Book Review
NATIONAL JOURNAL OF HOMOEOPATHY 2002 Sep / Oct VOL 4 NO 5.
Reviewed by
Dr Vishpala Parthasarathy

TITLE : Homoeopathic Psychology: Personality profiles of Major Constitutional Remedies.
AUTHOR: Philip M. Bailey
PAGES: 418
PRICE: 250
FIRST INDIAN EDITION: 2002
PUBLISHERS: B Jain Co, Chuna Mandi, New Delhi

This is a book written in true style of a contemporary Homoeopath like Catherine Coulter describing remedies and their personalities. A really engrossing book, we can now read Materia Medica's like novels. In all our earlier Materia Medica's this element of the personality was lost as the time element was lost. It has been the attempt of most contemporary Homoeopaths to follow the lead a la Kent, to bring this time element back and to give a real, live personality to the remedy. You will recollect that Dr Sarla Sonawala, in her humble manner, tried to do this with a few remedies in Materia Medica without tears. Dr Philip Bailey has done it for over 35 remedies- Causticum and China are the surprises. To best illustrate it, I am going to give extracts from his book; as an example, I have chosen, a not so usual and commonly used remedy, viz Alumina.

INTRODUCTION FROM THE AUTHOR: It is my hope that this book will help satisfy a need that, to a large extent, has remained inadequately served till now: the need for an accurate and realistic description of the personalities of the constitutional remedies. The old Materia Medica that we rely upon so heavily, describes only the crudest and most extreme elements of the mental picture of each remedy, missing the subtleties that we actually find in patients.
In my experience, the mentals are still the least understood, and the most underdeveloped aspect of homoeopathic prescribing. Yet the personality of the patient is at least as important as the physical characteristics in individualising the case and finding the similimum.
It is true that some patients have more than one layer of pathology, and that each layer corresponds to a different remedy, but the layers must be dealt with in the right sequence and the personality of the patient at any given time will correspond primarily to the most superficial layer, which represents the present frequency of the patient's vital force. The profiles that are contained in this book are the result entirely of my own clinical experience. At the end of each profile, I give a short description of the characteristic appearance, as physical appearance is so closely connected to personality,

LAYERS
The human organism appears to retain a memory of all preceding chronic states of the body and mind. This memory includes certain inherited traits. Majority of people remain in the same constitutional state for their whole life. In other words, their vital force will resonate to the same remedy from birth till death, excluding periods of acute illness. Traumatic experiences, both physical and psychic, can shift a person's vital force to a different frequency, forming a new layer, but more often they cause a deterioration of functioning within the same layer. Thus a relatively healthy, symptom free Natrum-muriaticum person will develop chronic sinusitis and claustrophobia following a long divorce settlement, which remains until helped by homoeopathy or other deep healing methods. These new symptoms are still within the scope of Natrum Muriaticum, and the remedy will simply return the patient's vital force to a healthier 'octave' of Natrum-muriaticum wavelength.
Given the stability of chronic layers, a patient's past medical and psychological history can provide useful information which can help to confirm the constitutional remedy. To illustrate his understanding, we take a remedy-Alumina

ALUMINA
Keynote: Mental instability
Alumina is not a common constitutional type. It is one of that group of remedies that the homoeopath thinks of when he has a patient who is mentally unstable, leaning to hysteria. H/o unstable childhood circumstances, and family history of mental illness and alcoholism, a reflection of the syphilitic miasm in the family. The few Alumina cases I have seen have all been women.

Loss of Self
Another highly characteristic feature of Alumina’s mental instability is a sense of unreality. A patient may say, "It’s like I’m not here". Others say "It is as though it is not me but another person watching these things". Hahnemann in his Chronic Diseases uses the same description; ‘when he says anything he feels as if another person has said it".

Depression and Self-Destructive Impulses
The confusion and lack of identity may bring to mind another remedy-Phosphoric-acid. But unlike this latter, Alumina is prone to powerful emotions, particularly despair, anger and anxiety. The mood often alternates between despair and a relatively contented state, changing several times within a day (Kent: "Mood changeable"). During depressive moods Alumina feels hopeless, and often contemplates suicide. There may be a great deal of weeping, or the patient may not weep at all, but simply withdraws into silence like Natrum and Aurum.
There is a marked moodiness before menses. Both despair and aggression may increase at this time, along with fear that the patient will hurt herself. Alumina has a very characteristic impulse to kill herself when she sees a knife.

VIOLENCE
Mental confusion with violent thoughts and impulses. Alumina feels violent towards herself, or those around her. She may subject to sudden bouts of rage, although often she will not take out her rage on others, but rather slam doors and smash things, or curses out aloud. Alumina is usually a quiet gentle person who hates her violent side (Kent: ‘Quiet disposition’). Very often the homoeopath must gain her confidence before she will admit to feeling violent impulses, until specifically asked.

Anxiety
Alumina is extremely anxious, prone to panic attacks and phobias. Fear of insanity, and fear of succumbing to the suicidal or homicidal impulses. Fear of meeting people, especially groups of people, a fear that is seen in most individuals prone to severe anxiety. Alumina’s fear often leads to insomnia. She will lie awake at night obsessively worrying about how she will cope with the next day, or with some anticipated ordeal in the near future. Given Alumina’s scattered mental processes, even little tasks like writing a thank you note can generate anxiety, and Alumina can be thrown into a panic by any change in surroundings or daily routine. She is unlikely to risk venturing forth on holiday unless she has a strong and reliable partner, and even then the holiday is likely to be too stressful for her to cope with.
One of my Alumina patients had a tremendous fear of failure, and on account of this she became a perfectionist, and would seldom attempt anything beyond her essential daily tasks.
Like other types who are prone to mental disintegration, (Argentum, Mercurius, Nitiricum, Phosphoric-acid), Alumina tends to become hurried when anxious (Kent: ‘Propensity to hurry’). This is aimless hurry when little is achieved, since the mind is so scattered. The more she hurries, the less she is able to cope, and so a vicious circle sets in. It may culminate in admission to a psychiatric ward with a ‘nervous breakdown’. Alumina’s hurriedness is often accompanied by a feeling of wanting to get away to escape, although the patient has no idea where she wants to go to.

The other remedies are described in a similar style and would certainly enhance the understanding of remedies. Of course as the understanding is from the author’s experience and may differ somewhat from our understanding; so we may need to go back to the concrete data available in out HMM, and clarify it for ourselves and then clarify it form practice. The actual proof of the pudding is always in the eating. This book, published in 1995, was hitherto not readily available in India. B Jain has brought this to our shores and at a reasonable price.

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