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Over two thousand years ago, Socrates wrote over the Temple at Delphi “Know Thyself.” Centuries have elapsed since that great philosopher thus admonished the race, and yet it has been left to the last half of the last century for neurologists, psychoanalysts, to interpret the handwriting on the wall.
By a special technique, these founders of a new psychology are leading patients suffering with a neurosis, a symptom of error in the unconscious mind, out of darkness into daylight: leading them to see that their symptoms (illness) are due to psychic skews in the development of the character, often dating back to infancy and childhood.
Mankind is heir to ills of the mind as well as to ills of the flesh. It is hard to decide which works the greater mischief.
Probably the neuroses are the most distressing, if not the most frequent of maladies. Undoubtedly, the neuroses lead to greater social unhappiness.
The skilled surgeon with a marvellous precision in every movement cuts down, perchance, into the viscera, removes a troublesome cancer, and the patient becomes well.
The skilled analyst, with his special technique, probes down into the unconscious mind, brings the offending psyche to the consciousness, and the patient becomes well.
The analyst, freeing the mind torn by its emotional conflicts, “letting out” the strangled emotions, brought relief from within.
One is a physiological process, the other a psychological process; but analogous in that both physicians are searching for and eliminating something that was causing symptoms and suffering.
Bringing the offending psyche from darkness, the unconscious, into daylight, the conscious mind, the patient begins to “know himself.” He has a better understanding of his possibilities and growth, a better readjustment to his environment: a process known in Psychoanalysis as “sublimation.”