The extreme selfishness and the uniqueness with which psychopathic
patients regard their own condition should be eradicated from
their mind. It must be impressed on them that their case is quite
common, and that there is nothing exceptional about them. It
must be made clear to them that the whole trouble is a matter of
mal-adjustment, that they have developed inordinately the impulse
of self-preservation and the fear instinct until their mental life
has become morbid and twisted. The whole personality has to be
readjusted. It is the special tendency of psychopathic patients to
regard themselves as unique, privileged above all other patients,
they are a kind of geniuses among the afflicted, possibly on
account of the special endowments possessed by them, gifts of quite
exceptional and mysterious a character. “Have you ever met with a
case like mine?” is the stereotyped phrase of the psychopathic,
neurotic patient. As long as the patient entertains that conception
of _nobility_, the impulse of self must still be regarded as morbid.
The neurotic must be made to understand clearly that there is
no aristocracy in disease, and that there is no nobility of the
specially elect in the world of morbid affections, any more than
there is in the domain of physical maladies.
The egocentric character of the psychopathic patient puts him in
the position of the savage who takes an animistic, a personal view
of the world and of the objects that surround him. Natural forces
are regarded as dealing with man and his fate, often conspiring
against man. Magic is the remedy by which the savage tries to
defend himself, and even to control the inimical or friendly
natural forces or objects, animate and inanimate, with which he
comes in contact. This same attitude, animistic and personal, of
the primitive man is present in the psychopathic patient. The
patient is afraid that something fearful may happen to him. Against
such accidents he takes measures often of a defensive character
which differ but little from the magic of the savage and the
barbarian. That is why these patients are the victims of all kinds
of fakes, schemes, panaceas of the wildest type, unscrupulous
patent medicines, absurd régimes, mental and religious, whose
silliness and absurdity are patent to the unprejudiced observer.
The mental state of the psychopathic or neurotic patient is that
of the savage with his anthropomorphic view of nature, with his
fears based on the impulse of self-preservation. _The psychopathic
patient is in a state of primitive fear and of savage credulity
with its faith in magic._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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