Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia: Their Causes, Symptoms, & Treatment — John Shaqi
Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia: Their Causes, Symptoms, & TreatmentBriggs, Isaac George
Science
Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia: Their Causes, Symptoms, & Treatment
Briggs, Isaac George
Epilepsy; Hysteria; Nervous system -- Diseases; Neurasthenia
If the experimenter puts his hands on the toy, and a friend talks to him,
while another whispers questions, he may write more or less coherent
answers, though all the time he goes on talking, and does not know what his
hand is writing. His mind is split into two smaller minds, each ignorant of
the other, each busily liberating memory-prisoners from its own block of
cells in the gaol of the subconscious. The writing often refers to
long-forgotten incidents, the experiment sometimes being of real use in
cases of lost memory.
Dreams are dissociations in sleep, while the scenes conjured up by
crystal-gazing are only waking dreams, in which the dissociation is caused
by gazing at a bright surface and so tiring the brain centres, whereupon
impressions of past life emerge from the subconscious, to surprise, not
only the onlookers to whom they are related, but also the gazer herself,
who has long "forgotten them".
It is childish to attach supernatural significance to either dreams or
crystal-gazing, both of which mirror, not the future, but only the past,
the subject's own past.
It is noteworthy that women dream more frequently and vividly than men.
When a dreamer has few worries, he usually dreams but forgets his dream on
waking; when greatly worried, he often carries his problems to bed with
him, and recent "representative dreams" are merely unprofitable overtime
work done by the brain. Occasionally, dreams have a purely physical basis
as when palpitation becomes transformed in a dream into a scene wherein a
horse is struggling violently, or where an uncovered foot originates a
dream of polar-exploration; in this latter type the dream is protective, in
that it is an effort to side-track some irritation without breaking sleep.
Since Freud has traced a sex-basis in all our dreams, many worthy people
have been much worried about the things they see or do in dreams. Let them
remember that virtue is not an inability to conceive of misconduct, so much
as the determination to refrain from it, and it may well be that the
centres which so determinedly inhibit sexual or unsocial thoughts in the
day, are tired by the very vigour of their resistance, and so in sleep
allow the thoughts they have so stoutly opposed when waking to slip by. The
man who is long-suffering and slow to wrath when awake, may surely be
excused if he murders a few of his tormentors during sleep.
Epileptiform Seizures are convulsions due to causes other than epilepsy,
and only a doctor can tell if an attack be epileptic or not and prescribe
appropriate treatment. To give "patent" medicines for "fits", to a man who
may be suffering from lead poisoning or heart disease, is criminal.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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