Applied Psychology for Nurses - Mary F. Porter (top 10 best books of all time TXT) 📗

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 Heredity 108 Environment 109 Personal Reactions 110 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,