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.

    9/420 (page iii)
    TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE 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 differ- ent times, as suffering from functional neuroses, nervousness, neuras- thenia, 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 to the poet, the artist, the dramatist, and the writer. I do 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 modifica- tions, 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 commenced to be resolved, and scientific medicine arrived at a point where its hypotheses began to yield valuable results in the fields of neurology and psychiatry. With the establishment of firmer founda- tions, it became worth while to delve into psychic problems, with some hope of sound deductions and practical results, and within the past few generations we have seen scientific medicine take its place in this domain heretofore left to the thousand and one uninformed and quasi-scientific cults which have for centuries constituted parasitic foci in every community. It was with the intention of furthering a knowledge of what scientific medicine could do in the domain outlined that I first translated Dubois' excellent work on the Psychoneuroses. Its fundamental postulate was an appeal to the intelligence of the individual.