never focus his consciousness; and the overattentive man who can never
dismiss any subject; the indifferent man on whom nothing produces
evident impression and feeling; the over-sensitive man who reacts on
slight impressions with exaggerated emotion; and yet every one of such
and a thousand similar variations, needs only the projection on a larger
scale to demonstrate a mental life which is self-destructive. The silly
girl and the stupid boy, the man who has the blues and the reckless
creature, are certainly worse equipped for the struggles of existence
than those who are intellectually and emotionally and volitionally
well-balanced. They will take wrong steps in life, they may be
unsuccessful, their stupidity may lead them to the poorhouse, their
recklessness may lead them to the penitentiary. And yet we do not speak
of them as patients because their disproportionate mental features may
be sufficiently corrected by other mental states which are perhaps more
strongly developed.

Further, inasmuch as human life just in its mental functions is related
to its social surroundings, much must depend on the external conditions,
whether the disproportion and abnormality has to be treated as
pathological. The mind which may find perhaps its way under the most
simple rural conditions would be unable to protect life under the
complex conditions of a great city. The man who in certain surroundings
may appear a crank has to be treated as a patient in a different set of
life conditions. Wherever psychotherapeutic work is in question, perhaps
nothing is more important than to keep steadily in mind this continuity
between normal and abnormal mental features. The mental disturbance must
constantly be looked upon as a change of proportions between functions
which, as such, belong to every normal life. We have to train and to
develop, and thus to reenforce, that which is too weak, and we have to
drain off and to suppress and to inhibit that which is too strong.

Yet just this functional view of disease must remind us strongly from
the beginning that it would be utterly in vain to draw any demarcation
line between psychical disturbances and physical ones. We have seen from
the start that from the point of view of physiological psychology,
there can be no psychical process without an accompanying physiological
process in the brain. Every disturbance in mental actions is thus at the
same time a disturbance in the equilibrium of nervous funct