a racking, insidious, nearly unbearable pain by a more violent emotion of any kind whatsoever, and at any rate for the time being to drive it out of the consciousness⁠—for this purpose an emotion is needed, as wild an emotion as possible, and to excite that emotion some excuse or other is needed. “It must be somebody’s fault that I feel bad”⁠—this kind of reasoning is peculiar to all invalids, and is but the more pronounced, the more ignorant they remain of the real cause of their feeling bad, the physiological cause (the cause may lie in a disease of the nervus sympathicus