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
=Gross Misconceptions.= Nervousness is caused by a lack of adjustment
to the world as it is; therefore the only possible cure must be some
sort of readjustment between the person's inner forces and the demands
of the social world. As this lack of adjustment is concerned chiefly
with the repressed instinct of reproduction, it is only natural that
there should be people who believe that "the way out" lies in some
form of physical satisfaction of the sex-impulse--in marriage, in
changing or ignoring the social code, in homo-sexual relations or in
the practice of masturbation. But we have only to look about us to see
that this prescription does not cure. Freud naïvely asks whether he
would be likely to take three years to uncover and loosen the psychic
resistances of his patients, if the simple prescription of sex-license
would give relief.
Since there are as many married neurotics as single, it is evident
that even marriage is not a sure preventive of nervousness. License,
on the other hand, can satisfy only a part of the individual's
craving. Freud insists that the sex-instinct has a psychic component
as well as a physical one, and that it is this psychic part which is
most often repressed. He maintains that for complete satisfaction
there must be psychic union between mates, and that gratification of
the physical component of sex when dissociated from psychic
satisfaction, results in an accumulation of tension that reacts badly
on the whole organism.
The psychic tension accumulating in adult sex-relations has its
inception in the mistaken attitude on the part of the wife, who
remains true to her childhood training that any pleasure in sex is
vulgar; or on the part of the man, who reacts to the mood of the wife,
or is held by his own unbroken mother-son complex; or on the part of
both the tension piles up because of society's taboo upon rearing
large families. As the first two factors in this lack of adjustment
grew largely out of some kind of faulty education or from faulty
reaction to early experiences, the only effective way to secure a
better adaptation must be through a re-education which reaches down
to that part of the personality that bears the stamp of the
unfortunate early factors.
=Remaking Ourselves.= As a matter of fact, the science of
psychotherapy or mental treatment is simply the science of
re-education,--a process designed to break up old unhealthy complexes
which disrupt the forces of the individual, and to build up healthy
complexes which adjust him to the social world and enable him to use
his energy in useful ways.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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