The psychoneuroses and their treatment by psychotherapy / by Professor J. Dejerine and Dr. E. Gauckler, authorized translation by Smith Ely Jelliffe.

  • Dejerine, J. (Jules), 1849-1917.
Date:
[1913], [©1913]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The psychoneuroses and their treatment by psychotherapy / by Professor J. Dejerine and Dr. E. Gauckler, authorized translation by Smith Ely Jelliffe. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

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    majority of cases that which is appropriate to the various symptoms occurring in younger subjects is the action of authority. Neither the child nor the young person is able to reason. It is very rare to find that education, which is nothing more than a long-continued suggestion, has developed a critical spirit in them. What one finds in these sub- jects, on the other hand, is a spirit of contradiction, the common reaction of the weak and the young to the suggestion of others. To attempt to reason with a child or a young person is to run great risk of seeing the symptom grow worse, and, far from being cured, to plunge them into a much more complex and intense symptomatology. That one should take advantage of childish sentimentalities is naturally to be understood; one may ask a child to try to act in this manner or that, for example, in order to please his parents,—that goes without saying; but to explain to him the why and the wherefore of his symptoms will often be to lose valuable time. Only one form of therapy is called for here. It is that which consists in using appropriate measures to oblige or constrain the child, or youthful patient, to give up his symptoms. Isolation is often indicated in just such cases as a somewhat coercive measure, and ought not to be abandoned until the subject makes up his mind to give up the various symptoms which he presents. Simple statements and suggestions while awake are, we feel, practically the only things that are indicated in such cases. Still, it must be understood that, among young children who are very emotional, the action of sthenic emotion should by no means be neglected. But one should always be on one's guard against more or less conscious tendency to simulation, and to more or less marked auto- and hetero-susgestibility which so frequently characterizes the infantile mentality. If we may be allowed the expression, children are much more apt than grown people to lead their physician a dance, and if the latter does not take this into account the therapeutic result will often be curiously com- promised. Precautions of the opposite nature must be taken with self-centred old people who are fixed in their systematizations. Any determined statement or conviction too emphatically expressed which is opposite to their own way of thinking is sometimes quite enough to destroy the certain value of all consecutive psychotherapeutic treatment. One must slowly and gradually penetrate the systematizations of the old. At least, it must be understood if he is a little weak, and has at the end of the long road of life returned to an infantile stage in which, credulous and suggestible, he will pay no attention to reasonings which he only vaguely understands, but will, on the contrary, not be able to stand out against plain distinct statements. In a general way and without reference to any particular cases, we find we have to treat patients of each sex in a different way. The critical spirit is rarely much developed in woman. Her sentimentality,