Annotated Edition of Nervous Ills Their Cause and Cure

by Boris Sidis

Nervous Ills – Their Cause and Cure is a passage to the secrets of human psychosis and the mysterious ways of how it works. This book presents a vast repository of culturally important scholastic views on contemporary civilization. The case studies serve to bring to the forefront the deep dark lurking secrets vigilantly guarded in human minds. The impulses of self-preservation that dominates the various animal forms, the innate urge to struggle for existence as an exemplary state of self-preservation, the instinct of fear as a basic constituent of life, including the three different phases of fear, haveall been outlined with meticulous precision. The book also serves to establish how fear is intrinsically woven with superstition, how functional psychosis is an expression of this instinct of constant fear, and finally it leads to identifying fear as the sole cause of this grave malady of functional psychosis or neurosis.Boris Sidis, 1867-1923, was born in Berditchev, Russia. He was a Ukrainian-American psychologist. He was also reputed for being a physician, psychiatrist and a philosopher of education. Boris earned four degrees from Harvard. His influential work on psychopathology had created quite a furore in the twentieth century. He was Russian by birth but his scientific researches were all conducted in the United States. He was imprisoned at the age of seventeen by Czar in Russia for teaching peasants, against the Czarist laws. After he was released, he had escaped to America in the year 1887. He came to the US at the age of just 20 and was penniless and friendless that time, sadly. Some of his notable works that deserve mention are Multiple An Experimental Investigation into Human Individuality (1904), The Psychology of Laughter (1913) and The Causation and Treatment of Psychopathic Diseases (1916) among others.

234 pages, Paperback

Published February 23, 2022

About the author

1867-1923
Boris Sidis was a Ukrainian-American psychologist, physician, psychiatrist, and philosopher of education. Sidis founded the New York State Psychopathic Institute and the Journal of Abnormal Psychology. He was the father of child prodigy William James Sidis. Boris Sidis eventually opposed mainstream psychology and Sigmund Freud, and thereby died ostracized. He was married to a maternal aunt of Clifton Fadiman, the noted American intellectual.