=Securing an Audience.= Besides furnishing relief from too intense strain, a nervous breakdown brings secondary advantages that are at most only dimly recognized by the individual.  One of the most intense cravings of the primitive part of the subconscious is for an audience; a nervous symptom always secures that audience.  The invalid is the object of the solicitous care of the family, friends, physician, and specialist.  Pomp and ceremony, so dear to the child-mind, make their appeal to the dissociated part of the personality.  The repressed instincts, hungry for love and attention, delight in the petting and special care which an illness is sure to bring.  Secretly and unconsciously, the neurotic takes a certain pleasure in all the various changes that are made for his benefit,—­the dismantling of striking clocks, the muffling of household noises, the banishing of crowing roosters, and the changes in menu which must be carefully planned for his stomach.

This characteristic of finding pleasure in personal ministrations is plainly a regression to the infantile phase of life.  The baby demands and obtains the center of the stage.  Later he has to learn to give it up, but the neurotic gets the center again and is often very loth to leave it for a more inconspicuous place.

=Capitalizing an Illness.= Then, too, a neurosis provides a way of escape from all sorts of disagreeable duties.  It can be capitalized in innumerable ways,—­ways that would horrify the invalid if he realized the truth.  Much of the resentment manifested against the suggestion that the neurosis is psychic in origin is simply a resistance against giving up the unconsciously enjoyed advantages of the illness.  An honest desire to get well is a long step toward cure.

The purposive character of a nervous illness is well illustrated by two cases reported by Thaddeus Hoyt Ames.[39] A young woman, the drudge of the family, suddenly became hysterically blind, that is, she became blind despite the fact that her eyes and optic nerves proved to be unimpaired.  She remained blind until it was proved to her that a part of her welcomed the blindness and had really produced it for the purpose of getting away from the monotony of her unappreciated life at home.  She naturally resented the charge but finally accepted it and “turned on” her eyesight in an instant.  The other patient, a man, became blind in order to avoid seeing his wife who had turned out to be not at all what he had hoped.  When he realized what he was doing, he decided that there might be better ways of adjusting himself to his wife.  He then switched on his seeing power, which had never been really lost, but only disconnected and dissociated from the rest of his mind.

[Footnote 39:  Thaddeus Hoyt Ames:  Archives of Ophthalmology, Vol.  XLIII, No. 4, 1914.]