Other Typical Cases : Part 2

The Nervous Housewife
by Abraham Myerson, M.D.

(Page 12 of 17)

Another factor of importance needs some space. The bridal year needs seclusion, on account of a normal voluptuousness that attends it. No outsider should witness the embraces and the kisses; no outsider should be present to impede the tender talks and the outlet of feeling. It sometimes happens that the elderly have a reaction against all love-making; having outlived it they are disgusted thereby, they find it animal like, though indeed it is the lyric poetry of life. So it was in this case; the mother was a third party where three is more than a crowd, and she was a critical, disgusted third party. The young woman found herself taking a similar attitude to the love-making, found herself inhibiting her emotions and had a furtive feeling of being spied on.

The previously strong, energetic girl quickly broke down. Physical strength and energy may come entirely from a united spirit; a disunited spirit lowers the physical endurance remarkably. She became disloyal to matrimony, rebelled against housework, and yet loved her husband intensely. A prey to conflicting ideas and emotions, she fell into a circular thinking and feeling, where depressed thoughts cannot be dismissed and depressed energy follows depressed mood. Prominent in the symptoms were headache, sleeplessness, etc., for which the neurologist was consulted.

How to remedy this situation was to tax the wisdom of a Solomon. It probably would have remained insoluble, had not the statement I made that the main element in the difficulty was the mother-in-law vs.

daughter-in-law situation come to the ears of the old lady. Conscientious and well-meaning, that lady announced her determination to take up her residence with a married daughter who already had a well-organized household, and whose husband was a favorite of the mother's. Despite the mother-in-law joke of the humorists, the mother-in-law is far more friendly to a daughter's husband than to a son's wife.

This solved part of my patient's problem. There remained the adjustment to domestic life. This was hard, and though in part successful, it was delayed by the sterility of the marriage. The husband and wife agreed that pending a child she might well become active again in the larger world. Though the best place would have been her old work, pride and convention stood in the way, and so she entered upon more or less amateurish social work. Finally, perhaps as an unconsciously humorous compensation for her own troubles, she became an ardent and thoroughly efficient secretary to a league of housewives that aimed at better conditions. This work took up her time except for the supervising of a servant, and this nondomestic arrangement worked well since she had no children.

Case VIII. The childless, neglected woman.

It happened that two of the severest cases I have seen occurred, one in a Jewish woman and the other in a young Irish woman, with such an identity of symptoms and social domestic background that either case might have been interchanged for the other without any appreciable difference. The factors in the cases might simply be summarized as childlessness, anxiety, neglect, and loneliness, and in each case the main symptoms were anxiety, attacks of cardiac symptoms, fatigue, and sleeplessness.

The young Jewish woman, thirty years of age, had been married since the age of twenty. Before marriage she worked in the needle trades, was well and strong and had no knowledge of any particular nervous or mental disease in her family. She married a man of twenty-four, who had also been in the tailoring business and had branched out in a small way in business. This business required him to go to work at about seven-thirty in the morning and he finished at nine-thirty in the evening. In the earlier years of their marriage he came home rather promptly at the end of his long day and the pair were quite happy.

At about the third year after marriage the woman became quite alarmed at her continued sterility. She commenced to consult physicians and in the course of the next three years underwent three operations with no result. She began to brood over this, especially since about this time her husband began to show a decided lack of interest in the home. He would come home at twelve and later, and she found that he was playing cards, - in fact had become a confirmed gambler. When she first discovered this, she became greatly worried; made a trip to New York where his people lived and induced them to bring pressure to bear on him for reform. This they did, with the result that for about six months he remained away from cards and gave more attention to his wife.

The reform lasted only for a short period and then the husband plunged deeper into gaming than ever, and there were periods of three and four days at a stretch when he would not return home at all. At such times the lonely wife, who still loved her husband, fell into a perturbed and agitated frame of mind, the worse because she confided her difficulties to no one. When he would return, shamefaced and repentant, she would reproach him bitterly and this would bring about renewed attention, gifts, etc., for a week or so, - and then backsliding. Finally even the brief spasmodic reforms grew less common, her reproaches were answered hotly or listened to with indifference, and she became "practically a widow" except for the occasions when the sexual feeling mastered them both.

The neurosis in this case approached almost an insanity. The dwelling alone, the desperate obsessive desire for a child to bring back his love and attentions and to satisfy her own maternal instinct, the pain the sight of happy couples with children gave her and which made her shun other women and their company, the fear that her husband was unfaithful (which fear was probably justified), and the lack of any fixed or definite purpose, the lack of a great pride or self-sufficiency, brought on symptoms that necessitated her removal to a sanitarium.

This of course pricked the conscience of her husband. He visited her frequently, vowed a complete change, promised to bring his business to the point where he would be able to come home at six, etc., etc. Gradually she improved and finally made a partial recovery.

Whether or not the husband kept his promises I cannot say. On the chances he did. Most confirmed gamblers, however, remain gamblers. The lure of excitement is more potent to such men than a wife whose charm has gone, through familiarity, through time itself, through the inconstancy of passion and love. The gambler usually knows no duty; he is kind and generous but only to please himself. He is easily bored and his sympathies rarely stand the disagreeable long; he knows only one constant attraction, - Chance.

Boston
Little, Brown, And Company
1920