Page:The Modern Treatment of Mental and Nervous Disorders.djvu/23

— 21 — he does not understand their real significance and relationship. There is a widespread belief that we are always fully acquainted with the workings of our own minds, and that we always know why we do and think things, but unfortunately the belief is for the most part an erroneous one. Often enough we do not know the causes of our thoughts and actions, and oftener still we ascribe them to causes which have actually played no part in their production. Thus the man who gives to a beggar because his neighbour is looking on may be fondly convinced that his action is dictated solely by the purest altruism. And if we all look through distorting glasses when we seek the causes of our own ideas and acts, these glasses are vastly more distorting and obscured in the case of the nervous patients with whom we are now dealing. Again, everything is not on the surface of the mind, and the phenomena on the surface may effectually conceal elements of a very different kind which are lurking underneath. Thus a sparkling wit may conceal a gnawing sorrow, and boisterous and aggressive conduct may be the cloak beneath which is an agonising shyness and diffidence. These buried elements often express themselves on the surface in astonishingly indirect ways, and here again the distorting processes are much more pronounced and intricate in the nervous patient than in the simple instances we have selected from everyday life. It is indeed to processes of this type that many of the protean symptoms of nervous disorder are due.

Hence it will be clear that, to discover what is