V

PSYCHIC SUFFERING

HERE is much physical and mental distress

THE

in this life that is unreal and evitable. The amount of pain, discomfort, and self-torment that humanity suffers without justifiable cause is incalculable. And it is to this psychic suffering that treatment by suggestion is peculiarly appropriate. Dynamic psychology is the habitbreaker paramount, and the body-builder as well. But why human nature must be driven by pain and fear to recognize the mysterious influence that is to help soul to rule and to set life in order does not appear. Why the intimate relationship between body and spirit is not universally perceived, and the spirit given sway as a logical preventive of psychosis and disease, awaits explanation.

Psychic suffering takes the form not only of the disabilities outlined in the previous chapter, but also of irrepressible ideas; of uncontrollable fears, impulses, caprices; of exaggerated worries, apprehensions, and doubts; of self-perpetuating

staunchless beliefs, delusions, and hallucinations. Its subjects are fancy-sick.

"The nerves, they are the man," said Cabanis. If these nerves are well nourished and underworked, health, happiness, and long life wait upon the man. But if these nerves are starved, fagged, poisoned by intestinal toxins due to prolonged endeavor, overwork, worry, or excesses, things seem not as they really are to the man and life sometimes becomes a burden.

The mind of the ill-nourished neurasthenic tends to weakness and irritability. Morbid terrors take possession of it, deceptions are enthroned, because the brain-cells are impoverished by the absorption of toxins and hence pathologically impressible. Poisons make the soil on which noxious conceptions thrive and bear their fruit.

Protoplasm, the essential constituent of the living cell, is the fundamental constructive unit of organic life, and the microbe is the inimical unit of destruction, in constant conflict with the cell.1 Nerve-tire, brain-fag, give the microphyte the coign of vantage. And here there is not only a marked diminution in capacity for sustained mental effort, but also a phenomenal susceptibility to over-colored impression by passing thoughts which fasten themselves in the mind. A delusion is a fixed misconception or false be

1 Dr. Robert T. Morris in The Archives of Diagnosis.

lief, a mental deception or error. It represents an abortive attempt of the mind to interpret percepts. A delusional state is to be distinguished from prejudice, ill-will, bad judgment, and drawing conclusions from insufficient premises or erroneous inferences from facts-all which may coexist with sanity. It is only when it becomes permanent that a delusion equivalents a pathological inaccuracy of judgment and betokens mental derangement. There is a difference between a mental disease and the unreasonable belief or conduct of a sane person. Thus there are delusions of the sane and delusions of the insane. Hence it is not every delusion that deprives a man of testamentary capacity. It must be an insane delusion, and this is in evidence when a person conceives something extravagant to exist which has no reality whatever, and, secondly, when he is incapable of being reasoned out of that conception.

An insane delusion is an idea or belief which springs spontaneously from a diseased or perverted mind without reason or without foundation in fact. It is distinguishable from a belief which is founded on prejudice or aversion, no matter how unreasonable or unfounded the prejudice or aversion may be. If it is the product of a reasoning mind, no matter how slight the evidence on which it is based, it cannot be

classed as an insane delusion. Such is a Supreme Court pronunciamento. A neurasthenic patient may be argued into an admission that his fears or dominant conceptions are without foundation, although he may not be able to dispel them. An insane patient accepts his delusion as a reality and cannot be persuaded that it is baseless. His power to weigh evidence is destroyed. Hence delusions are not in themselves proofs of insanity; they must be estimated in connection with other symptoms of brain defect or disease before their significance is determinable.

It has been said that a painter who does not believe in Christ cannot portray the Crucifixion. With equal truth it may be alleged that he who has not himself endured the torture of phobia, self-engendered belief, or obsession, can have little sympathy with psychic sufferers or any true conception of their agonies. The cases presented herewith are taken from the author's recordbooks which cover fifteen years of specialization as a psychotherapist, and contain the memoranda of many thousand experiences in the treatment of mental and moral conditions-all bonafide cases which have been successfully controlled by dynamic suggestions.1

1The subject of delusions has been elaborately discussed and illustrated in the author's work on Hypnotic Therapeutics (Harpers, N. Y.), pp. 149-167. Repetition will here be avoided. A few recent cases only will be presented to illustrate the suffering involved.