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
Jung has pointed out how frequently introversion or turning in of the
life-force is brought about by the painfulness of present reality and
by the lack of the power of adaptation to things as they are. But this
lack always has its roots in childhood. The woman who is shocked at
the thought of sex is the little girl who reacted too strongly to
early impressions. The man of forty who is disgruntled because he is
not made manager of a business created by others is the little boy who
was jealous of his father and wanted to usurp his place of power. The
man who suffers from a sense of inferiority because his friend has a
handsomer or more intellectual wife is the same little boy who strove
with his father for possession of the mother, the most desired object
in his childish environment. The measure of escape from these childish
attitudes means the measure of success in life.
Fortunately for society, the average person achieves this success. The
normal person in his childhood learned how to switch the energy of his
primitive desires into channels approved by society. Stored away in
his subconscious, this acquired faculty carries him without conscious
effort through all the necessary adjustments in maturity. The nervous
person, less well equipped in childhood, may fortunately acquire the
faculty in all its completeness, although at the cost of genuine
effort and patient self-study.
=Sublimation the Key Word.= In the prevention and in the cure of
nervous disorders there is one factor of central importance, and that
factor is sublimation--or the freeing of sex-energy for socially
useful, non-sexual ends. To sublimate is to find vent for oneself and
to serve society as well; for sublimation opens up new channels for
pent-up energy, utilizing all the surplus of the sex-instinct in
substitute activities. When the dynamic of this impulse is turned
outward, not inward, it proves to be one of man's greatest
possessions, a valuable contribution of energy to creative activities
and personal relationships of every kind.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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