ABSTRACT
Most cases that consult the medical psychologist, apart from psychotics, are suffering from symptoms psychological, or more often physical, the cause or aetiology of which is entirely unknown to them because it lies within their unconscious mind. Apart from those rare cases, the delight of every non-psychological clinician, where mental symptoms are the direct result of physical or chemical damage to the brain substance, the aetiology of nervous or psychogenic illness presents with one of the most absorbing and seemingly overwhelming problems that science has to offer. As some of the minor psychogenic ills are relatively superficial though far-reaching in effects, their aetiology, apart from hereditary predisposition, may well lie to a sensible degree within the individual lifetime of the patient. The very limited aetiological scope is the province of analysis and psychotherapy, and within it a limited, but in some cases very useful, amelioration of the patient’s symptoms and a subsequent helpful adjustment to environment may be achieved.
