thrill of fright when we step up in the dark and find no step there, so this instinct had gotten itself ready for a step which was not there. Inner repressions

or outer circumstances had denied satisfaction and left only an undefined sense that something was wrong. The life-force, feeling itself helpless, limp, tired, had no way of expressing itself except in terms of the body. Since expression is itself a relief and an outlet for feeling, the denied desire had seized on suggestions of overwork to explain its sense of weariness, and had symbolized its soul-pain by converting it into a physical pain. The feeling of inadequacy was very real, but it was simply displaced from one part of the personality to another,—from an unknown, inarticulate part to one which was more familiar and which had its own means of expression.