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original structure and "make-up" of the brain and nervous system, affections of brain or other organs, mental causes such as worries, anxieties and conflicting emotions, the secondary bodily effects produced by these mental causes, the mental effects produced by the bodily conditions, and so forth. Each and every one of these factors plays its part in the chain, and helps to mould the final link, the symptom, to the shape in which we see it in our patient. We may picture the processes involved, of course in purely diagrammatic fashion, and without making any attempt to indicate the actual subtleties of action and reaction, by the aid of the following figure:—
To cure our patient we must break this chain somewhere, and the fundamental problem of treatment is: "Which link shall be attacked?" The method of treatment selected depends entirely on the solution of this problem, because if we decide to attack a "bodily" link we must proceed by physiological means, if a "mental" link, by psychological means. Now it will surely be clear that we must direct our attack in the first place against the most important link, because unless this is broken no complete cure can be hoped for. In the second place, if the most important link is inaccessible to the weapons at present in our possession, we must attack one of the minor links with the object of
