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Copyright, 1921, by W. B. Saunders Company

PRINTED IN AMERICA
PRESS OF
W. B. SAUNDERS COMPANY
PHILADELPHIA

TO THE MEMORY OF
MY FATHER

FOREWORD

This little book is the outgrowth of a conviction, strengthened by some
years of experience with hundreds of supposedly normal young people in
schools and colleges, confirmed by my years of training in a
neurological hospital and months of work in a big city general hospital,
that it is of little value to help some people back to physical health
if they are to carry with them through a prolonged life the miseries of
a sick attitude. As nurses I believe it is our privilege and our duty to
work for health of body and health of mind as inseparable. Experience
has proved that too often the physically ill patient (hitherto nervously
well) returns from hospital care addicted to the illness-accepting
attitude for which the nurse must be held responsible.

I conceive of it as possible that every well trained nurse in our
country shall consider it an essential to her professional success to
leave her patient imbued with the will to health and better equipped to
attain it because the sick attitude has been averted, or if already
present, has been treated as really and intelligently as the sick body.
To this end I have dealt with the simple principles of psychology only
as the nurse can immediately apply them.

The writer wishes to acknowledge her indebtedness for criticism of this
work and for several definitions better than her own, in the chapters
_The Normal Mind_ and _Variations From Normal Mental Processes_, to
Dr. Robert S. Carroll, who through the years of hospital training helped
her to translate her collegiate psychology from fascinating abstract
principles into the sustaining bread of daily life.

MARY F. PORTER.

ASHEVILLE, N. C.,
_August, 1921_.

CONTENTS

PAGE
CHAPTER I

WHAT IS PSYCHOLOGY? 11

CHAPTER II

CONSCIOUSNESS 20
The Unconscious