We have only to read the endless advertisements of cathartics and “internal baths,” or to check up the quantity of laxatives sold at any drug store, to realize the wide-spread bondage to that great bugaboo constipation.  He who is constipated can hardly prove an alibi to “nerves.”  Then there are the school-teachers and others who are worn out at the end of each year’s work, hardly able to hold on until vacation; and the people who can’t manage their tempers; and those who are upset over trifles; and those who are dissatisfied with life.  To a certain degree, at least, all of these are nervous persons.  The list grows.

=Half-Power Engines.= These people are all supposed to be well.  They keep going—­by fits and starts—­and as they are used to running on three cylinders, with frequent stops for repairs, they accept this rate of living as a matter of course, never realizing that they might be sixty horse-power engines, instead of their little thirty or forty.  For this large and neglected class of people psychotherapy has a stimulating message, and for them many of the following pages have been written.

=The Real Sufferers.= These so-called normal people are merely on the fringe of nervousness, on the border line between normality and disease.  Beyond them there exists a great company of those whose lives have been literally wrecked by “nerves.”  Their work interrupted or given up for good, their minds harassed by doubts and fears, their bodies incapacitated, they crowd the sanatoria and the health resorts in a vain search for health.  From New England to Florida they seek, and on to Colorado and California, and perhaps to Hawaii and the Orient, thinking by rest and change to pull themselves together and become whole again.  There are thousands of these people—­lawyers, preachers, teachers, mothers, social workers, business and professional folk of all sorts, the kind of persons the world needs most—­laid off for months or years of treatment, on account of some kind of nervous disorder.

=Various Types of Nervousness.= The psychoneuroses are of many forms.[3] To some people “nerves” means nervous prostration, breakdown, fatigue, weakness, insomnia, the blues, upset stomach, or unsteady heart,—­all signs of so-called neurasthenia or nerve-weakness.  To others the word “nerves” calls up memories of strange, emotional storms that seem to rise out of nowhere, to sweep the sky clear of everything else, and to pass as they came, leaving the victim and the family equally mystified as to their meaning.  These strange alterations of personality are but one manifestation of hysteria, that myriad-faced disorder which is able to mimic so successfully the symptoms of almost every known disease, from tumors and fevers to paralysis and blindness.

[Footnote 3:  The technical term for nervousness is psycho-neurosis—­disease of the psyche.  There are certain “real neuroses” such as paralysis and spinal-cord disease, which involve an organic impairment of nerve-tissue.  However, as this book deals only with psychic disturbance, we shall, throughout, use the term neuroses and psycho-neuroses indiscriminately, to denote nervous or functional disorders.]