Outwitting Our Nerves: A Primer of PsychotherapyJackson, Josephine A. (Josephine Agnes)
Science
Outwitting Our Nerves: A Primer of Psychotherapy
Jackson, Josephine A. (Josephine Agnes)
Nervous system -- Diseases; Psychoanalysis; Therapeutics, Suggestive
He had been working on the eighth edition of his book, a scientific
treatise of nation-wide importance, but his eyes were so sensitive
that he could not possibly use them and had to keep them shaded from
the glare. He was so conscious of the messages of fatigue that he was
unable to walk at all, and he suffered from the usual trouble with
constipation. All these symptoms of course belonged together and were
the direct result of a wrong state of mind. When he had changed his
mind, he took off his extra clothes, walked a mile and a half at the
first try, gave up his constipation, and went back to work. Later on I
had a letter from him saying that his favorite seat was an overturned
nail-keg in the garden and that he was thinking of sawing the backs
off his chairs.
Miss Y---- had worn cotton in her ears for a year or two because she
had once had an inflammation of the middle ear, and believed the
membrane still sensitive to cold. There was Miss E----, whose
underwear always reached to her throat and wrists and who spent her
time following the sun; and Dr. I----, who never forgot her heavy
sweater or her shawl over her knees, even in front of the fire. The
procession of "cold ones" is almost endless, but always they find that
their sensitiveness is of their own making and that it disappears when
they choose to ignore it.
=Fear of Light.= Fear of cold is no more common than fear of light.
Nervous folk with half-shut eyes are very frequent indeed. From one
woman I took at least seven pairs of dark glasses before she learned
that her eye was made for light. A good example is furnished by a
woman who was not a patient of mine at all, but merely the sister of a
patient. After my patient had been cured of a number of distressing
symptoms--pain in the spine, sore heels, a severe nervous cough,
indigestion and other typical complaints,--she began to scheme to get
her sister to come to me.
This sister, the wife of a minister in the Middle West, had a constant
pain in her eyes, compelling her to hold them half-shut all the time.
When she was approached about coming to me, she said indignantly, "If
that doctor thinks that my trouble is nervous, she is much mistaken,"
and then proceeded to get well. Once the subconscious mind gets the
idea that its game is recognized, it is very apt to give it up, and it
can do this without loss of time if it really wants to.
=Pain at the Base of the Brain.= Of all nervous pains, that in the
back of the neck is by all odds the most common. It is rare indeed to
find a nervous patient without this complaint, and among supposedly
well folk it is only too frequent. Indeed, it almost seems that in
some quarters such a pain stands as a badge of the fervor and zeal of
one's work.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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