I want you to think of the people you have known who suffered mental breakdowns.

When we see a person with an alert, forceful, and orderly mind going through the business requirements of the day as if work were a pleasure (which it is), and see another person suffering from a "nervous breakdown" being wheeled along in an invalid's chair, all "shot to pieces," it is hard to realize that the invalid-chair specimen possesses quite as much energy as has the energetic individual who is making things move in the affairs of life. Yet such is the case.

In such nervous breakdown instances "Exhibit A" has most of his energy available for conscious utilization—has it all bunched up, so to speak; whereas "Exhibit B" is practically split wide open. The one is a united personality, utilizing his whole energy to meet the requirements of life, while the other is having most of his motive power dissipated in unconscious internecine strifes.

The cause of the nervous breakdown is the existence in the unconscious of a condition of mental anarchy; and the resultant nervous reactions are quite logical results of the underlying influences.

If, through carelessness or mental confusion, a person runs his automobile into a ditch or telegraph pole, he could not logically blame the steering gear of the machine for his predicament. And an analogous set of conditions exists in relation to so-called nervous breakdown.

Every form of so-called nervous breakdown is a symptom of the existence of unconscious mental turmoils; and when a "breakdown" occurs there is in reality a breaking out of something; a something that has at last become too insistent to be any longer restrained. It is not necessary, however, to get to the invalid-chair-stage of helplessness for unconscious handicaps to be apparent; neither is it wise to be in any way too self-satisfied as regards our own selves in this respect. For that matter, the person who is wholly free from unconscious handicaps is exceptional.

Have you ever had the experience of going along with the routine of life in the usual manner, and then almost all at once of having a feeling of depression come over you? As far as you can consciously understand, nothing has happened to cause this nervous breakdown; in fact, there is only one thing about it that you really understand, and that is that you have it.

Very often the term premonition is used in relation to such a passing feeling of depression, such nervous breakdown; there is an anxious feeling; a feeling that something unpleasant is going to happen. After this, whenever you have any such feeling, don't worry about anything going to happen; it has happened already. Something has happened already, and probably in the long, long ago at that; and you are just living it over again—though perhaps you don't know it. Something or other, unknown to your conscious self, "touched off" that unconscious mental mechanism of yours and stirred again into fierce activity some bunch of "touchy" old memories; memories which you buried alive at some time or other, but which simply declined to die.

Ever got out of bed the wrong way one morning? Ever get up with a grouch?

Ever tried to find out what it all meant? Probably ascribed your mental attitude to liver—if you have reflected about it at all. If you have ever caught yourself in this mental state of nervous breakdown, the chances are that you have been wholly unable to find any good reason for having had the mental experience. Nothing wrong occurred on the preceding day; neither does anything (consciously) distasteful lie ahead in the coming day's duties. Nevertheless, there is the grouch all the same; and it may be a particularly mean specimen at that.

Sometimes you may get up with something worse than a grouch; you may get up actually tired; and so tired that it seems that you have become more worn out during the night than you were when you went to bed. Ever stop to think it over? Probably not. On the contrary, the chances are that the liver was blamed again.

The real cause of such kind of nervous breakdown is that, although you have been asleep as far as your consciousness is concerned, you have been extremely active in your unconscious. Your great submerged mental mechanism has been on a rampage during the night; and your energy has been accordingly dissipated.

Something, on the preceding day probably, in some way or other, served as a stimulus to some set or sets of buried-alive memories; so that, as soon as the energetically restraining influences of your consciousness became lessened by sleep, out came your unconscious ghosts; and they made a night of it.

It took a whole lot of energy to keep up that all-night unconscious jamboree. No wonder that you got up feeling tired.

Ever been toddling along through life, taking things as they came as well as you could, and then been confronted with some little thing or other over which you stubbed your mental toes, so that you felt like "throwing things around"? Then, about nineteen and three-quarter minutes after such an experience, you have a slight realization that you went a little too far in what you said or did; and thirteen minutes later you feel pretty sure that you rather overdid things; and then, after the lapse of another brief "breathing spell," you become painfully conscious that you made a glorious ass of yourself?

It is a nasty feeling. I've been there; and consequently can speak from experience. And after such an episode, very probably (like the rest of us), you have chased about for some conveniently sized hole into which you could crawl, so to speak, and hide yourself until you have managed to get over the "outbreak" a little bit; get mentally convalescent again.

When you have had some such experience as the foregoing kinds of nervous breakdown, have you ever seriously tried to ascertain the cause of it all? Have you ever tried to link up the "explosion" with the immediate environmental causes?

If you make any such analytic efforts you will get an awakening; you will find that you did not "explode" by reason of anything that actually transpired at that time, or because of anything directly relating thereto. You will discover that you "blew up" because some particular incident (trivial and inconsequent in itself), unknown to your consciousness, touched off a group of old unconscious buried memories and led to certain kind of nervous breakdown. You therefore did not react to what occurred on that particular occasion at all. What happened was: by reason of a stirring into activity of some particular nest of buried-alive memories, you lived over again (in your unconscious) the actual sensations which you experienced when they originally occurred. You fought over again, in effigy, some old, past unpleasant experience.

The conditions which you have blamed for the nervous breakdown have, in reality, had little to do with the occurrence, except to act as a stimulus; they only happened to have some aspects about them which served to prod an old, unconscious, sore spot.

Again: have you ever taken an inventory of the people whom you know and the ones whom you casually meet in your daily life and noted those whom you like and those whom you don't like; then, after you have done this, have you tried to analyze just why it is that you happen to like or dislike Mr. A. or Mrs. B.?

A certain person "gives us a pain," or "makes us tired," mostly because of some feature of his personality that rubs something in our unconscious selves the wrong way. In reality, therefore, the poor devil who gets the blame for the trouble is oftentimes not the actual culprit at all. The real offender is that beastly mass of unconscious mental complexes that we are carrying about inside us.

Of course, we may think that we don't like a person because he or she has this, that, or some other characteristic we don't like. The truth is that if we would only stop to analyze things, we would realize that there are many people we don't dislike who may have similar temperamental qualities. In such circumstances as these we are not reacting from either the individual or any of his peculiarities. We have simply made him the scapegoat for certain weaknesses that exist in ourselves, for nervous breakdown that we had just experienced.

Then, again, have you ever started to talk economics or politics, or some other fool thing on which you may have "deep convictions" with the determination to keep quite cool, and to weigh the other chap down with the force of your well-measured arguments; and then, before the little seance had gone very far, have you found yourself so fighting mad that you could almost chew the ear off your adversary, throw him into the gutter, and sit on his head until you could get your breath again? And have you ever stopped to reason out just why such mental cannibalistic inclinations as these have broken out?

A little reflection will show you that you didn't get annoyed with that unfortunate adversary of yours at all, nor with anything that he said. It was only another instance of your being split again. Your conscious mind was pulling you one way and your unconscious mind another; and between the two of them you went to pieces.

It is always thus with the person who is rent by unconscious conflicts. He is constantly getting "torn"; but he thinks that it is the people he meets and the conditions which he encounters that are responsible. As a matter of fact, it is his own unconscious that is doing the tearing.

At every turn of the road the person who is blindly motivated by  unconscious  conflicts  is  everlastingly throwing blocks between his own feet over which he, himself, will stumble. He is forever seeing dangers       
where none exists, imagining the existence of obstacles where the road is clear, and taking insults and affronts where none have been intended.

This is the type of person who is so susceptible to the "nervous breakdown." This is the type of person who can be helped by self analysis.

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