Chapter IX: A Few Closing Words 283 (5)

The mother, nevertheless, insisted on bandaging the arm, talked of having an X-ray examination, and broadly hinted that a wrong diagnosis had been made. Within a few days, as Doctor Hecht had expected, all signs of injury disappeared. But now the boy complained that the hand of the injured arm felt stiff; and, in a day or so, his mother reported that both hand and arm were paralysed.

This was the situation when, passing along the street one day, Doctor Hecht was astonished and amused to see his “paralysed” patient romping with a number of children, quite as if nothing were the matter with him. He used his injured arm freely, pushed and pulled his playmates, and was pushed and pulled around by them.

“Ah,” thought the physician, with a feeling of relief, “evidently this youngster is going to give no more trouble.”

He was mistaken. Within a week the mother sent for him, reporting that her boy was suffering agonies, that he could not eat, and that his arm had become contracted at the elbow. In fact, on visiting the boy he found that at every attempt to flex the arm the little fellow screamed with pain.

But on his next visit, when the child chanced to be asleep, Doctor Hecht noticed that there was then no contracture of the arm, and that he could move it without disturbing the boy in the slightest. So soon, however, as he awoke, the contracture returned, and he wailed and shrieked when his arm was touched. To the astonished mother, the doctor said:

“I see what the trouble is. Your son needs a certain kind of treatment that I can administer only at my office. Bring him there as soon as possible.”

The treatment in question consisted in the application of a succession of slight electrical shocks, just painful enough to be felt. These, the doctor assured the boy, would cure him completely.

“If they do not,” said he, “your mother must bring you back, and I will give you a stronger treatment next time. I don’t think, though, that that will be necessary, do you?”

And, in point of fact, no second treatment was needed. From that moment the boy ceased complaining of his arm, the contracture and paralysis entirely disappeared, and he was like any normal, healthy child.

I have cited these three cases, not because of their singularity, but because they afford concrete illustration of some little known facts with which every parent ought to be acquainted. In each case, it will be observed, an element of deception was present; and, moreover, in each case the deception was seemingly motiveless. The child who pretended that she had been operated upon had apparently nothing to gain from the deceit practised by her; neither had the little girl who played the part of a “poltergeist,” nor the boy with the sham contracture and paralysis. Besides which, in two of the three cases the children subjected themselves to considerable inconvenience and even pain; and, in all three cases, they ran the risk of severe punishment. None the less, they systematically and persistently kept up their deceptions until discovery ensued.

Now, why did they do it?

They did it, as recent medical and psychological investigation into the inner life of childhood has conclusively demonstrated, because they were so constituted that they could not help doing it. And for the same reason, hundreds—nay, thousands—of children, before and since, have been doing much the same thing. It is not that they are merely “naughty.” The ordinary naughty child will, to be sure, lie and cheat and otherwise deceive; but only from readily ascertainable motives, and never in the way of an elaborately sustained deception. When a child’s “naughtiness” takes this latter form, medical authorities are to-day agreed, it is in reality indicative of the presence of a really serious disease—hysteria.

Than this disease—of which most people, unfortunately, have next to no exact knowledge, mistakenly confusing it with, and confining it to, uncontrollable attacks of weeping or laughing—there is no malady more insidious, peculiar, or dangerous in the variety of its possible consequences. Its peculiarity lies in the fact—discovered only within recent years—that it is always rooted in an extreme “suggestibility” on the part of its victims; and that the symptoms it develops are invariably conditioned by the character of the suggestions received from the environment. Hysteria is, to put the case briefly, pre-eminently a mental trouble; and this although, not infrequently, its only outward manifestations are wholly physical.

A child with a hysterical tendency—that is to say, an unusually sensitive, impressionable child, of undisciplined will, and quickly overwhelmed by whatever it sees, hears, or feels—is always liable, when brought into contact with a person suffering from any serious ailment of picturesque symptomatology, to manifest in some degree the symptoms of that particular ailment. Or, more commonly, such a child may manifest grave physical disabilities simply as a result of hearing or reading about them.

It does not do this voluntarily; there is no conscious intention to deceive; for the matter of that, the child itself is as much deceived as are its parents and friends. The trouble is that in its state of abnormal suggestibility, it is irresistibly impelled by the strange power of self-suggestion to imitate the symptoms of disease.

Or, instead of simulating disease symptoms, a hysterical child may enter on a course of seemingly deliberate chicanery like that practised by little “poltergeist” Polly Turner, whose case is typical of a species of behaviour indulged in by hysterical children in all countries and all ages. Here, likewise, abnormal suggestibility is in evidence, the resultant hysterical manifestations differing only because the suggestions received and acted on are different.

In cases like Polly Turner’s, it has been found, the hysterical child usually lives with people more or less superstitious and credulous. They are people inclined to attribute to some spiritistic agency any occurrence they cannot easily explain. In this environment the child gradually becomes obsessed—though quite unconsciously—with a desire to provide “marvels” for their edification and mystification, and, yielding to the desire, is soon in full career as a “poltergeist,” the hysterical obsession becoming intensified in proportion as the gullibility of those deceived increases, and also in proportion to the amount of attention paid to the little deceiver.

For—and this is a point to be borne well in mind—it is not alone abnormal suggestibility that characterises the hysterical child. There is also present an abnormal craving to attract attention, to be a centre of interest. Of this craving, as of the deceits carried out to attain its realisation, the child itself is unconscious. But it may be stated with assurance that it invariably exists as a concomitant of hysteria. Ordinarily it is the family and intimate friends whose interest and sympathy the child wishes to arouse, though this is not always the case. There may be special reasons for desiring to impress mere acquaintances, or even absolute strangers. Then we have the odd spectacle of children, like the pupil in the German school, whose hysterical obsessions appear chiefly or only in the presence of outsiders, while the parents remain in partial or total ignorance of them.

And, speaking of this type of hysteria, I may say that I am acquainted with a young New York woman who, since the age of fifteen, has led many an unsuspecting physician a merry dance by reason of her extraordinary hysterical simulations. In early girlhood she began to complain of various ailments, which on examination proved to be of no moment. Not unnaturally her family lost patience with her “whims,” as they called them, and regarded her as a wholly imaginary invalid. Like most people similarly situated, they utterly failed to appreciate that, as has been well said by Doctor Pierre Janet, one of the world’s foremost authorities on hysteria, “When a person is so ill that he says he is ill when he is not ill at all, then he must be very ill indeed.” They scolded the girl, they argued with her; but they made no attempt to give her the treatment she really needed.

What was the consequence? One day she mysteriously disappeared from home, and some time passed before she was located in a hospital, where preparations were making to perform an operation upon her for appendicitis. A little later she wandered off again, and turned up at another hospital with symptoms so closely resembling a tumorous growth that a diagnosis to that effect was made, and an immediate operation advised. Still later an eminent specialist was misled into crediting her with a serious spinal disease.

After this it was decided that she was insane, and the family had her committed to an asylum. Before her release she developed symptoms of ear trouble so pronounced that the dangerous mastoid operation would have been performed had not the superintendent of the asylum been informed of her previous adventures as a hospital visitant.

Manifestly, a disease that both impels and enables its victims to mimic the symptoms of grave organic affections, with such verisimilitude as to deceive even physicians, is an extremely serious affair. And one has only to inquire of doctors with an extensive hospital experience to learn that hysteria, in one form or another, is a widespread trouble among both children and adults. But it is no longer the bugbear of the medical profession that it used to be. Following the discovery of its essentially mental character, methods have been devised and perfected for handling it. Some of these seem absurdly simple, but even the simplest have been proved efficacious, especially in the case of children. Differing in detail, they have one feature in common. They directly attack the hysterical symptoms by the employment of the same agency that was provocative of them—namely, suggestion.

In the case of the boy with the pseudo paralysis, reported above, it was not any therapeutic virtue inherent in the electrical treatment that brought about his rapid restoration to health. It was simply the suggestive efficacy of the way in which the treatment was administered to him. The truth of this, however, may be made clearer by the citation of one or two other cases, that are also of interest as illustrating the ingenious devices by which hysterical attacks in the period of childhood are nowadays overcome.

There was brought to a New England neurologist a little girl of ten, suffering from a curious physical abnormality. As long as she was seated, there seemed to be little the matter with her; but the moment she attempted to stand her feet bent under her so that they would not support her weight. When left alone she swayed backward and forward, and then fell on her hands and knees. In addition to this, there was a complete paralysis of the left arm, the child thus being deprived of the use of three of her four limbs.

Questioned by the physician, her mother explained that these muscular troubles had first set in six months before, following an attack of measles, and that her condition had grown progressively worse. This pointed to an organic and incurable malady; and, indeed, the mother was firmly convinced that nothing could be done. But, on making some delicate diagnostic tests, no signs of true organic trouble were to be found; whereas there were some indications that the disability might be wholly functional, the result of hysteria. In verification of his suspicion the physician made a few experiments which proved that the child was extremely suggestible. Turning to her mother, he said:

“You are quite wrong in supposing that your daughter cannot be cured. She is ill, it is true; but her illness is of such a nature that it will quickly respond to the right kind of treatment.”

“But,” protested the mother, incredulous, “she cannot use her legs, she cannot move her arm.”

“No matter. I have something here that will enable her to use her legs and move her arm.”

He took up a large magnet and showed it to the little girl. She watched him with the keenest interest, while he used it to lift several pieces of iron.

“Now look,” said he.

Holding it over his left hand, he slowly raised that hand until it touched the magnet, pretending that it had been drawn up exactly as the pieces of iron had been.

“You see the power of this instrument,” he said, to the wondering child. “It can move your arm, and give strength to your legs and feet, in the very same way.”

For three weeks the magnet was applied to the different muscles, with the suggestion that the limbs would thereby regain their power. Nine treatments in all were given. After the ninth treatment the girl walked into the doctor’s office unaided.

“Yesterday,” her mother explained, “she told me that she thought her arm felt better, and she found that she could raise it. Then she said she believed she could walk; and, getting out of bed, she crossed the room without the least assistance, and without her feet clubbing under her. Can it be, Doctor, that she is cured?”

In fact, she was cured; although, of course, the magnet itself had had no power to cure her, but was used merely as an agent for an efficient “counter-suggestion” to dislodge and uproot the symptom-producing suggestions in the girl’s own mind.

Excellent results have also been obtained in many cases of hysterical paralysis among children by the use of what is known as the “method of surprise,” the invention of a German specialist named Bruns. As employed by Doctor Bruns and his followers, this method has undoubtedly a certain aspect of brutality; but this is more than compensated by its effectiveness. Having determined, by a searching medical examination, that the paralysis in any given case is functional and not organic, what Bruns does is to place the paralysed child in a bath-tub, turn on the cold water faucet, and watch the youngster climb out and scamper off.

“You see,” he then says to him, at this psychological moment, “you can walk very well, after all. Now let us hear no more from you about being unable to walk.”

If for any reason he deems the bath-tub device inadvisable, his plan is to put the child to bed, keep it entirely isolated, and deprive it of all food for a day or so. An appetising meal is then brought into the room, and left some distance from the child’s bed. Frequently this is all that is needed to effect a cure. The suggestion of food overcoming the suggestion of paralysis, the child gets out of bed and starts across the room, being encountered midway by Bruns, who—of course by accident—enters the room at that precise instant, and makes use of verbal suggestion to reinforce and maintain the “miraculous” recovery.

In contrast with this method of surprise is the “method of disregard,” also originated by Bruns and used by him in cases of hysteria other than those involving muscular paralysis—cases, for example, of obsessions, facial “tics,” spasms, or convulsive seizures. In employing the method of disregard the little patient is carefully watched by doctor and nurses but in such a manner that he is led to believe they are paying scarcely any attention to him. As a result the idea that, despite his own conviction, his malady must be most insignificant, gradually takes increasing possession of him, and in proportion as it does so the hysterical symptoms disappear.

But, the reader may ask, does this truly mean that the hysteria itself has been cured? Do not these methods, one and all, achieve merely the removal of symptoms? Is not the child still suggestible enough to develop a new variety of hysterical disturbances should occasion arise?

Such objections are not without force, though in practice it has been observed that the cure of the symptoms by suggestion does actually seem to weaken the tendency to future hysterical outbreaks of any kind. To be on the safe side, however, it is always well to institute environmental changes of a sort that will make for a constantly closer approach by the child to a normal life.

With this, we come to the point that is of supreme interest to parents.

Almost without exception it is in the home that the seeds are sown which may afterward bear the bitter fruit of hysteria, whether bearing it in childhood or not until some critical period comes in later years. It is the child who is “spoiled,” or kept by unwise parents in a state of nervous tension and excitement; the child whose sense of moral responsibility is not properly developed, and whose natural suggestibility is unduly heightened by the superstitions, fears, and eccentricities of its elders; it is such a child who, soon or late, may be counted on to manifest some hysterical taint, perhaps not of the extreme type illustrated by the cases narrated above, but nevertheless of a sort making against happiness, usefulness, and success in the world of active effort. Or, to state the situation in more detail in the words of a physician of my acquaintance:

“Hysterical children, it has been my observation, usually have neurotic parents. At first I was disposed to see in this another evidence of the dread workings of heredity. But I am now inclined to the belief that it illustrates rather the influence of environment. All children, as you know, are highly imitative. They tend to copy, with exaggerations, whatever models are placed before them, and instinctively they take their parents as their chief models. If, then, the parents are flighty, excitable, passing rapidly from extreme to extreme of mood, it is only natural that the children should be likewise. Their minds undisciplined, their will-power undeveloped, they easily fall a prey to the baneful, hysteria-producing suggestions of their unhealthy surroundings.

“To make matters worse, there is often, even among well-educated persons, an amazing disregard of the hygienic and dietetic requirements for neural stability. Children are allowed to sit up to unreasonable hours; they are permitted altogether too frequent attendance at parties, theatres, moving-picture shows, and similar places of entertainment, where they receive impressions too vivid and varied for them to absorb easily. Then, too, there is a tendency to give them at their meals an undue allowance of meat, and to permit them to drink tea, coffee, and other stimulants making for nerve disturbance.

“All the while they are living in an atmosphere of parental uneasiness and unrest. Their mothers—and perhaps their fathers also—fuss and fume over them. They delight, it may be, in ‘showing them off’ to admiring visitors, thus suggesting to the already over-impressionable little ones undue ideas of their own importance. Presently signs of trouble appear—restless sleep, ‘night terrors,’ facial ‘tics,’ possibly even full-blown attacks of hysterical convulsions, paralysis, deafness, or what not—and the neurologist has another patient on his hands.”

Surely the duty of parents is plain. To set before their children from earliest infancy examples of placidity and strength of character, to educate their will no less than their intellect, to guard them as far as possible from all harmful suggestions, to love them without idolising them, to study carefully their physical as well as their mental and moral needs—in this way, and in this way alone, can safety be had against the dread evil of hysteria and allied nervous troubles. Especially is such a course indispensable in view of the now well-demonstrated fact that a faulty upbringing may be primarily responsible for mental and nervous maladies, not of childhood but of adult life, and of a character to challenge the utmost skill of the best trained physicians. Of this, more in our next chapter.

VIII

THE MENACE OF FEAR

I have no intention of describing the ordinary, familiar phenomena of fear. These, in both their psychological and physiological manifestations, will be found adequately treated in any good text-book on the emotions. What I wish to do, rather, is to call attention to some little-known facts which find scant mention in the text-books for the excellent reason that it is only within the past few years that they have been made part of organised knowledge. Yet they are facts of the utmost significance from both a theoretical and a practical point of view; and, indeed, an understanding of them is of no less importance to the layman than to the scientist. Their discovery has made possible for the first time what may be called an applied psychology of fear—that is to say, a statement of principles the application of which will go far toward solving the problem of how to avert the evil consequences of fear without the loss of its really beneficial qualities.

That there is a certain virtue in fear requires no scientific demonstration. Fear, as everybody ought to be aware, is intrinsically one of the most useful of emotions. It is an instinct implanted in us as a prime aid in the struggle for existence. Doubtless for this reason it is, as compared with the other emotions, the earliest to make its appearance in the newborn child. Preyer, whose book, “The Mind of the Child,” is not nearly so well known in this country as it should be, puts the first manifestation of fear in an infant at the twenty-third day after birth. Other observers, including Charles Darwin, have found no indications of it until somewhat later than this. But all agree that it is the first emotion, properly so called, to show itself, and that its normal function is to instil caution and prudence in relation to objects and actions that might have destructive effects.

The trouble is that fear has a great tendency to function to excess, especially in the years of childhood, that formative period which means so much to future development. There is scarcely one of us who, looking back, cannot recall some youthful fear, abnormal in its intensity. Nor are such abnormal fears confined to the young. With many people they persist in one form or another throughout life; it may be as fear of thunder, fear of mice, fear of snakes. Moreover, they sometimes do not appear with full force until the period of youth is long past. At the age of thirty or forty—at any age—there may develop, with irresistible power, and seemingly for no reason, a paralysing, appalling fear of doing some trivial, everyday act, or of coming into contact with some familiar and entirely harmless object. When fear becomes as extreme as this it amounts to a disease, and is recognised as such by the medical profession, being technically known as a “phobia.” It is through scientific study of these phobias, as recently carried out by medical specialists with a psychological training, that full realisation has been gained of the tremendous rôle played by fear in the life of man, and the need for its proper control and direction.

The two commonest phobias are direct opposites of one another—namely, fear of open places (agoraphobia) and fear of being in a closed place (claustrophobia). The victim of agoraphobia can with difficulty be persuaded to trust himself outdoors. He fears that if he goes out some catastrophe will overwhelm him. His state of mind is one of absolute panic, and when obliged to cross any open space, such as a public park, he displays all the symptoms of extreme fear. The person troubled with abnormal fear of closed places experiences no difficulty of this sort. He is, on the contrary, never so happy as when in the open. His troubles begin when he is asked to take, say, a drive in a cab or a journey in a railway car. He dare not attend the theatre, or any indoor public entertainment. Whence comes his aversion from closed places he cannot say. He only knows that the mere thought of being in any place from which he cannot escape at a moment’s notice fills him with a torturing dread.

In accounting for phobias like these psychologists have, as a usual thing, fallen back on pure theory, and—especially when strongly influenced by the evolutionary doctrine—have been wont to attribute them to the emergence of ancestral traits and instincts once of real biological value. But recent investigation has made it certain that this ancestral revival theory is both superfluous and erroneous, and tends to hinder rather than help an understanding of the mechanism and consequences of fear. For one thing, there is the fact that agoraphobia and claustrophobia are not the only irrational fears. There may be a phobia for any conceivable act or object, and to explain all these in terms of the revival of ancestral instincts is surely beyond the power of the most vivid scientific imagination. Further than this, so far as abnormal fear of open or closed spaces is concerned, the researches of the medical specialists have rendered possible a satisfactory explanation—and an explanation that has much practical value—without harking back to the feelings and doings of primitive man.

It has been found in every case scientifically studied that there is indeed a memory revival of past experiences, but that it is invariably a revival of experiences in the life of the victim himself, not of his remote ancestors. This is true of every kind of phobia. The sufferer may honestly declare his inability to recall any antecedent happening of a fear-inducing character. But it is found that, subconsciously at any rate, he always carries with him a vivid memory-image of some occurrence that at the time shocked him greatly; and that his phobia is due to the ceaseless presentation in his subconsciousness of this vivid memory-image. In proof of which may be cited the experiences of any medical man accustomed, in treating patients for nervous and mental troubles, to make use of modern methods—hypnotism, hynoidisation, and so forth—for exploring the obscurer workings of the human mind.

Take, by way of illustration, a case of abnormal fear of open places successfully treated by Doctor Isador H. Coriat, a Boston neurologist of my acquaintance. The patient was a young man who for nearly two years had been tormented by an irrational fear of fields, parks, and public squares. His relatives and friends had argued with him, he had tried to conquer the phobia by force of will, but all to no purpose. Nor could he give any reason for his abnormal dread.

Put into the hypnotic state, however, and questioned again, he recalled an incident that at once revealed its source. Two years previously, it appeared, he had been taking a horseback ride, when he unexpectedly galloped into an open field.

“I became terribly frightened,” said he, “as the ground was rough, and I thought I should certainly fall off the horse. I felt faint, my heart beat rapidly, I broke into a cold perspiration and trembled all over. It seemed as if the end of the world was coming. Since then, whenever I see a field or a park I am reminded of this, and feel the same agonising fear.”

In the case of another patient suffering from fear of closed spaces the abnormal fear was traced to an occasion when, visiting a friend in a small, close room, the patient had a fainting attack. In a third patient, a young woman, there developed a fear of crowds because, some time previously, at a crowded school celebration, she had been slightly overcome by heat, and had “felt like screaming.” Another young woman was afflicted with pyrophobia, or fear of fire, in such an extreme form that she could not remain in a room where an open fire was burning, and every night made the rounds of her house to satisfy herself there was nothing that could start a conflagration. Inquiry showed that all this morbid anxiety was an outgrowth of a previous experience with fire.

Sometimes memory of the antecedent causal experience is not entirely blotted out of the upper consciousness. The sufferer may even entertain a clear recollection of it and still be unable to conquer his phobia; which, however, under these circumstances is not nearly so severe as when the process is entirely one of subconscious mentation. In either case, of course, the problem of the development of the phobia still requires explanation. Only partial enlightenment is gained, after all, when we recognise the causal action of some specific occurrence, such as a fall, a fainting-fit, or the sight of a fire. Thousands of persons experience these things without thereby becoming victims of a phobia. When a phobia does result, some exceptional circumstances must be operative, and it is manifestly desirable to learn, if possible, what these are.

It is the more desirable since, as investigation is daily revealing more and more clearly, abnormal dread is not the only malady resulting from a fear-occasioning event. Where one man, as the result of a sudden fright, may in course of time become a phobiac, another may develop symptoms, not of mental trouble, but of bodily disease. A most instructive instance is afforded by the experiences of a young Russian immigrant in this country who had the good fortune to come under the observation of those two eminent specialists in the treatment of mentally-caused disorders, Doctors Morton Prince and Boris Sidis.

The trouble for which this young man sought relief was, to all appearance, purely physical. It consisted of periodic convulsive attacks that racked the right half of his body, and had led to a diagnosis of epilepsy. Since sundry delicate symptoms characteristic of epilepsy were absent, however, the specialists, after a careful study of the case, came to the conclusion that the spasms from which their patient suffered might involve no true organic disease, and might be nothing more than the outward manifestation of some deep-seated psychical disturbance. With this possibility in mind they questioned him both in the normal waking state and in hypnosis, and brought to light some interesting facts.

The first attack, he told them, had set in five years before, when he was sixteen years old and living in Russia. After returning from a dance one evening, he went back to look for a ring lost by the young lady whom he had escorted home. It was past midnight, and his way lay over a country road by a cemetery. Nearing the cemetery, he thought he heard somebody or something running after him. He turned to flee, fell, and lost consciousness. He still was unconscious when found on the road. After he had been brought to, it was seen that he was afflicted with a spasmodic, uncontrollable shaking of the right side, involving his head, arm, and leg. This lasted almost a week, when he seemed as well as ever. But every year thereafter, at about the same time, he had had an attack similar in all respects to the first one, excepting only that he did not become unconscious.

He further declared, while in the hypnotic state, that throughout the period of the attacks he had unpleasant dreams, all relating to the fright and fall of five years before. In these dreams he lived over and over again the experience from which his trouble dated.

“I find myself,” said he, “on the lonely road in my little native town. I am hurrying along the road near the cemetery. It is very dark. I imagine somebody—a robber, or a ghost—is running after me. I become frightened, call for help, and fall. Then I wake up with a start, and remember nothing about the dream. I no longer am afraid, but I have these terrible spasms.”

It was even found possible to produce the convulsive attacks experimentally by simply reminding him, while hypnotised, of the incident on the road. To Doctors Prince and Sidis it now seemed certain that his malady was due to nothing else than the persistence of an intensely vivid subconscious memory-image of the fright he had experienced; and that he would no longer be troubled by it if the memory-image were destroyed by psychotherapeutic treatment. Suggestions to this effect were accordingly given him, when awake as well as when hypnotised. The outcome was all that could be desired, for a speedy and permanent cure was brought about.

Paralysis, muscular contractures, symptoms mimicking tuberculosis, kidney disease, and other dread organic maladies, are also recognised to-day as possible after-effects, through the power of subconscious mental action, of happenings that give rise to a profound feeling of fear. Sometimes more than one symptom is thus occasioned in the same patient. Again, for the purpose of concrete illustration, I cite a typical case from real life—the case of a Pole, a man of twenty-five, treated for a weird combination of mental and physical disturbances.

Physically, he suffered from severe and frequent attacks of headache, setting in gradually, and preceded by a feeling of depression and dizziness. During the attacks his body became cold, his head throbbed violently, he shivered incessantly. To keep warm, he was obliged to wrap himself in many blankets. Mentally, he was tormented by many phobias. He was afraid of closed places, and still more afraid of being obliged to remain alone, especially at night. He had a morbid fear of the dead, and would on no account enter a room with a corpse in it or attend a funeral. Nothing could induce him to visit a cemetery, even in company with other people. Fear of dogs was also a conspicuous feature of his case, as was fear of fire.

Through psychological exploration of his subconsciousness, every one of these symptoms was traced to actual experiences that had given him great emotional shocks, and in almost every instance to experiences that had occurred in his childhood. The fear of dogs had its origin in an exciting episode he had had with some dogs when he was only three. The pyrophobia was connected with the fact that at four years of age he had been hastily carried from a burning building, shivering with fright and cold, into the open air of a frosty night. His dread of cemeteries and of the dead was rooted in a subconscious recollection of terrors inspired in him, while a child, by hearing “all kinds of ghost stories and tales of wandering lost souls, and of spirits of dead people hovering about churchyards.”

In addition to this, his mother, a very superstitious woman, when he was nine, placed the cold hand of a corpse on his naked chest as a “cure” for some trifling ailment. Hence his special fear of corpses. As to the headaches and the sensations of cold, they were the result partly of this “dead hand” memory, and partly of the memory of a still more severe experience, occurring at about the same time, when he was forced to spend an entire night in a barn in mid-winter, to escape a party of drunken soldiers who had beaten his father unmercifully and had killed one of his little brothers. His fear of closed spaces and his fear of being alone were associated with the same experience.

As he grew older much of all this faded from his conscious recollection. But, by analysing his dreams and questioning him in hypnosis, it was found that subconsciously he had forgotten none of it. Evidence also was forthcoming indicating that from time to time, owing to the occurrence of later experiences of a less sinister nature but disquieting enough, there had been exceptionally vivid revivals of the earlier memories; and that it was in this way that they had been able to acquire such tremendous disease-producing power.

Here, I am confident, we have the answer to the question raised in connection with the development of phobias in adult life from seemingly trivial occurrences. Heredity, no doubt, plays some part. But assuredly a far greater influence is exercised by the presence of baneful memory-images that need only an appropriate stimulus to excite them into pernicious activity. The mechanism of fear-caused diseases, to put it briefly, is probably much the same as that operating in the production of the familiar phenomenon of dreaming.

When we dream of anything, we do so because an incident of the waking life has, through association of ideas, roused some dormant emotional “complex,” some group of subconscious ideas relating to matters which are, or once were, of great significance to us, and our dream is a symbolic expression of this dormant complex.[4] So is it with the man who suffers from a fear-induced malady, whether it take the form of a mental or of a physical disorder.

Perhaps of a neurotic tendency by inheritance, perhaps of a good heredity, but temporarily weakened by grief, worry, etc., something occurs that gives this person a sudden fright, and, by association of ideas, reminds him, if only subconsciously, of earlier fear-inspiring episodes in his life. Ordinarily there would be no unpleasant after-effect, except possibly a few nights of bad dreams. But in his condition dreaming is not sufficient to give vent to the subconscious emotions. Some other channel of discharge must be found, and it is found in the production of disease-symptoms—whether mental or physical, or both mental and physical—symbolising the emotional complex or complexes stimulated by the happening that frightened him.

Indeed, there is reason for suspecting that all functional nervous and mental troubles, no matter what their immediate cause, are traceable to fear-memories of remote occurrence, dating usually from the days of childhood. Certainly it is possible to detail from recent medical practice innumerable cases in support of this view. Not to be tedious, I will give only one or two, selecting first a case of Doctor Coriat’s, in which the patient, a middle-aged woman, had for years been tormented by an increasing fear that she would go insane, and that, if insane, she would inevitably injure some member of her family. The poor woman had worn herself out brooding over this, and was gradually qualifying for commitment to some institution. But Doctor Coriat could not find, either in her physical condition or in the facts of her family history, anything to warrant her belief that she was doomed to become insane.

Suspecting, therefore, that this belief was merely a hysterical outgrowth of some forgotten shock in her previous life, and knowing that in sleep such latent memories have a tendency to emerge momentarily into the field of consciousness, he questioned her regarding the frequency and content of her dreams.

“I dream a great deal,” she told him, “but I never have a clear remembrance of what I have dreamed about.”

Yet, when hypnotised and again questioned regarding the dreams, she was able to detail many of them. One in particular interested Doctor Coriat. It was of a recurrent character, and was identified by the patient as having first been dreamed at the time she began to worry over her condition. It was, in fact, a dream in which she saw herself insane.

“Had anything unpleasant happened to you the day before you first had that dream?” Doctor Coriat now inquired of his hypnotised patient.

“Nothing that I can remember, except that I went to a friend’s funeral.”

“The funeral of a very dear friend?”

“Not exactly—just a friend.”

“But that should not have had such a disturbing effect on your mind. Did anything happen at the funeral?”

“I saw a woman there whose eyes frightened me.”

“And why did they frighten you?”

“Because they reminded me of a preacher I used to know when I was a little girl. He was a revivalist, and I always thought he was crazy. I went to his meetings, and got terribly worked up, and it frightened me very much. I thought I would go crazy too, just like the preacher.”

To Doctor Coriat it seemed unnecessary to ask any more questions. As he saw it, the haunting dread of insanity was nothing but the continuation in consciousness of the forgotten memory of the childhood fright, revived by subconscious association of the woman at the funeral with the preacher whose rabid exhortations had inspired the patient with such terror. On this theory he utilised the resources of medical psychology to deprive the baneful memory-image of its power to harm, and soon had the satisfaction of being able to record a perfect cure.

In another case, successfully treated by Doctor Sidis, the subconscious persistence of childhood fears actually threatened a young woman with perhaps lifelong confinement in an asylum for the insane. She had, in fact, been placed in a New York hospital for observation, and it was there that Doctor Sidis treated her. According to her relatives, who did not doubt that she had lost her reason, she suffered from strange hallucinations, particularly of constantly hearing voices call to her, and of being killed. She even imagined at times that she was dead, and would lie in a cataleptic condition, rigidly motionless. At other times she complained of a painful stiffness in her arms, and of difficulty in walking.

Testing her psychologically, Doctor Sidis found cause for thinking that her trouble was hysterical rather than a true insanity involving brain lesions, and he promptly questioned her relatives regarding her previous history. She had had, he learned, some exceedingly unpleasant experiences with a brother-in-law, a rough, brutal fellow, but they did not seem adequate to account for her various symptoms. These, he suspected, had their roots farther back in her life, and, although she professed a total inability to recall any severe fright or worry other than those associated with her brother-in-law, he remained unshaken in his suspicion.

“What do you dream about?” he asked her.

“I don’t exactly know,” she replied. “I am sure I dream a good deal, though, for when I wake I always seem to have been dreaming, and to have had horrid dreams. All I can say is that I dimly remember seeing in them many ugly faces.”

“Is your brother-in-law’s face among them?”

“Yes, and other people’s faces. But I’m sure I don’t know who they are.”

Subjected to a special process of “mind tunneling” of Doctor Sidis’s own invention, the patient recalled a number of dreams in vivid detail. Most of them showed a strong resemblance to one another, in that they had as their setting a forest, and as their chief actors men of repulsive aspect, usually dressed in the roughest of clothing, and usually intent on capturing the dreamer. Only the night before, she declared, she had dreamed that a man was trying to choke her, and she had awakened panic-stricken, and so drenched with perspiration that her nurse—who corroborated her statement—had had to change her night-gown.

“Can you identify the men of your dreams—the men dressed in rough clothing who pursue you so fiercely?” Doctor Sidis asked, while she still was in the artificial state into which he had put her.

“Yes, yes,” she answered, much agitated. “I know them only too well.”

Now, for the first time, she related to him two most significant episodes of her girlhood. Once, it appeared, when she was hardly nine years old, she was walking along a country road, past a forest, when a wood-cutter—“a big man, with big arms and hands projecting from short sleeves”—tried to catch her and carry her into the forest. “He ran after me with outstretched arms. I screamed, and ran from him as fast as I could, calling for help all the time.” And, on another occasion, when she was even younger—only six—on her way to school through the woods, a man met her, gave her candy, talked to her nicely, and all at once seized her so roughly that she began to scream with fright and pain. At that moment somebody came along, and the man released her and fled.

These were the men whom she chiefly saw in her dreams; these were the shocks which, aggravated by the more recent experiences of a not dissimilar sort with her brother-in-law, were the true determinants of her hysteria—as was proved by the fact that upon psychological disintegration of her subconscious memories of them, a speedy and lasting return to health resulted.

In like manner the seemingly epileptic attacks of a nineteen-year-old New York “street arab” were found to be nothing more than the external manifestation of subconscious memory-images, dating back to early childhood, of nights passed in a dark, damp, terror-inspiring cellar. The sight of the discoloured corpse of a man who had died from cholera left in the mind of a sensitive girl of ten such a painful impression that years afterward, quite unaccountably as it seemed, she developed an abnormal fear of contracting some deadly disease; and had she not fortunately been taken to a skilled medical psychologist (Doctor Pierre Janet) she would almost certainly have ended her days in an asylum. In the case of an over-worked Boston young man, thought to be suffering from “dementia praecox,” it was found that his morbid notion that he had committed an “unpardonable sin” was only a hysterical product of subconsciously remembered fears of childhood. The victim himself eventually recognised this, declaring, in an autobiographical statement made at his physician’s request:

“My abnormal fear certainly originated from doctrines of hell which I heard in early childhood, particularly from a rather ignorant elderly woman who taught Sunday-school. My early religious thought was chiefly concerned with the direful eternity of torture that might be awaiting me if I was not good enough to be saved.”

Whether or no all cases of functional nervous and mental disease are thus rooted in emotional stresses of youth, certainly this is often enough the fact to constitute a serious warning to all who have anything to do with the upbringing of the young. If fears of childhood can persist throughout life and can affect adult development so profoundly as to be causal agents in the production of disease, it is obvious that parents and educators should adopt every means in their power to prevent the growth of unreasonable fears in the little ones in their care. Yet, as matters are to-day, and not least in the home, most children are subject to influences that tend to foster, not inhibit, such fears.

In their presence, as was noted on a previous page, parents often discuss accidents, crimes, sensational doings of all sorts; they betray a fretfulness, an anxiety, an unrest, that cannot but react on the sensitive mind of the child, filling it with fears of it knows not what; they even utilise the fear impulse as a means of coercing the child into good behaviour; and, what is perhaps worst of all, many parents intrust their children to ignorant and superstitious nurses, who take a strange pleasure in “scaring them half to death” with tales of demons, ghosts and goblins.

Fortunately the majority of people, as a result of later training and experience, or by the exercise of will-power, are able to suppress the fears of childhood; but often only at the cost of great mental torture. Not so long ago I received a letter from a Detroit business man, Mr. John J. Mitchell, that may well be quoted in this connection. He wrote:

“As a child, as far back as memory goes, I was ‘afraid of the dark,’ intensely afraid.... At about eleven years of age I got a place in a country store, and perhaps two years later changed to the largest store in town. This concern did a large, old-fashioned country business, buying produce and selling all manner of merchandise in exchange or on credit. This involved the use of two old-time buildings (frame) with three stories each and a cellar under all. Owing to the character of the business and location, there were doors opening to the street and area on each side and rear from every floor, including the cellar, seven or eight in all, and widely apart, besides windows. It was my duty at dusk to see that all these doors were properly closed and barred for the night.... With my childish fear of the dark this daily task was an ordeal—at times a terrible ordeal.

“I never made complaint or confided my fears to a soul. But for some reason, the source of which was, and is, as obscure as my intangible fears, I resolved to cure myself of this terror.... My plan, adopted and unflinchingly carried out, was to compel myself—a slender, timid little kid—to go that round daily, in the shadowy dusk, without a light (which I was privileged to have, a lantern). I can only remember now the _pain_ of dread and unreasoning apprehension, and the resolution to ‘have it over and done with.’

“I cannot now fix the time when it was accomplished, but in the end I was completely cured, so that, at least since my majority, I have not only been relieved of this dread, but I often welcome the folds of darkness (of night), as if wrapped about with a comforting garment. It will be a certain qualification to state that, at very long intervals, and always after some physical or mental strain, I feel momentarily a fear of return of old impressions in ‘uncanny’ surroundings.”

And, beyond any question, no matter how effectually one may suppress such youthful fears, so far as relates to their survival in the upper consciousness, there will always be a subconscious remnant, a buried complex, ready to emerge and work mischief in one way or another. There is a world of truth in Professor Angelo Mosso’s emphatic declaration:

“Every ugly thing told to the child, every shock, every fright given him, will remain like minute splinters in the flesh, to torture him all his life long.”

If not in such an extreme form as a phobia, or other functional disease, the early fears will nevertheless make their presence felt in later life. In some men they may engender lack of self-confidence, and even a despicable cowardice; in others they may breed superstitious terrors and usages. Always, in some way, one may depend on it, they will affect the character, the intellect, the whole moral and mental make-up.

Nor will their influence be confined to the individual. Fear, as every psychologist knows, is one of the most contagious of the emotions. Socially, as well as individually, it has a useful function to perform. The presence in all civilised communities of police and fire departments, boards of health, and the like, testifies impressively to the influence of social fear working normally as a conserving agent. But there may be, and frequently is, social as well as individual abnormality of fear; as in panics, massacres, lynchings. In order to deal with this effectually, in order to keep social fear within the bounds of reason, it will always be necessary to recognise that, after all, society is made up of a mass of individuals, and can only think and feel and act as individuals think and feel and act. Train the individual properly, and society will be sane and healthy and efficient enough.

IX

A FEW CLOSING WORDS

We have now reviewed in some detail the principal results of recent psychological research and observation, so far as these bear directly on man’s mental and moral growth. Varied as is the mass of information thus brought together, we have found it pointing uniformly to one conclusion—the transcendent significance of the environmental influences of early life.

Again and again we have found confirmation of the view that what a man is and does depends, as a rule, not so much on the gifts or defects of his heredity as on the excellences or shortcomings of his childhood’s training and surroundings. If these are favourable, even the dead hand of a bad inheritance may be arrested, and he may develop surprising strength of intellect and character; if unfavourable, mental and moral inferiority may be looked for, no matter how good the heredity.

This, of course, emphasises the responsibilities of parenthood, chief among which, as would appear from the facts surveyed, are the beginning of formal education in the home, the providing of a carefully planned material environment, and the setting of a really good example. There can be no doubt, to return for a moment to the superlatively instructive case of Karl Witte, that by all odds the greatest force in the moral development of that splendid scholar and gentleman, was the unceasing inspiration he unconsciously drew from the lives of his father and mother—from their integrity, unselfishness, patience, sincerity, and courage. Parents cannot too soon learn that, to quote a cardinal clause in the elder Witte’s educational creed:

“Our children are what we are. They are good when we are good, and bad when we are bad. I would extend this assertion. With full conviction I would say, they become clever, magnanimous, modest, witty, agreeable, amiable, if these are our qualities. They become the opposite if we precede them with the opposite.”

Or, as Doctor Dubois has so admirably put it in one of his University of Berne addresses on moral education:

“You, madam, who complain of the irritability of your little girl, could you not suppress your own, which I have seen break out, in a few words exchanged with your dear husband, immediately afterward? You, sir, who bitterly reproach your son for his impulsiveness and instability of temper, have you not these faults yourself?... Remember the proverb, ‘The fruit does not fall far from the tree.’” (“Reason and Sentiment,” pp. 53-54.)