eds
most--laid off for months or years of treatment, on account of some
kind of nervous disorder.

=Various Types of Nervousness.= The psychoneuroses are of many
forms.[3] To some people "nerves" means nervous prostration,
breakdown, fatigue, weakness, insomnia, the blues, upset stomach, or
unsteady heart,--all signs of so-called neurasthenia or
nerve-weakness. To others the word "nerves" calls up memories of
strange, emotional storms that seem to rise out of nowhere, to sweep
the sky clear of everything else, and to pass as they came, leaving
the victim and the family equally mystified as to their meaning. These
strange alterations of personality are but one manifestation of
hysteria, that myriad-faced disorder which is able to mimic so
successfully the symptoms of almost every known disease, from tumors
and fevers to paralysis and blindness.

[Footnote 3: The technical term for nervousness is
_psycho-neurosis_--disease of the psyche. There are certain "real
neuroses" such as paralysis and spinal-cord disease, which involve an
organic impairment of nerve-tissue. However, as this book deals only
with psychic disturbance, we shall, throughout, use the term
_neuroses_ and _psycho-neuroses_ indiscriminately, to denote nervous
or functional disorders.]

To still other people nervous trouble means fear,--just terrible fear
without object or meaning or reason (anxiety neuroses); or a definite
fear of some harmless object (phobia); or a strange, persistent,
recurrent idea, quite foreign to the personality and beyond the reach
of reason (obsession); or an insistent desire to perform some absurd
act (compulsion); or perhaps, a deadly and pall-like depression (the
blues).

As a matter of fact, the neuroses include all these varieties, and
various shades and combinations of each. There are, however, certain
mental characteristics which recur with surprising regularity in most
of the various phases--dissatisfaction, lack of confidence, a sense of
being alone and shut in to oneself, doubt, anxiety, fear, worry,
self-depreciation, lack of interest in outside affairs, pessimism,
fixed belief in one's powerlessness, along whatever line it may be.

Underneath all these differing forms of nervousness are the same
mechanisms and the same kind of difficulty. To understand one is to
understand all, and to understand normal people as well; for in the
last analysis we are one and all built on the same lines and governed
by the same la