he disagreeable, by balking an instinct, by
obstructing a wish or purpose, may arouse anger. The anger may blaze
forth in a sudden destructive fury in an effort to remove the obstacle,
or it may simmer as a patient sullenness, or it may link itself with
thought and become a careful plan to overcome the opposition. It may
range all the way from the blow of violence to burning indignation
against wrong and injustice; it is the source of the fighting spirit.
Without fear, purpose would never be born; without anger in some form or
other it would never be fulfilled.

3. But while fear and anger work well in succession, or at different
times, when both emotions are awakened by some disagreeable situation or
thing, when there is a helpless anger, when the instinct to fight is
paralyzed by fear, when doubt arises, then there is deenergization.

Thus a hostile situation, an intensely disagreeable situation, may be
met with energy: viz. planning, constructive flight, destructive
action, or it may be met with a deenergization, confusion, paralysis,
hopeless anger. It may cause an intense inner conflict with high
constant emotions, fatigue, incapacity to choose the proper action, and
the peculiar agony of doubt.

This last type of reaction is a very common one in the housewife. For
the situation is never clear-cut for decision--there is the ideal
implanted by training, education, social pressure, and her own desire to
live in conformity with this ideal; there is opposing it disgust, anger,
weariness, lack of interest that her house duties bring with them. This
conflict leads nowhere so far as action is concerned, for she can
neither accept nor reject the situation.

This is to say: The human being needs primarily a definite point of
view, a definite starting place for his actions. Some belief, some goal,
some definite purpose is needed for the rallying of the energy of mind
and body. Drifting is intolerable to the acute, active mind bent upon
some achievement before death. Man is the only animal keenly aware of
his mortality, and consequently he is the only one to fear the passing
of time. This passing of time can be received equably by the one
conscious of achievement, or who has some compensation in belief and
purpose; it becomes intolerable to those in doubt.

Fundamentally one may say that neurasthenia and the allied diseases
which we are here summing up as the nervousness of the housewife are
reactions to the disagreeable