FOREWORD


"Your trouble is nervous. There is nothing we can cut out and there is
nothing we can give medicine for." With these words a young college
student was dismissed from one of our great diagnostic clinics.

The physician was right. In a nervous disorder there is nothing to cut
out and there is nothing to give medicine for. Nevertheless there is
something to be done,--something which is as definite and scientific
as a prescription or a surgical operation.

Psychotherapy, which is treatment by the mental measures of
psycho-analysis and re-education, is an established procedure in the
scientific world to-day. Nervous disorders are now curable, as has
been proved by the clinical results in scores of cases from civil
life, under treatment by Freud, Janet, Prince, Sidis, DuBois, and
others; and in thousands of cases of war neuroses as reported by Smith
and Pear, Eder, MacCurdy, and other military observers. These army
experts have shown that shell-shock in war is the same as nervousness
in civil life and that both may be cured by psycho-analysis and
re-education.

For more than a decade, in handling nervous cases, I have made use of
the findings of recognized authorities on psychopathology. Truths have
been applied in a special way, with the features of re-education so
emphasized that my home has been called a psychological