United States or Rwanda ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
This way of regarding the field of memory is further supported by such evidence as has been collected with regard to the influence of past experience in dreams, phobias and various forms of insanity, but in these cases, of course, it is only isolated past experiences here and there whose activity can be observed, and so, while helping to upset the most natural assumption that whatever cannot be recalled by ordinary efforts of memory may be assumed to have been destroyed, they do not lend very much support to the wider view put forward by Bergson, that no experience, however trivial, is ever destroyed but that all of it is included in the field out of which memory makes its practical selection.
He found that large groups of mental disturbances result from a psychical trauma, a disagreeable idea which, inhibited in the mind, becomes the source of mischief and produces phobias and obsessions and hysterical motions. The cure of the symptoms demands the recognition of this first mental accident, which may lie back for years and which may no longer be in the memory of the patient.
A fellow who has it is afraid to cross an open lot or field, and if he does make the venture, he carries with him a big stick or some weapon of defense. This, like many other phobias, is explained by scientists as being of simian inheritance. Our grandparents who lived in trees a few thousand years ago had a much tougher struggle for existence than any of us have today.
That being settled, a mark which he acknowledges in the presence of two witnesses, preferably men of standing, will constitute a valid document. In certain forms of neurasthenia, the 'phobias' are common, but must not be regarded as evidence of insanity.
"Obsessions and phobias have their origin, according to Freud, in sexual life. The obsession represents a compensation or substitute for an unbearable sexual idea and takes its place in consciousness. In normal sexual life, no neurosis is possible, say the Freudists. Sex is the strongest impulse, yet subject to the greatest repression, and hence the weakest point of our cultural development.
Their pressure and influence may be felt in the conscious life in fantastic imaginations, in fears, phobias, and obsessions in morbid dreams in morbid emotional and moral reactions throughout the entire psycho-physical life. It is these automatic, self-acting complexes which originate many of the disorders of the mind.
There are many others, less serious in their nature, such as indecision, exaggerated scrupulousness, extreme pliability, hypochondria. All of these should be ruthlessly supprest the moment we become aware of them, for they are one and all the forerunners of that mentally diseased condition which gives rise to the phobias of which we have just been speaking.
Thus we must claim that all those so-called functional disturbances like neurasthenia and hysteria, fixed ideas and obsessions, phobias and dissociations of the personality, as well as the typical insane states of the maniac or paranoiac have their basis in a pathological change of the anatomical structure of the brain.
Among these are counted all sorts of compulsive neuroses, compulsive thoughts, compulsive behavior and cases of hysteria, where phobias and obsessions play a chief role, also somatic phenomena of hysteria which do not need to be acted upon quickly, such as, for example, anorexia. In acute cases of hysteria it is better to wait for a calmer period before applying psychoanalysis.
The fear-maladies, or "phobias," as they are called, are examples of this class, and, belonging properly under temporary mental derangements, the same as hallucinations or delusions, will be spoken of in another chapter.
Word Of The Day