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August 29, 2023

Glenn Reynolds reckons “Looking around at our politics, it’s hard not to feel that there’s an increasingly neurotic strain to them,” what with COVID and “safetyism” and the single women voting Democrat epidemic.

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Now the notion of “neurosis,” although invented by a Scot, was popularized by Freud and then Jung. But today the term is no longer used in professional psychiatry. Still, “mental health,” the child of neurosis, is a Thing, and if you read your Freud and your Jung, mostly a Girl Thing.  But I wondered what life was like before Freud and psychiatry.

For that, I always go to my favorite 19th-century novels. And, first off there is Mrs. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice and her “nerves;” they sometimes kept her in bed. In Dickens there is Miss Havisham in Great Expectations who stopped her life when she was left at the altar. In George Eliot there is the eternal worrier Lisbeth, mother of Adam Bede. Two of those ladies were rich and privileged and had servants to look after them and their “nerves.” As for the other, George Eliot writes this about Lisbeth:

Like all complaining women, she complained in the expectation of being soothed, and when Adam said nothing, she was only prompted to complain more bitterly.

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So I would say that women have always complained, always suffered from “nerves,” always needed someone to “soothe” them. And if nobody volunteered to soothe them, they “were prompted to complain more bitterly.”

That was the way it was until Freud and Jung cranked up “nerves” into the science of “neurosis” and made it into a Thing. Today, women complain that they are “stressed out.”

But whatabout men? La Wik’s neurosis piece notes the “shell shock” or “battle neurosis” experienced by men in World War I. Today, experts call it “combat stress reaction.”  I wrote about it in 2019.

It is said, for instance, that a man cannot endure more than 100 days in combat. He goes through three stages: thinking “it won’t happen to me,” then thinking “it’s bound to happen to me,” and finally “why hasn’t it happened to me?” After 100 days, the combat soldier goes mad — battle fatigue, shell shock, mental health issues, PTSD.

I wonder what is going to happen in the next war with women and transgenders in combat.

So what is Glenn Reynolds talking about? He is talking about how modern politicians have exploited women’s “nerves” and used it to corral the votes of single women. This makes sense, because single women in the modern era don’t have husbands or Adam Bedes or Dinah Morrises to “soothe” them. They are, you might say, victims waiting to be exploited by sauntering politicians. And what do they do? They “complain more bitterly.”