"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 psyc ho-
analysis and re-education.
