Let it be understood that this protest against the doctor’s degree is not a protest against the length of time that is given to graduate studies in preparation for teaching. This should be increased rather than diminished. It is a protest against some of the objects to which years of graduate study have been devoted under the shadow of the doctor’s degree. It is “a place in the sun” that we are demanding. In using this phrase “a place in the sun,” I am not plagiarizing that one whom Henry Van Dyke has christened “the damned vulture of Potsdam,” but a far better man, Diogenes of Sinope, who once requested Alexander the Great to get out of his daylight and give him his place in the sun.
In conclusion let me cite an incident from the life of Zeno, the founder of Stoicism. It is related that Zeno once asked the oracle what he ought to do to live in the most excellent way. The reply came back that he ought to become of the same complexion as the dead. Whereupon he immediately inferred that he ought to apply himself to reading the books of the ancients. This is the Zeno who promulgated the doctrines of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, who fashioned the molds in which the Roman Law and Roman Christianity were cast, who conceived of a world democracy in which friendship should be the guiding principle, and in which Greek and barbarian alike should have equal privileges and equal opportunities for growth.
THE MODERN MEDICINE MAN
Medicine, like other natural phenomena tends to the cyclic. Having passed safely through the drug period of evolution, both allopathic and homeopathic, into the no-drug state of so-called “preventive medicine” which has nothing to do with medicine as the word is commonly understood, this ancient mystery of the cure of bodies is now reunited to its equally ancient but long alienated mate the cure of souls, and this bewildered generation is confronted with the amazing spectacle of the lion of science and the lamb of religion lying down together. Whether the ultimate resting place of the lamb will be inside the lion is not yet disclosed to the anxious and inquiring mind. Again the priest and the physician are combined in one person, and we see before us the modern counterpart of the antique medicine man who exorcised the devils that possessed and tormented the soul and the body, and by sorcery and incantations treated impartially diseases of the spirit and of the flesh. Again the accepted cure for blindness is to “go and sin no more.”
It is especially that borderland where soul and body meet and fuse in what a recent treatise on the diseases of the nervous system calls “the psychic or symbolic system” that the modern medicine man takes as his province. In this No Man’s Land he is master of all he surveys, and his sextant comprises the universe in its angle.
We are prone to think of diseases of the mind as a specialty of modern life. But the briefest review of history would indicate that these symptoms of maladjustment to the environment have been evident from the earliest times. Adam and Eve are said to have developed “paranoiac delusions of persecution,” a kind of manie à deux, accompanied by hallucinations of vision described as “seeing snakes.” Their elder son was afflicted with a “homicidal mania,” while the younger was apparently a case of “constitutional inferiority.” Noah was a well recognized “alcoholic,” Job was subject to severe “depressions,” Nebuchadnezzar exhibited “praecox dilapidations of conduct” and Saul was a pronounced “manic-depressive.” The Bible contains many edifying and well worked-out case histories with prescriptions for the treatment of such difficulties. It was Isaiah who outlined the newer method when he said, on the highest authority, “Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.”
It was perhaps through dwelling on his own race history and literature that the newest prophet in Israel, the famous, to some infamous, Viennese professor, Sigmund Freud, came to invent the latest prophylaxis for mental disorders, now widely known under the name of psychoanalysis, at present the best recognized specific for many mental disorders, and particularly for those orgies and “hang-overs” of the soul, the “manic-depressive psychosis.”
This is the chief of the new designations for one of the old diseases, the failing reserved for the especially refined and subtle mind, the form of complex developed most frequently in the most delicate psychological machinery. This psychosis is the protest of the winged spirit against the humdrum dead levels of the main-traveled roads, a near relation to the “hysteric” refuge of the æsthetic nature from the vulgarities of everyday life, the “præcox” preference for childhood’s happy hour, and the “paranoiac” escape from the banalities of a society composed too exclusively of well-meaning, friendly but unbearably tiresome folk. All these phenomena are but the outbreak of the higher nature, the reaction of the superman, that creature of light and air, to the dullness and dreariness of this underworld, in which the chrysalis drags out its drab and worm-like existence before the emergence of the butterfly.
In view, however, of the stubborn fact that the superman must continue to exist (unless indeed non-existence is the state preferred) in a world made up largely of subnormal, or even more deadly normal beings, the overbred and super-sensitive must seek some form of reconciliation to the fundamental absurdities that pass for real life, must even submit to something in the nature of a “cure” for the disease of superevolution, some esoteric bloodletting process as it were, in order to restrain the impulse to skip like a lamb in the sun on the hillside, and confine the gait to an anemic crawl along the narrow path of the commonplace.
Psychoanalysis appears to be the “indicated” treatment for these adjustment difficulties, and it is the purpose of this article to suggest to the as yet uninitiated some of the novel features in the mechanism of this psychotherapy, and to offer a few reflections thereon.