progress. This goes back, in truth, to the fact that the psyche, the mind, and opinions did not submit to detached study with the ease with which the body and matter submitted. Moreover, the psyche was from the beginning a special preserve of the priests, who monopolized it and refused to give it up; they exploited it and forbade all others to occupy themselves with it; they preserved its primitiveness and the old reactionary

theories that had treated of its affairs, and they beat back every attempt made by the liberated among physicians, philosophers, and scholars to make clear its features and to light up its dark regions.

And since the prevailing faith held that the causes of mental illnesses are metaphysical, reli-gious, spiritual, their treatment remained within the compass of superstition and metaphysics. Many believed that the sole means of curing the sick man lay in driving those accursed spirits out of his body. So they tried — and still try — to drive them out in various ways. Some shackle the patient and wind his legs about with ropes and chains down to the foot, then rain blows with sticks upon the soles of his feet, believing that if the spirit feels pain from this beating, it will go out of the sick man in flight... Some cauterize the patient on his head, supposing that the heat of the cautery is enough to expel those spirits... Some would bore a hole in the skull, that the spirit might escape through the hole... Some bind the patient with fetters and shackles and tie him fast to a wall or to a huge stone, firm-set and immovable, believing that the evil spirit cannot endure confinement or captivity, and will soon gather itself up and desert its victim, never to return... And the patient would be thrown into a dark, filthy corner and given the worst of foods, and salt water, and dry black bread, so that when the spirit dwelling in him could no longer bear this ill treatment, it would leave him and go far away... People went to such lengths in inventing methods and devising means that some of them went so far as to burn the patient whole, to drive that unclean spirit

out of his inward parts; and they looked upon the death of the patient as a secondary incident beside the great benefit he gained.

Do I exaggerate if I say that most of the patients we see and exam-ine have tried amulets, written charms, and talismans, and have visited the priest or the sheikh before finding their way to us — the one read over them and the other blessed them, and neither did the one profit them nor the other avail them?... Nor is that all: if we review the vocabulary we use in our everyday talk, we find that we still use the very same words the ancients used. We say today of the old abandoned house, for example, that it is inhabited — meaning that jinn and spirits dwell in it. And we speak of the man stricken with mental ailments in a similar fashion: we say that so-and-so is inhabited, or rather possessed, or touched, or brushed; and what we mean by this is that one of the evil spirits has clothed itself in him, or touched him, or brushed against him... And when they write charms for him, or trace lines for him, or read over him, or take him on visits to the monasteries and the saints, they do so on the strength of an old maxim, namely that "when the angels come, the devils depart" — a belief that has become one of the famous proverbs...

And perhaps we may observe that the greatest trace of the old views in the present time is that we still describe those stricken with strange mental symptoms, those who walk the paths of abnormal behavior, by saying that they are "majnun" — mad; and the

madman is not a sick person, but a person whom the jinn have clothed themselves in and mastered... This is an important and grave matter, for our view of those stricken with mental illnesses in these days is not the offspring of the knowledge we have attained, nor does it spring from our grasp of the truth of these illnesses, or from any feeling of ours that those stricken with them are still of mankind, that they feel and sense and think like other human beings. It is a view differing utterly from our view of any other sick person, and that because we did not believe, before, that they were among the sick; rather we counted them among those of evil souls and abominable morals and weak, wavering faith — for how else could the evil spirits have been able to enter into them and work upon them and make of them a brute instrument of their passions and their ends?...

For this reason those stricken with mental illnesses became hated; people fear them and take pains in torturing them and pun-ishing them for what their souls have committed; their families disown them, and friends and relations keep far from them... And so the illness — an illness and nothing more — became a shameful disgrace, a stain that nothing could wipe away but burning or death or retribution... or the other methods of expiation.

It is only fair that I point out here that this ill treatment was a feature of social life in Europe more than in any other spot on earth — to a degree that leads us to believe that in certain epochs it

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