=Gross Misconceptions.= Nervousness is caused by a lack of adjustment to the world as it is; therefore the only possible cure must be some sort of readjustment between the person’s inner forces and the demands of the social world.  As this lack of adjustment is concerned chiefly with the repressed instinct of reproduction, it is only natural that there should be people who believe that “the way out” lies in some form of physical satisfaction of the sex-impulse—­in marriage, in changing or ignoring the social code, in homo-sexual relations or in the practice of masturbation.  But we have only to look about us to see that this prescription does not cure.  Freud naively asks whether he would be likely to take three years to uncover and loosen the psychic resistances of his patients, if the simple prescription of sex-license would give relief.

Since there are as many married neurotics as single, it is evident that even marriage is not a sure preventive of nervousness.  License, on the other hand, can satisfy only a part of the individual’s craving.  Freud insists that the sex-instinct has a psychic component as well as a physical one, and that it is this psychic part which is most often repressed.  He maintains that for complete satisfaction there must be psychic union between mates, and that gratification of the physical component of sex when dissociated from psychic satisfaction, results in an accumulation of tension that reacts badly on the whole organism.

The psychic tension accumulating in adult sex-relations has its inception in the mistaken attitude on the part of the wife, who remains true to her childhood training that any pleasure in sex is vulgar; or on the part of the man, who reacts to the mood of the wife, or is held by his own unbroken mother-son complex; or on the part of both the tension piles up because of society’s taboo upon rearing large families.  As the first two factors in this lack of adjustment grew largely out of some kind of faulty education or from faulty reaction to early experiences, the only effective way to secure a better adaptation must be through a re-education which reaches down to that part of the personality that bears the stamp of the unfortunate early factors.

=Remaking Ourselves.= As a matter of fact, the science of psychotherapy or mental treatment is simply the science of re-education,—­a process designed to break up old unhealthy complexes which disrupt the forces of the individual, and to build up healthy complexes which adjust him to the social world and enable him to use his energy in useful ways.

Fortunately, minds can be changed.  It is easier to make over an unhealthy complex than to make over a weak heart, to straighten out a warped idea than to straighten a bent back.  Remarkable indeed have been some of the transformations in people who are supposed to have passed the plastic period in life.  While it is true that some persons become “set” in middle life, and almost impervious to new ideas, it is also true that a person at fifty has more richness of experience upon which to draw, more appreciation of the value of the good, than has a person at twenty.  If he really wants to change himself, he can do wonderful things by re-education.