asked to
avoid situations which will necessarily lead to excitement and quarrel
and possible disappointment.

It is one of the surest tests of psychotherapeutic skill to discriminate
wisely whether one or the other of these features of general treatment
ought to be emphasized. They usually demand more insight than specific
forms of psychotherapy like hypnotic suggestions. These general efforts
are also much more directed against the disease itself where the
specific methods are merely directed against the symptoms. The
separation from disturbing surroundings, the reduction of engagements
and work, the complete rest, the suppression of artificial stimulants,
the enjoyment of art, of nature, of sport, the distractions of social
life, each might be in one case a decisive help and indifferent, perhaps
even harmful in another. All is a matter of choice and adjustment to the
particular needs in which all the personal factors of inherited
constitution, acquired adjustments, social surroundings, temperament,
and education, and the probable later development have to be most
tactfully weighed. Yet this general treatment may take and very often
ought to take the opposite direction, not towards rest but towards work,
not towards light distraction but towards serious effort, not towards
reduction of engagements but towards energetic regulation. We said that
it was an exaggeration to blame the external conditions of our life, the
technical manifoldness of our surroundings as the source of the
widespread nervousness. The mere complexity of the life, the rapidity of
the demands, the amount of intellectual effort is in itself not
dangerous and our time is not more pernicious than the past has been;
but it is perhaps no exaggeration to say that our time is by many of its
features more than the past tending towards an unsound inner attitude of
man.

Much of the present civilization leads the average man and woman to a
superficiality and inner hastiness which undermines sound mental life
much more than the external factors. We look with a condescending smile
at the old-fashioned periods in which the demands of authority and
discipline controlled the education of the child and after all the
education of the adult to his last days. We have substituted for it the
demand of freedom with all its blessings, but instead of the blessings
we too often get all its vices. A go-as-you-please method characterizes
our whole society from the kindergart