THE BACKGROUNDS OF PERSONALITY 187 



flabbiness, weakness and softness of the nerves, to coin the word 

 neurasthenia. Nerve exhaustion he believed was the cause of 

 the nerve weakness. Weir Mitchell, another American, intro- 

 duced the rest cure combined with overfeeding as a treatment 

 for it. 



An analytical French neurologist, Charcot, was not to be satis- 

 fied by words of Latin-Greek derivation. Insisting upon the 

 significance of the individual mental workings of each case, he 

 and his pupil Janet began to unravel a tangle which has led to 

 the present revolution in psychology. For Freud, Jung and 

 Adler took up the story where Janet left off. 



Janet elaborated the ideas of a subconscious and an uncon- 

 scious, a dissociation of the components of the mind, and a split- 

 ting of the personality. Lumping the phenomena of amnesia, 

 somnambulism, hypnotism, anesthesia, obsession and hysteria 

 into the grand group of mental dissociations and disintegrations, 

 he achieved a unification never considered possible before him. 

 Suggestion as a mode of cure was also emphasized and elaborated 

 by him to an undreamed-of degree. 



Freud, in 1895, studying a case of hysteria with Breuer, had 

 attempted cure by the method of free association, attempting to 

 get the hysteric to pour out her mental life. Not succeeding, and 

 his interest aroused by her continual references to her dreams, 

 he discovered that by means of those dreams he could tap the 

 subconscious and unconscious in regions hitherto inaccessible. 

 For in the dreams, ideas, persons, and experiences appeared that 

 never came upon the stage of the conscious. From that finding 

 he developed the concept of repression, i. e., the relegation of a 

 painful experience into the unconscious, and kept imprisoned 

 there by the censor. Also how there it became the complex, 

 which, like a stage manager, never appeared before the footlights 

 of the conscious, but determined its content just the same by 

 inhibition or stimulation of any character or scene to be enacted 

 upon it. 



A complete critique of Freudianism cannot be attempted here. 

 But in relation to the endocrine system as controllers of nerve 

 function in health and disease, a valid criticism can be made. 

 Firstly, the Freudian jargon, its technicalities and explanations, 

 are metaphors. Some may regard them as justifiable descriptions 

 of mental processes. But it certainly can be urged against them 

 that they provide us with no idea concerning what is happening 

 in the cells of the body and brain as explanation for the event, 



