'Nervousness' and education : the role of the teacher / by Tom A. Williams.

  • Williams, Tom A. (Tom Alfred), 1870-
Date:
1910
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: 'Nervousness' and education : the role of the teacher / by Tom A. Williams. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    doubter. He is the individual who easily receives suggestions, whose mainspring is imitation. He always follows the fashion; he does what every one is doing; he is the first to stampede at the fire; the first to cheer when carried away at a political meeting; the first to give way to the ani- mal impulse of hitting the boy who is down. He is the bluffer and boaster when successful, and the sycophant when not so. This is the type from which are drawn the cases of suggestion psychoneurosis which are called hysteria. It has occurred in this way: Every student of psychology knows that the perception of any act tends to reproduce itself in the re- cipient in a similar act, and this would always happen if what we call inhibition were not used. The reproduction of the act is a natural reflex; its inhibition is a cultivated or conditioned reflex. Now hysterica] people tend to follow the impulses derived from imitation or induced by the speech or acts of others in the form of suggestion. prevention. The best means of preventing this tendency is again games. The temptation of the automatic act is there at its height, but so is the interest- sentiment. By utilizing this the teaclier can bring out all the powers of inhibition which the boy possesses. He can be taught not to strike, not to follow, not to jeer, not to give in, even though others do. He can learn to make a pride in being his own man, and not a puppet in the hands of others. EXAMPLES. A railway shock is called traumatic-neurosis, and is one of the ways in which such people may react. They are then obeying the idea, that they ought to be incapacitated, and even neurasthenic, as a consequence of what they conceive to be a catastrophe capable of causing paralysis, loss of
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