The truth of the matter is that the absolutely insane person who lives all
his absurd dreams in his waking life no longer needs the unconsciousness
which the normal individual requires in order to escape from reality. The
insane man who knows he is a combination of a Don Juan, a millionaire and
a powerful ruler, need not dream of becoming all those characters. He has
attained his goal and it is only the continued conflicts with reality
which may reach his consciousness in his lucid moments which necessitate
the unconsciousness of a few minutes or hours of sleep in which reality no
longer intrudes into his absurd world.
Since insomniacs can rest without sleep and insomnia does not lead to
insanity, there is no reason why narcotics should be administered. There
is a very good reason on the other hand why they should never be
administered except in case some harrowing pain has to be relieved and
shock avoided.
For one thing, their effect is problematic and depends also to a great
extent from the subject's mental condition.
Kraepelin noticed that large doses of alcohol failed to produce the usual
muscular lameness in subjects who were agitated. Bleuler makes the
interesting suggestion that our central nervous system only "accepts"
narcotics when they are "wanted" and keeps drugs, carried about in the
blood stream, from being assimilated by the organism when the organism is
not "willing" to submit to their influence.
But the most cogent reason why narcotics should never be resorted to in
"nervous" sleeplessness is that they do not relax the organism but
paralyse it by killing it partly. If they only dulled consciousness and
freed the unconscious, they would accomplish some good but we do not know
of any agent besides sleep, which accomplishes that successfully.
Narcotics partly kill both consciousness and unconscious. While their
effect lasts, the very phenomenon which makes the neurotic a neurotic is
exaggerated. In the neurotic's waking state, unconscious complexes manage
to free themselves, somewhat indirectly. In the stupor of drugged sleep,
the repression is complete. Hence the horrible feeling which is often
experienced when awakening from drug-induced sleep. Normal sleep is
brother to life, but drug induced sleep is indeed akin to death.
Neither can hypnotic suggestion be recommended as a cure for
sleeplessness, except of course, in emergencies.
About the end of the nineteenth century, a Swedish physician,
Wetterstrand, inaugurated a method of treatment which was founded on a
just estimate of the value of sleep, although Wetterstrand himself could
not at the time have understood the psychology of it.
He had in Upsala a "house of sleep" furnished with innumerable divans and
couches on which his patients were allowed to rest for hours in hypnotic
sleep.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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