Treatment of the Individual Cases : Part 2

The Nervous Housewife
by Abraham Myerson, M.D.

(Page 13 of 14)

But it is certain that in the majority of cases more than this may be accomplished. It is often a great surprise and relief to a woman to realize that her overconscientiousness, her fussiness, her rebellion, and discontent, her reaction to something or other is back of her symptoms. She has feared disease of the brain, tumor, insanity, or has blamed her trouble on some other definite physical basis.

If one deals with intelligence, explanation helps a great deal. The intelligent usually want to be convinced; they do not ask for miracles, they seek counsel as well as treatment.

It is my firm belief that the function of intelligence is to control instinct and emotion, and that temperament, if inborn, is not unchangeable, even at maturity. Once you convince a person that his or her symptoms are due to fear, worry, doubt, and rebellion you enlist the personal efforts to change.

A new philosophy of life must be presented. Less fussiness, less fear, more endurance, less reaction to the trifles of their life are necessary. The aimless drifter must be given a central purpose or taught to seek one; the dissatisfied and impatient must be asked, "Why should life give you all you want?" "What cannot be remedied must be endured!" What a wealth of wisdom in the proverb! One seeks to establish an ideal of fortitude, of patience, of fidelity to duty, - old-fashioned words, but serenity of spirit is their meaning. Suddenly to come face to face with one's self, to strip away the self-imposed disguise, to see clearly that jealousy, impatience, luxurious, and never satisfied tastes, a selfish and restless spirit, are back of ennui and fatigue, pains and aches of body and mind, is to step into a true self-understanding.

If a situation demands action, even drastic action, "surgical" action, then that action must be forthcoming, even though it hurts. To end doubt, perplexity, to cease being buffeted between hither and yon, is to end an intolerable life situation. I have in mind certain domestic situations, such as the effort to keep up in appearance and activity with those of more means and ability.

Sexual difficulties, so important and so common, demand the coöperation of the husband for remedy. He should be seen (for usually the wife consults the physician alone) and the situation gone over with him. Men are usually willing to help, willing to seek a way out. A neurasthenic wife is a sore trial to the patience and endurance of her husband and he is anxious enough to help cure her.

Where there is conflict of other kinds the situation is complicated by the intricacy of the factors. Financial difficulties especially wear down the patience and endurance of the partners, and the physician cannot prescribe a golden cure. In prosperous times there is less neurasthenia than in the unprosperous, just as there is less suicide.

Sometimes it is just one thing, one difficulty, over which the conflict rages. I have in mind two such cases, where one habit of the husband deënergized his wife by outraging her pride and love. When he was induced to yield on this point the wife came back to herself, - a highly strung, very efficient self.

In fact, the basis of treatment is the painstaking study of the individual woman and then the painstaking adjustment of that individual woman. It may mean the adjustment of the whole life situation to that housewife, or conversely the adjustment of the housewife to the life situation.

In many marital difficulties that one sees, not so much in practice as in contact with normal married couples, the trouble reminds one of the orang-outang in Kipling's story who had "too much Ego in his Cosmos." Marriage, to be successful, is based on a graceful recession of the ego in the cosmos of each of the partners. The prime difficulty is this; people do not like to recede the ego. And the worst offenders are the ones who are determined to stand up for the right, which usually is a disguised way of naming their desire.

One might speak of a thousand and one things that every man and every woman knows. One might speak of the death of love and the growth of irritation, the disappearance of sympathy, - these are the hopeless situations. But far more common and important, though less tragic, is the disappearance of the little attentions, the little love-making, the disappearance of good manners. Men are not the only or the worst offenders in this; the nervous housewife is very apt to be the scold and the nag. Perhaps the neurasthenia of the husband arises from his revolt against the incessant demands of his wife, but that's another story.

At any rate, there is what seems to be a cardinal point of difference between men and women, perhaps arising from some essential difference in make-up, perhaps in part due to difference in training. An essential need of the average American-trained woman is sympathy, constantly expressed, constantly manifested. The average man tends to become matter-of-fact, the average woman finds in matter-of-factness the death of love. She acts as if she believed that the little acts of love and sympathy are the more important as manifesting the real state of feeling, that the major duties were of less importance.

On this point most men and women never seem to agree. The man gets impatient over the constant demand for his attention. He thinks it unreasonable and childish. Intent upon his own struggle he is apt to think her affairs are minor matters. He thinks his wife makes mountains out of molehills and lacks a sense of proportion. He forgets that the devotion of the husband is the woman's anchor to windward, her grip on safety, - that his success and struggle are hers only in so far as he and she are intimate and lover-like. And women, even those who trust their husbands absolutely so far as physical loyalty goes, jealously watch them for the appearance of boredom, or lack of interest, for the falling off of the lover's spirit and feeling.

After marriage the rivalry of men expresses itself in business more than in love. Even where a woman does not fear another woman as a rival she fears the rivalry of business, - and with reason. So she craves attention, sympathy, as well as the dull love of everyday life. She ought to have it; it is her recompense for her lot, for her married life, her smaller interests. Now and then some great man intent upon a great work has some excuse for absorption in that work; for the great majority of men there is no such excuse. Their own affairs are also minor and are no more important than those of their wives. Fair play demands that the women they have immured in a home have a prior claim to their company, in at least the majority of the leisure hours. If in the time to come the home alters and a woman who continues to work marries a man who works, and they meet only at night, then it will be ethical for each to go his or her way. Marriage at present must mean the giving up of freedom for the man as well as for the woman, in the interests of justice and the race.

In medicine we prescribe bitter tonics which have the property of increasing appetite and vigor. For the husband of every woman there is this bit of advice; sympathy and attention constitute a sweet tonic, which if judiciously administered is of incomparable power and efficiency.

Boston
Little, Brown, And Company
1920