The most important psychotherapeutic factor for the relief of the discomfort due to dreads is the knowledge that there are so many and such different varieties of them and that so many people suffer from them. Many of those afflicted are inclined to think that their cases are almost unique. To have them know that there are all forms and phases of these curious aversions is to make them laugh a little at their own because they laugh so readily at others, and it gives them new courage for the attempt to conquer them. The aversion cannot be entirely overcome, but it can be prevented from seriously influencing sleep or appetite or occupation. This is after all the important feature of the case from the standpoint of psychotherapy. Besides, patients are encouraged not only to take up, but, above all, to continue, the practice of that mental discipline and self-control which will enable them to lessen their natural aversion, if not to remove it entirely. I have many cases in which patients' aversions have been entirely overcome. Curiously enough, there are rather often relapses when the patients are run down in weight, or are in an irritable condition from worry or emotional stress, and then something of the former mental discipline has to be reinstituted to make them once more free from disturbance.{627}

I have sometimes found that the recommendation to patients suffering from dreads to read Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's "Frankenstein" has proved an excellent therapeutic agent. This is particularly true when the patients are women, for it is likely to bring them close to the sad lives of the Shelleys. The circumstances in which the book was written add to the appeal. "Frankenstein" itself is interesting, so that the mood created by this combination of interests is excellently therapeutic. It will be recalled that in "Frankenstein" the inventor seeking to make a man does make an automaton that is able to move and to talk, but that then haunts its inventor, demanding of him a soul. It proves a plague to him, but he cannot escape from it. Fly where he will his creation follows him and bothers the life out of him, killing a friend, strangling his bride, and making existence intolerable. The symbol is complete and to the point. The things that bother us in life are to a great extent of our own invention. The dreads that make so many people miserable are practically always without any groundwork in reality, figments of our imagination without the soul of real life, but capable, as was Frankenstein's monster, of making their creators intensely miserable and with them, to an even greater degree, their friends.