About Morita Therapy
What is psychic interaction?
- Psychic interaction in nervousness is a mental process by which the focus of attention on a feeling causes hypersensitivity. This hypersensitivity focuses more attention on the feeling so that the feeling and attention interact with each other in a vicious spiral.
- Examples of the symptoms of nervousness are headache; dizziness; lethargy, tachycardia, wandering attention, sleeplessness; an overly full feeling in the stomach, molysmophobia, shyness, and lewd obsessions when seeing the opposite sex, anxiety attacks, sudden paralysis, sudden pain, and neuralgiform symptoms. However, looking at the stage at which these symptoms develop initially they are no more than discomfort that anybody might undergo. They are feelings and thoughts that may be experienced by healthy persons. For example, we might feel a headache after becoming fatigued or after oversleeping; we might feel stomach upset when we have eaten too much. We might blush when in the presence of a loved one of the opposite sex. We might feel chilled or our hearts might pound when we see someone who has died of a sudden illness or leg pain when we are running.
- However, persons with nervousness are liable to take these normal feelings for abnormality. Such a misconception may cause fear and worry that the feeling will occur again. The result is increased likelihood of having the feeling again due to the psychic interaction. This leads to a long-lasting fixation on the symptom
Genuine symptoms of headache, sleeplessness, vertigo, and so forth may develop with very hard study, cephalic trauma, or influenza, but the symptoms of neurosis are magnified out of proportion due to the hypersensitivity and self-focus of the neurotic person. - The nervous symptoms that develop concurrently with other diseases or disasters may continue to be felt persistently even after the diseases have been cured and the actual symptoms have gone. Similar symptoms related to the actual illness may persist. After a disease symptom has been magnified by psychic interaction, whether it is a chronic headache, vertigo, or obsession, the subjectivity continues as though in a dream, and the worries continue.
Shoma Morita.
The essence of nervousness and therapy.
Hakuyosha.