Nervous Ills: Their Causes and Cure
Boris Sidis, 1922
Your heart pounds, your thoughts tangle, and it seems something is wrong with your body. Back in 1922, the psychologist and physician Boris Sidis argued that behind many “nervous” troubles stands a fear for oneself that has lost all sense of measure. You will learn how such fear grows out of childhood frights, why it jumps from one cause to another, and what, according to Sidis, can be set against it.
Who it is for
For people worn down by worry about their health and their future, who notice that one fear keeps giving way to another, and who are interested in the history of psychology.
The instinct of fear falls asleep last and wakes first.
The lunch after which life felt frightening
In January 1911, a twenty-year-old clerk at a dry cleaner's has lunch in a restaurant. For five years he has worked fifteen, sometimes eighteen hours a day, and at night he has gone out with friends. Suddenly blood rushes to his head, weakness and trembling come over him, and his knees give way in the street. He is taken to his father's shop, and there he collapses. At the hospital the duty doctor calls it acute indigestion.
From that day on, as he later recalled, the real trouble began. He no longer fears food, but new attacks. He fears leaving the house, fears lying down, fears living and fears dying. His story was later written down by Boris Sidis, a psychologist and physician who for a quarter of a century treated people with so-called nervous illnesses.
In 1922, Sidis published a popular book about what, in his conviction, lies behind such troubles. Not weak nerves, not bad heredity, and not the suppressed desires that Sigmund Freud wrote about, but an ancient force: fear, which rests on the instinct of self-preservation. He called neurosis a disease of fear for oneself.
This is the view of a physician from the early twentieth century, not modern medicine, and Sidis argued sharply, sometimes bluntly. But his main idea is easy to test on yourself: fear, which should guard life, can grow and take it over. Next you will learn when fear helps and when it shackles, how a childhood fright sprouts new shoots thirty years later, and what, according to Sidis, gives a person back their strength.
The guard who falls asleep last
Sidis describes a scene familiar to anyone who has lived in a big city: when danger comes suddenly, a nervous person freezes in the middle of the street and cannot take a single step. Cows and horses are just as hard to lead out of a burning stable. From fear they go rigid and die in the smoke. The feeling that should save here destroys.
To understand how this is possible, Sidis starts with the basis of all life. From microbe to human, every creature holds to one thing: keeping its life. This is the instinct of self-preservation, and in higher animals its protective side shows up as fear. Sidis calls fear the guardian of everything alive: it falls asleep last, wakes first, and follows us like a shadow.
According to Sidis, fear has three stages.
• Spurring. Mild fear halts current activity and turns attention to a new sound or smell. Strength gathers for flight or fight. This is normal and as necessary as hunger and thirst. Sidis regarded the absence of such fear as closer to an illness.
• Inhibiting. Hands tremble, breathing catches, thoughts scatter and memory fails. Control can still be regained, sometimes even with a new rush of strength, but the chances are smaller.
• Paralyzing. The body goes rigid, like a small animal that plays dead. Here fear no longer guards. It leads to ruin.
Sidis takes his main conclusion from the ancients: as Plato taught, a person must know what to fear and what not to fear. The task is not to fear nothing at all. The task is to notice which stage your fear has reached. Does it gather you for action, or has it already tied your hands and feet?
About the author
Boris Sidis (1867-1923) was an American psychologist and physician, born in the Russian Empire. He studied suggestion, sleep and the unconscious, and ran his own psychotherapy clinic in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
All books by this author: Boris Sidis
Terms from the book
- Freud
- Tuberculosis
- chronometer
- neurosis
- Plato
- eugenics
- typhoid
- James
- Pericles
- instinct of self-preservation: The innate drive of a living being to keep its life. For Sidis it is the basis of everything alive, and fear is its protective side.
- rabies: A deadly viral disease passed on by the bites of infected animals, most often dogs. Its old name is hydrophobia.
- syphilis: An infectious disease passed mainly through sexual contact. Before antibiotics it was treated for a long time and with great hardship, and it caused intense fear.
- dermatologist: A doctor who treats diseases of the skin and mucous membranes.
- Geographic tongue: A harmless feature of the tongue: smooth red patches with a white border appear on it, looking like continents on a map. The patches change shape and place.
- neophobia: Fear of the new. For Sidis, one of the main signs of a person who has been taken over by fear for oneself.
- rest cure: A method of the late nineteenth century proposed by the American physician Silas Weir Mitchell: long bed rest, heavy feeding and isolation. Sidis considered it harmful for his patients.
- reserve energy: A concept of Sidis and James: a person usually uses only a small part of their strength, and the rest is kept in reserve for hard moments. It is their hypothesis, not a measured quantity.
- Romanes: George Romanes (1848-1894) was a British naturalist and a friend of Charles Darwin who studied the minds of animals.
All terms
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