Outwitting Our Nerves | Page 9

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 the mother, the teacher, the preacher, the social worker or the neurologist, leads back inevitably to the instincts as the starting-point of understanding. But what is instinct?
We are apt to be a bit hazy on that point, as we are on any fundamental thing with which we intimately live. We reckon on these instinctive tendencies every hour of the day, but as we are not used to labeling them, it may help in the very beginning of our discussion to have a list before our eyes. Here, then, is a list of the fundamental tendencies of the human race and the emotions which drive them to fulfilment.
THE SPECIFIC INSTINCTS AND THEIR EMOTIONS (AFTER MCDOUGALL)
Instinct Emotion Nutritive Instinct Hunger Flight Fear Repulsion Disgust Curiosity Wonder Self-assertion Positive Self-feeling (Elation) Self-abasement Negative Self-feeling (Subjection) Gregariousness Emotion unnamed Acquisition Love of Possession Construction Emotion unnamed Pugnacity Anger Reproductive Instinct Emotion unnamed Parental Instinct Tender Emotion
These are the fundamental tendencies or dispositions with which every human being is endowed as he comes into the world. Differing in degree in