An examination of Boenninghausen’s Therapeutic Pocketbook reveals a relative paucity of Mental/Emotional expressions in comparison with Kent’s Repertory & its contemporary derivatives, with only 71 rubrics in the Mind chapter, many of these actually representing neurological symptoms; symptoms of the brain
compared to 4,468 Mind symptoms in Kent’s Repertory. It’s often suggested that Boenninghausen disregarded the significance of Mind; I’d correct this notion to suggest that Boenninghausen’s perspective reflected Hahnemann’s thoughts expressed in aphorism 211
This preeminent importance of the emotional state holds good to such an extent that the patient's emotional state often tips the scales in the selection of the homeopathic remedy. This is a decidedly peculiar sign which, among all the signs of disease, can least remain hidden from the exactly observing physician.
While Kent got carried away with Emmanuel Swedenborg’s dogma suggesting that disease originated in disturbances in “man’s will and understanding.”
All medicines operate upon the will and understanding first ... affecting man in his ability to think or to will, and ultimately upon the tissues, the functions and sensations ... Sickness in its essence is a derangement proceeding from the innermost which spreads towards the outermost
Which Hahnemann would regard as an empty speculation and hypothesis concerning the internal essential nature of the vital processes and the mode in which diseases originate in the invisible interior of the organism (see the footnote to aphorism 1 in the Organon).
In order to make use of the complex mental/emotional symptoms often reported & recorded by Kent & his successors, it’s necessary to understand the significance of their constituent dimensions. The Symptom Dimensions Boenninghausen described in his 1858 essay A Contribution to the Judgement Concerning The Characteristic Value of Symptoms and adopted in his Therapeutic Pocketbook, represented in the X-diagram adopted by Hering that I discussed in a previous essay, do not apply well to the description of mental/emotional symptoms. Inspired by Boenninghausen’s example, I set out to describe the characterizing dimensions of a mental/emotional symptom; I’ll detail this below, but also discuss it in my online course Characterizing Dimensions of a Mental/Emotional Symptom, from which much of the material below is drawn.