attendance on a sick husband or child. Then, suddenly one day, comes a
queer fear or a faint dizzy feeling which awakens great alarm, is
brooded upon, wondered at, and its return feared. This fearful
expectation really makes the return inevitable, and then the disease
starts. If the patient would seek competent advice at this stage,
recovery would usually be prompt. Instead, there is a long unsuccessful
struggle, with each defeat tending to make the fear or anxiety or
obsession habitual. Sometimes, perhaps in most cases, and in all cases
according to Freud and his followers, there is a long-hidden series of
causes behind the symptoms; subconscious sexual conflicts and
repressions, etc. It may be stated here that the present author is not
at all a Freudian and believes that the causes of these forms of
nervousness are simpler, more related to the big obvious factors in
life, than to the curiously complicated and bizarrely sexual Freudian
factors. People get tired, disgusted, apprehensive; they hate where they
should love; love where they should hate; are jealous unreasonably; are
bored, tortured by monotony; have their hopes, purposes, and desires
frustrated and blocked; fear death and old age, however brave a face
they may wear; want happiness and achievement, and some break, one way
or another, according to their emotional and intellectual resistance.
These and other causes are the great factors of the conditions we have
been considering.

Of all the forms of nervousness proper, the psychoneuroses, hysteria is
probably the one having its source mainly in the character of the
patient. That is to say, outward happenings play a part which is
secondary to the personality defect. Hysteria is one of the oldest of
diseases and has probably played a very important rôle in the history of
man. Unquestionably many of the religions have depended upon hysteria,
for it is in this field that "miracle cures" occur. All founders of