The Nervous Housewife | Page 8

Thus a sex feeling that is not legitimate, an illicit
forbidden love has to be conquered for the sake of the purpose to be
religious or good, or the desire to be respected. So one may struggle
against a hatred for a person whom one should love,--a husband, a wife,
an invalid parent, or child whose care is a burden, and one refuses to
recognize that there is such a struggle. So one may seek to suppress
jealousy, envy of the nearest and dearest; soul-stirring, forbidden
passions; secret revolt against morality and law which may (and often
do) rage in the most puritanical breast.
In the theory of the subconscious these undesired thoughts, feelings,
passions, wishes, are repressed and pushed into the innermost recesses
of the being, out of the light of the conscious personality, but
nevertheless acting on the personality, distorting it, wearying it.
However this may be, there is struggle, conflict in every human breast
and especially difficult and undecided struggles in the case of the
neurasthenic. Literally, secretly or otherwise, he is a house divided

against himself, deënergized by fear, disgust, revolt, and conflict.
And the housewife we are trying to understand is particularly such a
creature, with a host of deënergizing influences playing on her,
buffeting her. Our aim will be to analyze these influences and to
discover how they work.
I have stated that in medical practice two other types are
described,--psychasthenia and hysteria. These are not so definitely
related to the happenings of life as to the inborn disposition of the
patient. Nor are they quite so common in the housewife as the
neurasthenic, deënergized state. However, they are usually of more
serious nature, and as such merit a description.
By the term psychasthenia is understood a group of conditions in which
the bodily symptoms, such as fatigue, sleeplessness, loss of appetite,
etc., are either not so marked as in neurasthenia, or else are
overshadowed by other, more distinctly mental symptoms.
These mental symptoms are of three main types. There is a tendency to
recurring fears,--fears of open places, fears of closed places, fear of
leaving home, of being alone, fear of eating or sleeping, fear of dirt, so
that the victim is impelled continually to wash the hands, fear of
disease--especially such as syphilis--and a host of other fears, all of
which are recognized as unreasonable, against which the victim
struggles but vainly. Sometimes the fear is nameless, vague,
undifferentiated, and comes on like a cloud with rapid heartbeat, faint
feelings, and a sense of impending death. Sometimes the fear is related
to something that has actually happened, as, fear of anything hot after a
sunstroke; or fear of any vehicle after an automobile accident.
There is also a tendency to obsessive ideas and doubts; that is, ideas
and doubts that persist in coming against the will of the patient, such as
the obscene word or phrase that continually obtrudes itself on a chaste
woman, or the doubt whether one has shut the door or properly turned
off the gas. Of course, everybody has such obsessions and doubts
occasionally, but to be psychasthenic about it is to have them
continually and to have them obtrude themselves into every action. In

extreme psychasthenia the difficulty of "making up the mind", of
deciding, becomes so great that a person may suffer agonies of internal
debate about crossing the street, putting on his clothes, eating his meals,
doing his work, about every detail of his coming, going, doing, and
thinking. A restless anxiety results, a fear of insanity, an inefficiency,
and an incapacity for sustained effort that results in the name that is
often applied,--"anxiety neurosis."
Third, there is a group of impulsions and habits. Citing a few absurd
impulsions: a person feels compelled to step over every crack, to touch
the posts along his journey, to take the stairs three steps at a time. The
habits range from the queer desire to bite one's nails to the quick that is
so common in children and which persists in the psychasthenic adult, to
the odd grimaces and facial contortions, blinking eyes and cracking
joints of the inveterate ticquer. Against some of these habit spasms,
comparable to severe stammering, all measures are in vain, for there
seems to be a queer pleasure in these acts against which the will of the
patient is powerless.
Especially do the first two described types of trouble follow exhaustion,
acute illness, sudden fright, and long painful ordeal. The ground is
prepared for these conditions, _e.g._ by the strain of long attendance on
a sick husband or child. Then, suddenly one day, comes a queer fear or
a faint dizzy feeling which awakens great alarm, is brooded upon,
wondered at, and its return feared. This fearful expectation really
makes the return inevitable, and then