It is possible to speak of thyroid moods, adrenal moods, ante-pituitary or post-pituitary moods, gonadal moods.  Each of these is the echo in the mind of cells stimulated or depressed, by concentration or dilution in the blood of particular internal secretions.  Restlessness and excitement can be produced experimentally by feeding thyroid.  Vague anxiety, depressive fancies and fears, imaginative overactivity can be removed by inhibiting the post-pituitary.  Hypersecretion of the ovary will cause a sexual susceptibility and a mood of genital obsession, capable of the most remarkable sublimations and perversions.

CHAPTER IX

THE BACKGROUNDS OF PERSONALITY

The question of moods and sublimations once raised introduces the problem of the relation of neuroses, nervous disorders without an organic disease basis, and mental abnormalities, to the endocrine system.  Obviously, in view of all the influences exerted by the ductless glands upon every organ and function of the body and mind, and their intermediary, the vegetative nervous system, a relation must exist.  Observations accumulated, some of which have been referred to in the preceding chapters, prove the complete, though complex, reality of such a deduction.

The history of attitudes toward nerve and mental disorders is a remarkable illustration of the vicissitudes of ignorance playing with words.  The Greeks, swayed and dazzled as they were by the magic of words which they discovered, yet never permitted themselves to be fooled by them.  As an explanation for the phenomena of hysteria in women, that benign mental disorder par excellence, they had the theory of a wandering about of the womb in the organism as a cause.  That provided an image of something material happening as an explanation.  With the triumphs of anatomy after the Renaissance, that naive view had to be discarded.  In its place the humoral theory held sway, with its good humors and its bad humors, and their bilious, lymphatic, nervous and sanguine admixtures.  But that, too, went the way of all flesh.  During the first half of the nineteenth century, a popular phrase, “nerves,” paraphrased by practitioners of medicine as neuroses, then came into vogue as the efficient cause of these troubles.  “Nerves” indeed today have filtered everywhere into the common consciousness.

Because of the irritant effects of light, food and social conditions, America has come to swarm with neurotics of every type, especially the sexual.  A rich field was created for cults of treatment, which spring up like weeds periodically all over the country.  We have seen how the American, Beard, was inspired by the idea that “nerves” represented a loss of tone, a 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, introduced the rest cure combined with overfeeding as a treatment for it.