episode, is a metaphor pure and simple.  From the standpoint of the process of repression as pictured by the student of the vegetative apparatus, the term signifies a real bottling up of energy.  For the repression means actual compression of muscle, the muscle contained in the viscera.  And the repression means a real interference with the release of energy, which remains bound up, tugging for room for expression as much as a spring tightly coiled in a box.  In the production of that tension an endocrine has often been decisive.  The endocrine nature of the individual may decide whether a subconscious, i.e., visceral or vegetative tension, is to come into being, live or die, in the face of a given situation.  If thereby, a permanent disturbance of the equilibrium between the components is brought about, a neurosis, expression of an unsatisfied vegetative tension, follows.

It has been hailed as a brand new discovery by those following the latest in psychology that the subconscious and the unconscious constitute a more essential component of the personality than the conscious.  As a matter of fact, common practice has recognized the fact, if not the mechanism and its significance, for ages.  It is not what people say or do—­it is how they say it:  that is how the true reactions of personality are recognized instinctively even by animals.  Tone and gesture (when not acted or posed) are accepted as symbols and symptoms of states of the inmost sancta sanctorum that words and wit never give entrance to, nay disguise and block.  Tone and gesture as revelations of the Inner-Me, the True-Me or Intra-Me if you will, are so potent because they are direct expressions of the vegetative apparatus.  The curl of a lip, the flicker of an eye-lash, the twitch of a shoulder are the overflow of energy cramped in the increased intravisceral pressure, determined by increased outflow of endocrine secretion.  Wittingly or unwittingly we interpret the little signs as messages from the deepest self, which they truly are.

NERVOUS BREAKDOWNS AND SHELL SHOCK

In civil life, the complex of symptoms Beard jumbled together as neurasthenia, when associated with a loss of self-control, so that the sufferer is incapacitated for the duties of everyday life, has become the popular “nervous breakdown.”  A sanitarium appears to be one of the necessary components of the condition.  It is the last act, the climax of “nerves.”

During the War of 1914-1918, thousands of cases of functional disorders of the nervous came to be grouped under “Shell Shock.”  The psychic phenomena in the wake of concussion of the brain due to explosives suggested the term, and its application to affections of self-control, or dissociations of the personality, with paralysis, blindness, speechlessness, loss of hearing and so on.  The War neurosis (including those arising in home service) is still a topical subject because thousands of mentally disabled soldiers are alive.