A Viennese neurologist of considerable reputation has recently written
about the _Binnenleben,_ as he terms it, or buried life of human beings.
No doctor, this writer says, can get into really profitable relations
with a nervous patient until he gets some sense of what the patient's
_Binnenleben_ is, of the sort of unuttered inner atmosphere in which his
consciousness dwells alone with the secrets of its prison-house. This
inner personal tone is what we can't communicate or describe
articulately to others; but the wraith and ghost of it, so to speak, are
often what our friends and intimates feel as our most characteristic
quality. In the unhealthy-minded, apart from all sorts of old regrets,
ambitions checked by shames and aspirations obstructed by timidities, it
consists mainly of bodily discomforts not distinctly localized by the
sufferer, but breeding a general self-mistrust and sense that things are
not as they should be with him. Half the thirst for alcohol that exists
in the world exists simply because alcohol acts as a temporary
anaesthetic and effacer to all these morbid feelings that never ought to
be in a human being at all.
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