The science of life : fully illustrated in tone and line and including many diagrams

BOOK 8

revelations made by him was one of the conditions of life on Mars, including a detailed account of the language of the inhabitants.

Flournoy analysed this language and showed that it was all composed of European word-roots, mostly French—the language of Mlle. Smith herself. He was also able, by a careful analysis, to trace the genesis of Leopold to an incident in Héléne’s childhood, when a strange man of striking appearance came on the scene in time to save her from the attacks of a big and savage dog ; and his memory was invested with all sorts of ideal qualities by the girl. And the stories which were heard by Mlle. Smith, or told by “ Leopold ’’W—some of them long and florid romances—were just what one would imagine as the products of the romantic side of'a rich personality which the exigencies of life (she was employed in a business) had forcibly repressed.

§ 10 Neurasthenia

Let us turn now from these aspects of dissociation to another type of mental disorder, which occurs where dissociation is not achieved. All minds are not equally prone to dissociation. Some are so close kmit that they are unable to keep apart even the most violently discordant groups of ideas. And then open conflict goes on.

During the War there appeared a great number of cases of mental disorder of a non-inhibitory, non-dissociative type, which were at first classified as “ shell-shock.”? In pre-War days the psychological theories of nervous disorder were at a discount ; orthodox medical science preferred to look for its cause in physical damage or disorder in the nerve-cells. When a shell bursts close to a man the concussion may cause actual tiny hemorrhages from the blood-vessels of the brain, with consequent damage to the nerve-cells ; and at first cases of shellshock were almost without exception set down to organic injury of this kind. But soon even the keenest upholders of this view found that the facts were against them ; in many patients no trace of hemorrhage could be found, and some severe shellshock cases had not even been rendered unconscious by concussion.

The main cause of the nervous collapse was then sought within the mind; the shell-burst had set things off, not by means of its mechanical effects, but by working on the hidden springs of emotion. The old-

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CHAPTER 7

fashioned medical men, robbed of the comfort of a tangible cause, flew to the other extreme and accused all shell-shock patients of malingering. It is on record that one medical officer with the rank of general in the British Army declared roundly that every such case should be shot as a warning to other shirkers and malingerers.

This view was not tenable for lonsindeed, it was really not tenable at all by anyone acquainted with the facts. The next stage was the admission that most shell-shock was mentally caused, but this was coupled with the assertion that it only occurred in men who were somehow below the normal level—in degenerates or defectives, in those of unbalanced mental constitution or unstable temperament. It was a stigma of inferiority. But this idea, too, had to be given up. Many of the sufferers were men of the highest type of character and the most unblemished record. Whatever their weaknesses may have been —and everyone has some weak point in his mental organization—they were not in any way inferior.

And meanwhile the misleading word “shell-shock”’ itself had dropped out of the medical vocabulary. It was recognized that these cases were essentially failures of inhibition. Their essence was continued unabating conflict: because inhibition had no decisive power, and the ease with which excitations spread and circulated through the cortex meant that the antagonistic ideas and urges could be continually struggling with and chafing against each other. The neurasthenic types are the worriers, the anxious souls. Their conflicts were of the same general nature as those which lead to hysteria, but they do not end in hysteria. In part, this difference is due to a difference in the circumstances ; a sudden shock helps the development of hysterical symptoms, while a less violent but chronic rousing of the conflicting impulses to renew their never-decided battle favours a neurasthenic outcome. But in the main the difference is due to inner causes, of temperament or of training.

To the subject of imnate differences of temperament we shall return; it merits a section to itself. Here we will only mention the significant fact that, while the percentage of mentally-caused disorder in the War was about the same among commissioned officers as among other ranks, there was more neurasthenia among the officers, more hysteria among the N.C.O.’s and privates. Apparently the closer knitting of the mind