A sensible and intelligent man, once the cause of his trouble has been made clear to him, may be competent to continue to cure himself, or, in other words, to re-educate himself, and completely to conquer the cause of his undoing. But the duller and stupider man may need a daily demonstration and renewal of confidence before he begins to make any progress. It is precisely analogous to the experience of every teacher of a class of students; the brilliant man will seize hold of a principle at once and learn to apply it without further help, whereas the dull man needs repeated and concrete demonstrations before it sinks into his understanding. In dealing with soldiers, and this applies with especial force to the regular army, the conditions in many of the cases differ considerably from those of the civilians. Trifling forgetfulness in the civilian would perhaps not be a serious cause of worry, but in the soldier, inured by years of training to strict discipline, forgetfulness of even trivial instructions, or any difficulty in understanding complex orders, is likely to bring down upon his head condign punishment. Such lapses are regarded by the soldier as extremely serious offences, because years of training and discipline have inculcated this idea. When as the result of shock such soldiers are afflicted by even slight forgetfulness, they become worried by it much more than would the civilian and exaggerate its importance until it becomes a real terror to them. As the result of their training they may regard such phenomena as altogether abnormal; and by a process of rationalising what to them is a novel experience, they are apt to imagine that they are going mad. Such patients often dream about incidents in their army life when they had been forgetful and got into trouble; they become obsessed with the haunting fear that they are likely to get into perpetual difficulties, are worried by the thought that they are incompetent for the duties to which they have been accustomed, and may imagine themselves debarred from all useful work. However, they are easily reassured when the medical attendant explains to them that in ordinary life civilians are frequently subject to such experiences, and that it is only the special circumstances of army life which make such trivial lapses seem serious to them. Not only is the soldier much more scared by such things than the civilian, but it is also a very remarkable phenomenon, and certainly one which came as a surprise, that the neurasthenia of a soldier is apt to be very much more serious than that of the civilian. For when a really brave man is stricken by fear he is more seriously affected by the terror of an experience which to him not only has a larger element of novelty than in the case of the civilian, but also wounds him more deeply by convincing him that he is lacking in that very quality which is most essential for his professional work. _The Therapeutic Value of Work._