In taking up the special types predisposed to the nervousness of the housewife it is to be emphasized that conditions may bring about the neurosis in the normal housewife.  Nevertheless, there are groups of women who, because of their make-up or constitution, acquire the neurosis much more easily and much more intensely than do the normal women.  They are the types most commonly seen in the hospital clinic or in the private consulting room of the neurologist.

First comes the hyperaesthetic type.  One of the chief marks of advancing civilization is an increasing refinement of taste and desire.  The fundamental human needs are food, shelter, clothes, sex relations, and companionship.  These the savage has as well as his civilized brother, and he finds them not only necessary but agreeable.  What we call progress improves the food and the shelter, modifies the clothes, elaborates the sex relations and the code governing companionship.  With each step forward the cruder methods become more actively disagreeable, and only the refined methods prove agreeable.  In other words, desire keeps pace with improvement, so that although great advances materially have been made, there has been little advance, if any, in contentment.  This is because as we progress in refinement little things come to be important, manner becomes more essential than matter, and we get to the hyperaesthetic stage.

Thus the dinner becomes less important than the manner of serving it.  In the “highest circles” it is the savoir faire, the niceties of conduct, that count more than character.  Words become the means of playing with thought rather than the means of expressing it, and thought itself scorns the elemental and fundamental and busies itself with the vagaries of existence.

From another angle, to the hyperaesthetic more and more things have become disagreeable.  To the man of simple tastes and simple feelings, only the calamities are disagreeable; to the hyperaesthetic every breeze has a sting, and life is full of pin pricks.  “The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” are multiplied in number, and furthermore the reaction to them is intensified.  In the “Arabian Nights” the princess boasts that a rose petal bruises her skin, while her competitor in delicacy is made ill by a fiber of cotton in her silken garments.  So with the hyperaesthetic; an unintentional overlooking is reacted to as a deadly insult; the thwarting of any desire robs life of its savor; sounds become noises; a bit of litter, dirt; a little reality, intolerable crudity.

A woman with this temperament is a poor candidate for matrimony unless there goes with it a capacity for adjustment, unusual in this type.  Most men have their habitual crudities, their daily lapses, and every home is the theater of a constant struggle with the disagreeable.  Intensely pleased by the utmost refinements, these are too uncommon to make up for the shortcomings.  The hyperaesthetic woman