The Nervous Housewife | Page 9

the disease starts. If the patient
would seek competent advice at this stage, recovery would usually be
prompt. Instead, there is a long unsuccessful struggle, with each defeat
tending to make the fear or anxiety or obsession habitual. Sometimes,
perhaps in most cases, and in all cases according to Freud and his
followers, there is a long-hidden series of causes behind the symptoms;
subconscious sexual conflicts and repressions, etc. It may be stated here
that the present author is not at all a Freudian and believes that the
causes of these forms of nervousness are simpler, more related to the
big obvious factors in life, than to the curiously complicated and
bizarrely sexual Freudian factors. People get tired, disgusted,
apprehensive; they hate where they should love; love where they

should hate; are jealous unreasonably; are bored, tortured by monotony;
have their hopes, purposes, and desires frustrated and blocked; fear
death and old age, however brave a face they may wear; want
happiness and achievement, and some break, one way or another,
according to their emotional and intellectual resistance. These and other
causes are the great factors of the conditions we have been considering.
Of all the forms of nervousness proper, the psychoneuroses, hysteria is
probably the one having its source mainly in the character of the patient.
That is to say, outward happenings play a part which is secondary to
the personality defect. Hysteria is one of the oldest of diseases and has
probably played a very important rôle in the history of man.
Unquestionably many of the religions have depended upon hysteria, for
it is in this field that "miracle cures" occur. All founders of religions
have based part of their claim on the belief of others in their healing
power. Nothing is so spectacular as when the hysterical blind see, the
hysterical dumb talk, the hysterical cripple throws away his crutches
and walks. In every age and in every country, in every faith, there have
been the equivalents of Lourdes and St. Anne de Beaupré.
In hysteria four important groups of symptoms occur in the housewife
as well as in her single sisters and brothers.
There is first of all an emotional instability, with a tendency to
prolonged and freakish manifestations,--the well-known hysterics with
laughing, crying, etc. Fundamental in the personality of the hysterics is
this instability, this emotionality, which is however secondary to an
egotistic, easily wounded nature, craving sympathy and respect and
often unable legitimately to earn them.
A group of symptoms that seem hard to explain are the so-called
paralyses. These paralyses may affect almost any part, may come in a
moment and go as suddenly, or last for years. They may concern arm,
leg, face, hands, feet, speech, etc. They seem very severe, but are due to
worry, to misdirected ideas and emotions and not at all to injury to the
nervous system. They are manifestations of what the neurologists call
"dissociations of the personality." That is, conflicts of emotions, ideas,
and purposes of the type previously described have occurred, and a

paralysis has resulted. These paralyses yield remarkably to any
energizing influence like good fortune, the compelling personality of a
physician or clergyman or healer (the miracle cure), or a serious danger.
The latter is exemplified in the cases now and then reported of people
who have not been out of bed for years, but are aroused by threat of
some danger, like a fire, reach safety, and thereafter are well.
Similar in type to the paralyses are losses of sensation in various parts
of the body,--losses so complete that one may thrust a needle deep into
the flesh without pain to the patient. In the days of witch-hunting the
witch-hunters would test the women suspected with a pin, and if they
found places where pain was not felt, considered they had proof of
witchcraft or diabolic possession, so that many a hysteric was hanged
or drowned. The history of man is full of psychopathic characters and
happenings; insane men have changed the course of human events by
their ideas and delusions, and on the other hand society has continually
mistaken the insane and the nervously afflicted for criminals or
wretches deserving severest punishment.
Especially striking in hysteria are the curious changes in consciousness
that take place. These range from what seem to be fainting spells to
long trances lasting perhaps for months, in which animation is
apparently suspended and the body seems on the brink of death. In
olden days the Delphian oracles were people who had the power
voluntarily of throwing themselves into these hysteric states and their
vague statements were taken to be heaven-inspired. To-day, their
descendants in hysteria are the crystal gazers, the mediums, the
automatic writers that by a mixture of hysteria and faking deceive the
simple and credulous.
For,