Dysart

“ One picks up crumb here, crumb there: but if one has not good digestion, Lord, what sinnifies a feast?—Healthy man thrives on a 'tatoe, sickly looks pale on a haunch. You sees, your honour, as I said afore, I was own sarvant to Colonel Dysart; he was a Lord's nephy, a very gay gentleman, and great hand with the ladies,—not a man more in the world;—so I had the opportunity of larning what's what among the best set; at his honour's expense, too,—augh! To my mind, Sir, there is not a place from which a man has a better view of things than the bit carpet behind a gentleman's chair. ”

“ And all infectious distempers must be communicated by those passages.
Some distempers or dispositions of body, make men rave; others make them melancholy: Some give them courage, impetuosity, prodigious energy of mind, and rapturous thoughts and expressions; others sink and depress their spirits, give them panick fears, dismal apprehensions, melancholy images, and secret frights; and they will all account for such sensations from their former imbibed prejudices by early education, and by long use become familiar to them. ”

“ The effort to work becomes daily more laborious, the task of fixing the attention grows increasingly difficult, thoughts wander, memory fails, the reasoning power is enfeebled; prejudice—the shade of defunct emotion or some past persuasion—takes the place of judgment; physical nerve or brain disturbance may supervene, and the crash will then come suddenly, unexpected by on-lookers, perhaps unperceived by the sufferer himself. This is the history of "worry," or disorder produced by mental disquietude and distraction, occasionally by physical disease. ”

“ No sooner does our disorder turn its back upon us than we laugh at it. The state we have been in, sounds like a dream, a fable; health is the order of the day, strength is ours de jure and de facto; and we discard all uncalled-for evidence to the contrary with a smile of contemptuous incredulity, just as we throw our physic-bottles out of the window! ”

“ The course of the disorder appears to be that the rationalisations, developed by the subject to explain his inferiority, become so intimately connected with the affective basis of his trouble that they attain a reality and effectiveness which greatly relieve, or even wholly remove, the painfulness of the conflict. ”

“ But to minds strongly marked by the positive and negative qualities that create severity,–strength of will, conscious rectitude of purpose, narrowness of imagination and intellect, great power of self-control, and a disposition to exert control over others,–prejudices come as the natural food of tendencies which can get no sustenance out of that complex, fragmentary, doubt-provoking knowledge which we call truth. ”

“ By this mental bondage morbid sympathy is clearly and definitely distinguished from all subordinate degrees of this instinct, however closely allied the imitation of a disorder may seem to be to that of a mere folly, of an absurd fashion, of an awkward habit in speech and manner, or even of a confusion of ideas. Even these latter imitations, however, directed as they are to foolish and pernicious objects, place the self-independence of the greater portion of mankind in a very doubtful light, and account for their union into a social whole. ”

“ To the vulgar-minded, all persons who present deformities, whether physical or mental, are subjects of derision and hatred; to those who realise something of the disabilities under which these unfortunates are labouring, they are the objects of either active or passive sympathy,—in the abstract, of course; should the insane, the leprous, or even the man of genius get in our way we, as normal persons, feel ourselves justified in ridding the world of its nuisance. ”

“ I fly from the subject, and thicken the cloud of mystery, of which I have so often, and, I still think, so justly complained.—These are some of the effects of the contradictory systems, that have so long bewildered our principles and conduct. A combination of causes, added to the conflict between a thousand delicate and nameless emotions, have lately conspired to confuse, to weaken, my spirits. You can conceive, that these acute, mental, sensations, must have had a temporary effect on the state of my health. ”

“ But the gist of the whole matter is this: in a neurosis, certain forces of the personality—instincts and their accompanying emotions—which ought to work harmoniously, having become tangled up with some erroneous ideas, have lost their power of coöperation and are working at cross purposes, leaving the individual mis-adapted to his environment, the prey of all sorts of mental and physical disturbances. ”

“ But it is none the less true that always some disorder results from excess or defect, that it influences every function, bodily and mental, and that it constitutes a lowering of the life for the time being. ”

“ And how all thought of fixity in anything had disappeared as a ridiculous illusion intended, maybe, by something to fool man into the belief that his world here, his physical and mental state, was real and enduring, a greater thing than anything else in the universe, when so plainly it was not. ”

“ In this disease, which often seems to start from a state of inferiority, real or supposed, the sufferer enters upon an elaborate process of rationalisation, partly to explain his inferiority, partly to still the conflicts to which certain forms of inferiority render their subjects peculiarly liable. The usual course of such a paranoia is from suspicions and forebodings arising out of inferiority to explanations which tend towards delusions of grandeur. ”

“ Very early, out of the extravagant vagaries of a child's brain, an audacious word had escaped, sped by a temper aflame, for which he had suffered—from youngsters a day's derision, from a strict elder a look that was worse disgrace. ”

“ His thesis is that the mainspring of all the efforts [62] of achievement and the source of all the vicissitudes of the psyche is a desire to be important, or will to "be above," not wholly unlike Nietzsches theory of the "will to power." The neurosis goes back to some organic defect or other cause of childish humiliation. As a result, the cause of such humiliation, a defective bodily organ, or whatever it may be, gains special attention. The whole psyche is modified in the process of adjustment. ”

“ I never know what to expect, what scarifying question they are going to hurtle at me, or what cold, examining eyes are going to strip me to the bone—eyes that represent brains so shrewd and merciless that one wonders why they do not startle the world long before they usually do. ”

“ Many of the grosser cases are found at last to be accompanied by mental disorder, and it is difficult to avoid referring the whole class to something different from simple misuse of the reasoning power. The first instance is one which puts in a strong light the state of things in which we live, brought about by our glorious freedom of thought, speech, and writing. ”

“ The mother's thoughts run on her children, the painter's on pictures, the poet's on poems; those of the anxious head of the house on money cares, it may be, until in times of unusual pressure the thoughts beat, beat, beat in that well-worn rut of ways and means, and decline to run in any other channel, till the poor man loses his reason, simply because he cannot get his thoughts out of that one channel made in the substance of his brain. And, indeed, "that way madness lies" for every one of us, in the persistent preying of any one train of thought upon the brain tissue. ”

“ Those who have accumulated the largest sum of experience in disorders of the intellect, have viewed the various forms under which they are manifested, as equally conducing to render an individual incapable of conducting himself and managing his affairs, whether the mental affection be termed madness, melancholy, insanity, mental derangement, non compos mentis, idiotcy, or lunacy ”

“ When a clock is foul and disordered, its wheels warped or cogs broken, the bell hammer and the hands will proclaim the fact; instead of being a guide, it will mislead, and, while the disorder continues, will continually betray its own infirmity. So when a man’s mind is disordered or his heart corrupted, there will gather on his face and in his language an expression corresponding to the irregularities within. There is, indeed, a physiognomy in the speech as well as in the face. ”

“ In the civilized world there obviously prevails a twilight mood which finds expression, amongst other ways, in all sorts of odd æsthetic fashions. All these new tendencies, realism or naturalism, ‘decadentism,’ neo-mysticism, and their sub-varieties, are manifestations of degeneration and hysteria, and identical with the mental stigmata which the observations of clinicists have unquestionably established as belonging to these. ”

“ Originating, apparently, from stress of adverse circumstances, it has become an acquired taste, the indulgence of which has created a peculiar form of mental disorder, with lack of feeling, love of fighting, cruelty, and general human degeneracy, as prominent attributes. ”

“ Some strange psychic predisposition, dating no doubt from one of your former lives, has favoured the development of your ‘disease’; and the fact that you had no normal training at school or college, no leading by the poor intellect into the culs-de-sac falsely called knowledge, has further caused your exceedingly rapid movement along the lines of direct inner experience. ”

“ The natural consequence is restlessness, agitation, anger, indecision, etc. The dissociation of personality, with the outcropping of the “b mood,” follows—a conflict due to the excitation of certain childhood complexes, conserved in the unconscious and embracing sentiments in which are incorporated the instinct of self-subjection or abasement. This “b mood” is a study in itself. ”

“ So much does inordinate arrogance characterize mental aberration, that, in the course of my own practice, I have detected, in that infirmity, the certain symptom of insanity, long before the brain had made its disease manifest even to the most familiar kindred. ”

“ When it comes to the question of their physical or mental inferiority, a cursory inspection is all that is required to show they are far below the average. There is a great want of symmetry of body and mind—evidence of degeneration. ”

“ All other miseries come from the brain, and, as these belong to thought, they can be driven out by their master as unruly and unpleasant vagabonds; for a mental trouble should be spoken to, confronted, reprimanded and so dismissed. ”

“ Within the different forms, on the other hand, there seems to be a tendency toward the appearance of particular mental processes, those concerned in the visual perception of the body, in felt organic stir and in verbal perceptions and ideas. And now, what of continuity?
Prejudice is strong; but you must be ready to discard it. Experimental and everyday observation both testify, when the question is directly put, to the intermittence of the self-experience. We are not always aware of our self. ”

“ In the degenerate, whose brain and nervous system are characterized by hereditary malformations or irregularities; in the hysterical, whom we have learnt to regard as victims of exhaustion, the will is entirely lacking, is possessed only in a small degree. The consequence of weakness or want of will is incapacity of attention. ”

“ Their perpetual solicitude for him, acting as a suggestion of irresistible force, tends to engender in him a mental attitude out of which may afterward spring, according to the subsequent circumstances of his life, a cold, heartless, calculating selfishness, or a morbid self-anxiety, perhaps eventuating in all sorts of neurotic symptoms. ”

“ To these impassive natures all displays of the personality are distasteful, and the lighter social arts, seeming both insignificant and [53] histrionic, are learned with difficulty and practised with repugnance. An awkwardness of address, in the uneducated almost bovine, becomes in the cultivated a painful reserve and self-consciousness, reflecting in open physical distress the uneasiness of the man's whole being. ”

“ I have been told by my advisers, some of them wise, deeply instructed, and kind-hearted men, that such a life-destiny should be related by the subject of it for the instruction of others, and especially for the light it throws on certain peculiarities of human character often wrongly interpreted as due to moral perversion, when they are in reality the results of misdirected or reversed actions in some of the closely connected nervous centres. ”

“ Do we observe instances of a total want of memory, imagination, and judgment, either from an original defect in the stamina of the brain, or from the influence of physical causes? The same unnatural defect is sometimes observed, and probably from the same causes, of a moral faculty. ”

“ But his maladies, from the very nature of the delicate organ of thinking, intensely exercised, are more terrible than those of any other profession; they are more complicated, more hidden 71 in their causes, and the mysterious union and secret influence of the faculties of the soul over those of the body, are visible, yet still incomprehensible ”

“ Prejudice leads us to suppose that between the sensory stimulus and the utterance of the words a process of thought must have intervened, but there seems no good reason for such a supposition. Any habitual action, such as eating or dressing, may be performed on the appropriate occasion, without any need of thought, and the same seems to be true of a painfully large proportion of our talk. ”

“ Again, physiological causes may be at work to distort sensations: imperfection's in the sense organs, fatigue, illness, and the like are examples. But not least among the causes of error must be set psychological causes. That is, we read facts differently in the light of what we fear or hope, Page 397 like or dislike, expect or recall. We see things the way we want them to be, or the way previous experience has taught us to expect them to be. ”