The Psychoneuroses and Their Treatmet By Psychotherapy (Classic Reprint)

In translating this work, I have had in mind a very definite purpose. For a number of years, like many another, I have been struck by the immense number of minor psychic disturbances which render numerous individuals unhappy, discontented, ill, unable to hold their own in their milieu, even making confirmed invalids of many. These individuals, variously classified as to their maladies, at different times, as suffering from functional neuroses, nervousness, neurasthenia, phobias, fixed ideas, obsessions, hysteria, psychoneuroses, etc., have been neglected for many years as objects of scientific medical inquiry. The reasons for this are obvious. They centre about the cardinal fact that the psychic life of the human being is the most complex series of phenomena in the most highly evolved creature with which human intelligence is acquainted. The psychic problems of the individual have been left for the most part to the poet, the artist, the dramatist, and the story writer. I dp not mean that the physicians of times past have not made serious attempts to understand these questions. They have, and the student of medical history may well admire the results obtained, even if to-day they may seem inadequate, if not provoking. Even taking this knowledge into consideration, however, it appears that the problems of medicine have been so many, and so difficult of solution, that the human mind has naturally and wisely grasped at those for which some adequate solution seemed practicable. It is for this reason that the comparatively simpler problems of the bodily activities, their modifications, etc., have received their wealth of study, which is one of the crowning glories of medical science in the last century. The time came, however, when the intricacies of the nervous system conunenced to be resolved, and scientific medicine arrived at a point where its hypotheses began
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)