The psychoneuroses and their treatment by psychotherapy / Translated by Smith Ely Jelliffe.

  • Dejerine, J. (Jules), 1849-1917.
Date:
1913
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: The psychoneuroses and their treatment by psychotherapy / Translated by Smith Ely Jelliffe. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by UCL Library Services. The original may be consulted at UCL (University College London)

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    INTRODUCTION This work is devoted td the study of the psychoneuroses, and their treatment. In it will be found the ideas which have been formed by one of us who has spent thirty years in daily contact with neuropaths. In attending these patients, and noting the manner in which they have been treated, it has seemed to us that many physicians have held ideas concerning the nature of the psychoneuroses that are not only incom- plete and inexact, according to our lights, but are also therapeutically dangerous. This does not imply ignorance on their part, but rather that, having been brought up on doctrines and methods which are excellent in their place, they have extended their application to a branch of medicine like the psychoneuroses, with which they have nothing to do. All advance work in modern medicine is the direct result of progress in pathological anatomy and laboratory work. These have enabled us to get a very much more exact idea of the human mechanism, and the various troubles that may afflict it. But the fact has been quite overlooked that modifications of physical energy are not the only ones in which physicians should be interested. All physicians rebel at the idea of any dissociation which would separate the physical organism on the one hand from the psychic and moral organism on the other. But, both instinctively, and as a result of their education, the majority of them have a tendency to subordinate the disturbances of the psychic life to those of the physical, and to always look for some initial somatic change. They refuse to even consider the existence of illnesses which owe their origin to any ante- cedent psychic or moral disturbance. But, there exists, according to our way of thinking, a very special nosological group, of much impor- tance, whose symptomatology is caused solely by a primitive modifica- tion of the moral or mental state, followed by a whole series of secondary manifestations. The affections which come under this heading are known as the psychoneuroses. This book is wholly devoted to the development of this point of view. It will be divided into three parts. The first, which is analytical, will be devoted to the study of functional manifestations, that is, to the study of all the symptoms which are observed in the course of the psychoneuroses, whose exact nature we wish to ascertain. In the second, the synthetic, we shall endeavor to make plain the general mechanism of the foundation of the psychoneuroses, as well as their variations and nature. In the third, which is therapeutic, will be set forth the psycho- therapeutic proceedings and helps which we feel are the only measures which should be used in the treatment of the psychoneuroses.