"Neurosis has an absolute genius for malingering. There is no illness which it cannot counterfeit perfectly. It will produce lifelike imitations of the dilatations of dyspepsia, the nausea of pregnancy, the arythmia of the cardiac, the feverishness of the consumptive. If it is capable of deceiving the doctor, how should it fail to deceive the patient? Ah, do not think that I am mocking your sufferings. I should not undertake to cure them unless I understood them thoroughly. And, may I say, there i no good confession that is not reciprocal. I have told you that without nervous disorder there can be no great artist. What is more," he added, raising a solemn forefinger, "there can be no great scientist either. I will go further, and say that, unless he himself is subject to nervous trouble, he is not, I won't say a good doctor, but I do say the right doctor to treat nervous troubles. In the pathology of nervous diseases, a doctor who doesn't talk too much nonsense is a half-cured patient, just as a critic is a poet who has stopped writing verse and a policeman a burglar who has retired from practice. I, Madame, I do not, like you, fancy myself to be suffering from albuminuria, I have not your neurotic fear of good, or of fresh air, but I can never to to sleep without getting out of bed at least twenty times to see if my door is shut. And yesterday I went to that nursing-home, where I came across the poet who wouldn't move his neck, for the purpose of booking a room, for, between ourselves, I spend my holidays there looking after myself when I have aggravated my own troubles by wearing myself out in the attempt to cure those of others."
"But, Doctor, ought I to take a similar cure?" asked my grandmother, aghast.
"It is not necessary, Madame. The symptoms you betray here will vanish at my bidding. Besides, you have a very efficient person whom I appoint as your doctor from now onwards. That is your malady itself, your nervous hyperactivity. Even if I knew how to cure you of it, I should take good care not to. All I need do is to control it. I see on your table there one of Bergette's books. Cured of your nervous diathesis, you would not longer care for it. Now, how could I take it upon myself to substitute for the joys that it procures you a nervous stability which would be quite incapable of giving you those joys? But those joys themselves are a powerful remedy, the more powerful of all perhaps."
Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, pp. 316-317
Dr. du Boulbon continues his treatment of Marcel's grandmother, and somewhere along the way a Marx Brothers routine breaks out. Normally if the doctor tells you that he isn't going to cure you because your condition will keep tabs on you - and also discusses the fact that he'll be checking himself into the institution soon - you should probably begin to back toward the door and not break eye contact. Sadly, as I read this all I could think of is the increasing proliferation of accommodation forms that we are inundated with at school. I'm not appalled by the students having them - or their parents sincerely trying to do what they think is best for their kids - but the system which generally fails them so dramatically. They are bedeviled by irresponsible doctors hoping to get more perks from rapacious pharmaceutical companies by over-prescribing the latest soma and generally under-qualified support systems that produce increasingly vague accommodation forms that give the students many seemingly legitimate reasons to not try or take responsibility for their own actions. In this case the doctors don't want to "cure" the problem, not because, as in Proust's case, de Boulbon believed that it would monitor the patient, but because it's just too profitable.
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