ause. That
provided an image of something material happening as an explanation.
With the triumphs of anatomy after the Renaissance, that naive view
had to be discarded. In its place the humoral theory held sway, with
its good humors and its bad humors, and their bilious, lymphatic,
nervous and sanguine admixtures. But that, too, went the way of all
flesh. During the first half of the nineteenth century, a popular
phrase, "nerves," paraphrased by practitioners of medicine as
neuroses, then came into vogue as the efficient cause of these
troubles. "Nerves" indeed today have filtered everywhere into the
common consciousness.

Because of the irritant effects of light, food and social conditions,
America has come to swarm with neurotics of every type, especially the
sexual. A rich field was created for cults of treatment, which spring
up like weeds periodically all over the country. We have seen how the
American, Beard, was inspired by the idea that "nerves" represented a
loss of tone, a flabbiness, weakness and softness of the nerves, to
coin the word neurasthenia. Nerve exhaustion he believed was the cause
of the nerve weakness. Weir Mitchell, another American, introduced the
rest cure combined with overfeeding as a treatment for it.

An analytical French neurologist, Charcot, was not to be satisfied by
words of Latin-Greek derivation. Insisting upon the significance of
the individual mental workings of each case, he and his pupil Janet
began to unravel a tangle which has led to the present revolution in
psychology. For Freud, Jung and Adler took up the story where Janet
left off.

Janet elaborated the ideas of a subconscious and an unconscious, a
dissociation of the components of the mind, and a splitting of
the personality. Lumping the phenomena of amnesia, somnambulism,
hypnotism, anesthesia, obsession and hysteria into the grand group of
mental dissociations and disintegrations, he achieved a unification
never considered possible before him. Suggestion as a mode of cure was
also emphasized and elaborated by him to an undreamed-of degree.

Freud, in 1895, studying a case of hysteria with Breuer, had attempted
cure by the method of free association, attempting to get the hysteric
to pour out her mental life. Not succeeding, and his interest aroused
by her continual references to her dreams, he discovered that by means
of those dreams he could tap the subconscious and unconscious in
regions hitherto inaccessible. For