Applied Psychology for Nurses

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Title: Applied Psychology for Nurses

Author: Mary F. Porter

Release Date: July 16, 2006 [EBook #18843]

Language: English

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Applied Psychology

for Nurses

By

Mary F. Porter, A. B.

Graduate Nurse; Teacher of Applied Psychology,

Highland Hospital, Asheville, N. C.

Philadelphia and London

W. B. Saunders Company

1921

Copyright, 1921, by W. B. Saunders Company

PRINTED IN AMERICA

PRESS OF

W. B. SAUNDERS COMPANY

PHILADELPHIA

TO THE MEMORY OF

MY FATHER

FOREWORD

This little book is the outgrowth of a conviction, strengthened by some years of experience with hundreds of supposedly normal young people in schools and colleges, confirmed by my years of training in a neurological hospital and months of work in a big city general hospital, that it is of little value to help some people back to physical health if they are to carry with them through a prolonged life the miseries of a sick attitude. As nurses I believe it is our privilege and our duty to work for health of body and health of mind as inseparable. Experience has proved that too often the physically ill patient (hitherto nervously well) returns from hospital care addicted to the illness-accepting attitude for which the nurse must be held responsible.

I conceive of it as possible that every well trained nurse in our country shall consider it an essential to her professional success to leave her patient imbued with the will to health and better equipped to attain it because the sick attitude has been averted, or if already present, has been treated as really and intelligently as the sick body. To this end I have dealt with the simple principles of psychology only as the nurse can immediately apply them.

The writer wishes to acknowledge her indebtedness for criticism of this work and for several definitions better than her own, in the chapters The Normal Mind and Variations From Normal Mental Processes, to Dr. Robert S. Carroll, who through the years of hospital training helped her to translate her collegiate psychology from fascinating abstract principles into the sustaining bread of daily life.

Mary F. Porter.

Asheville, N. C.,

August, 1921.

CONTENTS

PAGE

CHAPTER I

What is Psychology? 11

CHAPTER II

Consciousness 20 The Unconscious 23 Consciousness is Complex 29 Consciousness in Sleep 31 Consciousness in Delirium 32

CHAPTER III

Organs of Consciousness 34 The Central and Peripheral Nervous Systems in Action 35 The Sympathetic Nervous System 37

CHAPTER IV

Relation of Mind and Body 40 The Cerebrum or Forebrain 43

CHAPTER V

The Normal Mind 47

CHAPTER VI

The Normal Mind ( Continued ) 59 Instinct 59 Memory 62 The Place of Emotion 67 The Beginning of Reason 69 Development of Reason and Will 71 Judgment 72 Reaction Proportioned to Stimuli 75 Normal Emotional Reactions 77 The Normal Mind 77

CHAPTER VII

Psychology and Health 79 Necessity of Adaptability 80 The Power of Suggestion 84 One Thought Can Be Replaced by Another 89 Habit is a Conserver of Effort 90 The Saving Power of Will 93

CHAPTER VIII

Variations from Normal Mental Processes 95 Disorders and Perversions 95

CHAPTER IX

Variations from Normal Mental Processes ( Continued ) 101 Factors Causing Variations from Normal Mental Processes 108

Heredity108

Environment109

Personal Reactions110

CHAPTER X

Attention the Root of Disease or Health Attitude 112 The Attention of Interest 112 The Attention of Reason and Will 118

CHAPTER XI

Getting the Patient’s Point of View 124 What Determines the Point of View 124 Getting the Other Man’s Point of View 126 The Deluded Patient 133 Nursing the Deluded Patient 135 The Obsessed Patient 136 The Mind a Prey to False Associations 137

CHAPTER XII

The Psychology of the Nurse 139 Accuracy of Perception 141 Training Perception 142 Association of Ideas 143 Concentration 146 Self-training in Memory 150

CHAPTER XIII

The Psychology of the Nurse ( Continued ) 152 Emotional Equilibrium 152 Self-correction 160 Training the Will 161

CHAPTER XIV

The Nurse of the Future 164

Index 169

Applied Psychology for Nurses

CHAPTER I

WHAT IS PSYCHOLOGY?

Wise men study the sciences which deal with the origins and development of animal life, with the structure of the cells, with the effect of various diseases upon the tissues and fluids of the body; they study the causes of the reactions of the body cells to disease germs, and search for the origin and means of extermination of these enemies to health. They study the laws of physical well-being. They seek for the chemical principles governing the reactions of digestive fluids to the foods they must transform into heat and energy. So the doctor learns to combat disease with science, and at the same time to apply scientific laws of health that he may fortify the human body against the invasion of harmful germs. Thus, eventually, he makes medicine itself less necessary.

But another science must walk hand in hand today with that of medicine; for doctors and nurses are realizing as never before the power of mind over body, and the hopelessness of trying to cure the one without considering the other. Hence psychology has come into her own as a recognized science of the mind, just as biology, histology, chemistry, pathology, and medicine are recognized sciences governing the body. As these are concerned with the how and why of life, and of the body reactions, so psychology is concerned with the how and why of conduct and of thinking. For as truly as every infectious disease is caused by a definite germ, just as truly has every action of man its adequate explanation, and every thought its definite origin. As we would know the laws of the sciences governing man’s physical well-being that we might have body health, so we would know the laws of the mind and of its response to its world in order to attain and hold fast to mind health. Experience with patients soon proves to us nurses that the weal and woe of the one vitally affects the other.

Psychology is the science of mental life, both of its phenomena and their conditions.

So William James took up the burden of proof some thirty years ago, and assured a doubting world of men and women that there were laws in the realm of mind as certain and dependable as those applying to the world of matter—men and women who were not at all sure they had any right to get near enough the center of things to see the wheels go round. But today thousands of people are trying to find out something of the way the mind is conceived, and to understand its workings. And many of us have in our impatient, hasty investigation, self-analytically taken our mental machines all to pieces and are trying effortfully to put them together again. Some of us have made a pretty bad mess of it, for we tore out the screws and pulled apart the adjustments so hastily and carelessly that we cannot now find how they fit. And millions of other machines are working wrong because the engineers do not know how to keep them in order, put them in repair, or even what levers operate them. So books must be written—books of directions.

If you can glibly recite the definition above, know and explain the meaning of mental life, describe its phenomena and their conditions, illustrating from real life; if you can do this, and prove that psychology is a science, i. e., an organized system of knowledge on the workings of the mind—not mere speculation or plausible theory—then you are a psychologist, and can make your own definitions. Indeed, the test of the value of a course such as this should be your ability, at its end, to tell clearly, in a few words of your own, what psychology is.

The word science comes from a Latin root, scir, the infinitive form, scire, meaning to know. So a science is simply the accumulated, tested knowledge, the proved group of facts about a subject, all that is known of that subject to date. Hence, if psychology is a science, it is no longer a thing of guesses or theories, but is a grouping of confirmed facts about the mind, facts proved in the psychology laboratory even as chemical facts are demonstrated in the chemical laboratory. Wherein psychology departs from facts which can be proved by actual experience or by accurate tests, it becomes metaphysics, and is beyond the realm of science; for metaphysics deals with the realities of the supermind, or the soul, and its relations to life, and death, and God. Physics, chemistry, biology have all in their day been merely speculative. They were bodies of theory which might prove true or might not. When they worked, by actually being tried out, they became bodies of accepted facts, and are today called sciences. In the same way the laws of the working of the mind have been tested, and a body of assured facts about it has taken its place with other sciences.

It must be admitted that no psychologist is willing to stop with the known and proved, but, when he has presented that, dips into the fascinations of the yet unknown, and works with promising theory, which tomorrow may prove to be science also. But we will first find what they have verified, and make that the safe foundation for our own understanding of ourselves and others.

What do we mean by mental life?—or, we might say, the science of the life of the mind. And what is mind?

But let us start our quest by asking first what reasons we have for being sure mind exists. We find the proof of it in consciousness, although we shall learn later that the activities of the mind may at times be unconscious. So where consciousness is, we know there is mind; but where consciousness is not, we must find whether it has been, and is only temporarily withdrawn, before we say Mind is not here. And consciousness we might call awareness, or our personal recognition of being—awareness of me, and thee, and it. So we recognize mind by its evidences of awareness, i. e., by the body’s reaction to stimuli; and we find mind at the very dawn of animal life.

Consciousness is evidenced in the protozoön, the simplest form in which animal life is known to exist, by what we call its response to stimuli. The protozoön has a limited power of self-movement, and will accept or reject certain environments. But while we see that mind expresses itself in consciousness as vague, as dubious as that of the protozoön, we find it also as clear, as definite, as far reaching as that of the statesman, the chemist, the philosopher. Hence, the phenomena of mental life embrace the entire realms of feeling, knowing, willing—not of man alone, but of all creatures.

In our study, however, we shall limit ourselves to the psychology of the human mind, since that concerns us vitally as nurses. Animal psychology, race psychology, comparative psychology are not within the realm of our practical needs in hospital life. We would know the workings of man’s mind in disease and health. What are the instinctive responses to fear, as shown by babies and children and primitive races? What are the normal expressions of joy, of anger, or desire? What external conditions call forth these evidences? What are the acquired responses to the things which originally caused fear, or joy, or anger? How