ty, distorting it, wearying it.

However this may be, there is struggle, conflict in every human breast
and especially difficult and undecided struggles in the case of the
neurasthenic. Literally, secretly or otherwise, he is a house divided
against himself, deenergized by fear, disgust, revolt, and conflict.

And the housewife we are trying to understand is particularly such a
creature, with a host of deenergizing influences playing on her,
buffeting her. Our aim will be to analyze these influences and to
discover how they work.

I have stated that in medical practice two other types are
described,--psychasthenia and hysteria. These are not so definitely
related to the happenings of life as to the inborn disposition of the
patient. Nor are they quite so common in the housewife as the
neurasthenic, deenergized state. However, they are usually of more
serious nature, and as such merit a description.

By the term psychasthenia is understood a group of conditions in which
the bodily symptoms, such as fatigue, sleeplessness, loss of appetite,
etc., are either not so marked as in neurasthenia, or else are
overshadowed by other, more distinctly mental symptoms.

These mental symptoms are of three main types. There is a tendency to
recurring fears,--fears of open places, fears of closed places, fear of
leaving home, of being alone, fear of eating or sleeping, fear of dirt,
so that the victim is impelled continually to wash the hands, fear of
disease--especially such as syphilis--and a host of other fears, all of
which are recognized as unreasonable, against which the victim struggles
but vainly. Sometimes the fear is nameless, vague, undifferentiated, and
comes on like a cloud with rapid heartbeat, faint feelings, and a sense
of impending death. Sometimes the fear is related to something that has
actually happened, as, fear of anything hot after a sunstroke; or fear
of any vehicle after an automobile accident.

There is also a tendency to obsessive ideas and doubts; that is, ideas
and doubts that persist in coming against the will of the patient, such
as the obscene word or phrase that continually obtrudes itself on a
chaste woman, or the doubt whether one has shut the door or properly
turned off the gas. Of course, everybody has such obsessions and doubts
occasionally, but to be psychasthenic about it is to have them
continually and to have them obtrude themselves into every action. In
extreme psychasthenia the difficul