Outwitting Our Nerves | Page 9

will make and the profession you will choose, besides
having a large share in the health or ill-health of your body in the
meantime.
SUMMARY
Perhaps it would be well before going farther to summarize what we
have been saying. Here in a nutshell is the kernel of the subject:
Disease may be caused by physical or by psychic forces. A "nervous"
disorder is not a physical but a psychic disease. It is caused not by lack
of energy but by misdirected energy; not by overwork or
nerve-depletion, but by misconception, emotional conflict, repressed
instincts, and buried memories. Seventy-five per cent. of all cases of
ill-health are due to psychic causes, to disjointed thinking rather than to
a disjointed spine. Wherefore, let us learn to think right.

In outline form, the trouble in a neurosis may be stated something like
this:
Lack of adaptation to the social environment--caused by Lack of
harmony within the personality--caused by Misdirected energy--caused
by Inappropriate emotions--caused by Wrong ideas or ignorance.
Working backward, the cure naturally would be:
Right ideas--resulting in Appropriate emotions--resulting in Redirected
energy--resulting in Harmony--resulting in Readjustment to the
environment.
If the reader is beginning to feel somewhat bewildered by these general
statements, let him take heart. So far we have tried merely to suggest
the outline of the whole problem, but we shall in the future be more
specific. Nervous troubles, which seem so simple, are really involved
with the whole mechanism of mental life and can in no way be
understood except as these mechanisms are understood. We have
hinted at some of the causes of "nerves," but we cannot give a real
explanation until we explain the forces behind them. These forces may
at first seem a bit abstract, or a bit remote from the main theme, but
each is essential to the story of nerves and to the understanding of the
more practical chapters in
Part III.
As in a Bernard Shaw play, the preface may be the most important part
of this "drama of nerves." Nor is the figure too far-fetched, because,
strange as it may seem, every neurosis is in essence a drama. It has its
conflict, its villain, and its victim, its love-story, its practical joke, its
climax, and its denouement. Sometimes the play goes on forever with
no solution, but sometimes psychotherapy steps in as the fairy
god-mother, to release the victim, outwit the villain, and bring about
the live-happily-ever-after ending.

PART II: "HOW THE WHEELS GO
ROUND"

CHAPTER III
In which we find a goodly inheritance THE STORY OF THE
INSTINCTS
EACH IN HIS OWN TONGUE
A fire mist and a planet, A crystal and a cell, A jelly-fish and a saurian,
And caves where cavemen dwell; Then a sense of law and beauty, And
a face turned from the clod; Some call it evolution And others call it
God.[4]
If we begin at the beginning, we have to go back a long way to get our
start, for the roots of our family tree reach back over millions of years.
"In the beginning--God." These first words of the book of Genesis must
be, in spirit at least, the first words of any discussion of life. We know
now, however, that when God made man, He did not complete His
masterpiece at one sitting, but instead devised a plan by which the
onward urge within and the environment without should act and
interact until from countless adaptations a human being was made.
[Footnote 4: William Herbert Carruth.]
As the late Dr. Putnam of Harvard University says, "We stand as the
representative of a Creative Energy that expressed itself first in far
simpler forms of life and finally in the form of human instincts."[5]
And again: "The choices and decisions of the organisms whose lives
prepared the way through eons of time for ours, present themselves to
us as instincts."[6]

[Footnote 5: Putnam: Human Motives, p. 32.]
[Footnote 6: Putnam: Human Motives, p. 18.]
INTRODUCING THE INSTINCTS
=Back of Our Dispositions.= What is it that makes the baby jump at a
noise? What energizes a man when you tell him he is a liar? What
makes a young girl blush when you look at her, or a youth begin to take
pains with his necktie? What makes men go to war or build tunnels or
found hospitals or make love or save for a home? What makes a
woman slave for her children, or give her life for them if need be?
"Instinct" you say, and rightly. Back of every one of these well-known
human tendencies is a specific instinct or group of instincts. The story
of the life of man and the story of the mind of man must begin with the
instincts. Indeed, any intelligent approach to human life, whether it be
that of