"Do the thing you are afraid of, or soon you will be afraid of something else as well. And the more you do what you fear to do, the less you will be afraid of it, because your act will bring you evidence of the truth. Your act will prove to you that you can do the thing that you fear you cannot. That fact will convince you a great deal more than all the talking that your doctor or anybody else can do. You will get conviction by reality, the best of all witnesses."
Among the poor, with whom we deal part of the time in social work—though I insist that social work is concerned with the rich as well—we have to face economic fears. In America and England economic fears are a very real evil—fears of the work-house, fears of coming to be dependent, of having no place of their own, are what poor people often dread. Again, the clue for our usefulness is to find out what people do not tell us of these economic fears, and then to see if we can make them groundless.
In a certain number of people (I do not feel competent to say how large a portion), life is rendered miserable by the fear of being found out. I happened, as I have already said, to get driven some years ago into a position where I thought it best to swear off medical lying. One of the surprising parts of this experience was the sense of relief which I felt when I knew that there was no longer anything in my medical work that I was afraid of having any one find out. It was in benevolent, unselfish medical lies that I had been dealing, according to the ordinary practice of the medical profession. But as soon as I decided that I could abandon these and need no longer fear that any patient might find out what was being done to him, I had the sense of a weight taken off my shoulders.
Forgetfulness
There is a very eloquent passage in one of Mrs. Bernard Bosanquet's books[2] about social work, in which she describes the psychology of the poorer classes among whom she worked in London, and dwells especially on their characteristic forgetfulness. They cannot learn because they cannot remember. They cannot learn how to avoid mistakes in future because they cannot remember past mistakes. One well-known difference between a feeble-minded person and a person competent to manage the affairs of life, is that the former forgets so extraordinarily, and therefore cannot build up through remembrance of his past how to steer better through the future. Of course we all of us have this disease in varying degrees. We all forget, in the moral field as well as the physical, things that we ought to remember. There are things that we ought to forget. After we have started to jump a fence, we must not remember the possibility of our failing. The time to remember that is before we have begun to jump. Moreover, there is no particular benefit in remembering our own past mistakes if they are such that we cannot do anything about them, morally or any other way.
There are things, then, that we ought to forget, but allowing for these, forgetfulness means forgetting the things which we ought to remember. In alcoholism it is extraordinary how much the person forgets. One cannot fail to be struck by the fact that the alcoholic gets into trouble again and again because he cannot fully remember what happened before. In the field of sex faults this truth is equally obvious. A man is unfaithful to his wife because he allows himself to forget his wife—his memory of her is for the moment blotted out. Nobody could violate his own standards in this field if he could vividly remember them. Hence if we are to help any one else to govern himself in matters of affection we must help him to remember, help him by planning devices that make it nearly impossible to forget.
Bad temper can ordinarily be explained by forgetfulness. We can hardly lose our temper with a person if we remember the other sides of his nature opposed to that with which we are just now about to quarrel. Nobody consists wholly of irritating characteristics. We all possess them; but we all possess something else besides. Hence if we can realize some of our own moments of wrath, I think we must confess that for the moment the person with whom we were enraged possessed for us but a single characteristic. The rest were forgotten.
My account of these five common types of mental deficiency: ignorance, shiftlessness, instability, fears, forgetfulness, is general and vague. I mean to make it so. If my suggestions are of any use to the reader it will be because he is able to make his own specific applications. I want, however, to mention one example of a much more specific fault, namely, nagging. In social work we often see families broken up or seriously cracked by some one's nagging. It consists in reminding people of their defects and shortcomings in season and out of season, until the reminder finally gets upon their nerves. You are aware that your husband, your wife, your child, has some very deleterious fault. Admittedly he has it and it is constantly getting him into trouble. So you want to be quite sure that it never gets him into trouble again; and hence you keep reminding him of it again and again until you produce an irritation that only aggravates the original fault.
Why do I take so trivial and specific a case as this? Because I can remember several cases where I could not possibly leave out nagging when I came to make my social diagnosis. It was one of the chief factors. One cures this disease, in case one does help it at all, by making the nagging person conscious of what it is that he is doing. The nagging impulse is like an itch. It recurs and scratching does not stop it. The nagger does not know quite why he does it; he finds himself doing it almost in his sleep. Hence we try to wake him up, to make him conscious, if we can, of his foolishness, of the kind of harm he is doing, and of the degree of incurability he is inducing in the person whom he is trying to cure.
I will now sum up the last four chapters in a diagram which we have used in Boston at the Massachusetts General Hospital to assist us in making our social diagnoses. A social diagnosis can very seldom be made in one word, such as idiocy or tramp. It must include the patient's physical state. It must summarize a person's physical, moral, and economic needs. Our best social diagnoses, such as idiocy or feeble-mindedness, do not refer to the mind only. They refer to the body just as much. Feeble-mindedness is a statement about the child's body, his brain, his voracious appetite, the diseases to which he is likely to succumb, his extraordinary susceptibility to cold, and his poor chances of growing up. One says a great deal about the physical side of a child as soon as one pronounces the word "feeble-minded." Also one says a great deal about his financial future. One knows that the feeble-minded child will never rise beyond a very low point in the economic scale. One says also a great deal about his moral future. We all know to what sexual dangers and temptations he is especially exposed. And on the purely psychological side one can predict his entire unteachability beyond a perfectly definite limit. All this is given in the medical-social diagnosis, "feeble-mindedness."