DISCOVER YOUR SELF

INTRODUCTION

You don't consider yourself bad company, do you?

It would not be a great hardship to spend an hour a day three or four times a week in your own exclusive company, would it?

These short periods of solitary rumination may transform you from a discontented, disorganized being into a serene personality.

Discovering your self is a restful but highly stimulating process. It does not require great powers of concentration; on the contrary, the faculty for “de-centration” is what you will have to develop.

Lack of self-control in the face of temptation, an over abundance of self-control hampering vital emotions and functions and various cases of hysterical incapacities can be cured completely through auto analytical practice.

Fits of melancholia or a senseless abandon to superficial fun, excessive shyness or compulsive show-offishness can be eliminated by drawing on secret resources. Auto analysis does not offer a sure-fire cure for nervous symptoms like tics, stuttering, asthma and certain kinds of skin diseases, but in combination with competent medical treatment it may help by bringing relief from the common cause of these evils: relief from the pressure of a clogged sub-conscious.

The auto analytical method developed in this book is especially adapted to the faculties of the unassisted layman. A word of warning may be in order: if you feel that you won't have the energy necessary for such an undertaking, don't even embark upon it.

See a reliable psychiatrist instead. If your symptoms seem to be of a severe order, don't try to analyze yourself. The exercises and analyses prescribed on the following pages can help against neurotic but not against psychotic disturbances.The nervous person is addressed. Through this medium it is not possible to guide the deranged.

Nevertheless, some psychiatrists, especially if they are hard pressed for time, may find it useful to put this book into their patients' hands in order to convey in¬formation and training supplementary to their treat¬ment.

Autoanalysis makes extensive use of techniques based on discoveries of the pioneer psychoanalysts, but only insofar as they can be applied by one individual to his own troubles. It uses other techniques too, such as auto¬suggestion, self-conditioning, introspection and certain “mental tools.”

Since the lonely, decentrated mind only too easily can float away from its problem, I have devised a few symbolic “props” for the autoanalyst. For instance, if you feel at odds with the world, write one word char¬acterizing your chief complaint on a blackboard.

After passing one full autoanalytical session facing this word and getting your fill of its nasty associations, wipe it off your slate; you can be sure that this simple symbolic act has the suggestive power to wipe away your com¬plaining mood too. (“Make a clean slate of it.”)

Introspection is not “brooding.” Rather it is work, hard work applied to your essential self. When you set out to discover your self, you want, first, to reach the unconscious center of your own being and, second, to make this center respond to your conscious directives.

Almost every human being has an astonishing amount of psychic power, but many men and women cannot use their will power when it should serve to improve their own functioning. You must break through the outer crust which is formed by moral censorship and self-censorship, by forgetfulness, inertia, taboos.

The process of gaining access to your own unconscious core in order to clear up emotional complications is what you might call “learning to be an autoanalyst.” This method, I believe, can be understood easily by the many men and women whose disorders originate in hurt feelings and not in hurt thinking.

Our troubled epoch is reflected in the profound rest¬lessness of many physically healthy individuals. Statis¬ticians predict that one seventeenth of the population of the United States will spend some time as mental pa¬tients in our hospitals. This is a terrifying figure. The spread of autoanalytical knowledge and technique might help to reduce this danger.

Many people who need psychiatric treatment never get it, mainly for three reasons: lack of money, lack of time, and inhibitions against self-revelation. In many cases, the monetary reason obviously is the decisive one.

Lack of time can be a strong deterrent too. To accomplish his purpose, the analyst will need the patient's undivided attention (or better, his undivided in¬attention) for one hour five days a week during a period of several years.

If you can overcome these two material obstacles, there remains the third: most men do not want to talk about their secret lives. Many women seem to have a strong urge to speak in the first person singular. This, however, as a rule is the extrovert kind of talk which aims to impress the partner with affectations and affec¬tions: there can be no psychic healing without intro¬version.

The approach to psychological analysis by reading a book and thereby learning to apply analytical methods to one's own symptoms has none of these disadvantages. A book cannot do the work of a competent psychiatrist, of course, but it can be of considerable help.

Self-discovery builds on an ancient tradition. Intro-spective processes have been of vast importance in the adventure of man's learning about himself. They have been elaborated upon through the centuries, from Bud¬dha down to the founders of psychoanalysis.

As a matter of fact, Professor Freud made many of his valuable discoveries by observing Professor Freud. (He verified the symbolic significance of slips of the tongue, for in¬stance, in just that manner.) Many psychiatrists deny that analysis applied by laymen to their own symptoms can produce durable healing effects.

Freud's pupil, Otto Rank, recommended that “the guidance of the analysis should be withheld completely from the patient.” Freud himself had different ideas: “The analyst rejoices if he can save his advice and, instead, waken the initiative of the analyzed person.”

This seems to indicate that some autoanalytical work of the patient would have found his approval. A comprehensive study of self-analysis has been made by Karen Horney. I am deeply indebted to these and many other workers in this field.

Contrary to standard psychoanalysis, the autoanalyti¬cal method explores the inner rhythms of the living or¬ganism. Certain procedures can be effective only if they are coordinated to the ebb and flow of the psyche, to “high” or “low spirits.”

As a matter of fact, it might be a good idea for the autoanalyst to obtain what is known as his Biogram and to use his biorhythmic data as a frame of reference during the progress of his studies and exercises.

Autoanalysis, as a system, relies on the essentially good qualities of man's unconscious mind. Some psy¬chiatrists picture the subconscious as filled exclusively with complicated traumata and barbaric drives. I am firmly convinced that this isn't the whole picture.

The unconscious is also the seat of repressed humane and graciously childlike feelings which the tough, battered adult of our era has consciously discarded. Therefore, the unconscious part of our soul can be transformed into a constant source of elation and inner contentment, into a counterbalance against actual afflictions. The un¬conscious is really your guardian angel—if you learn to understand its untrammeled voice.

Wind Up Your Worries

TELL everybody in the house to leave you alone for one hour.

Lock your door.

Make yourself comfortable. Lie down on a couch, or on your bed, and start worrying.

Worrying as such is not necessarily bad; on this point I disagree with many psychologists. I am sure that some problems can be solved only by worrying about them, by intermittent, frequently repeated attacks of emotionally tinged thought.

You may prefer to call it ruminat¬ing; anyway, the overanxiousness to avoid worries at any price for some people is worse than a normal portion of worries. A healthy person can easily manage and digest some harassing mental processes.

If you worry about something worthwhile, and if you feel that the results reached by this worrying finally will relieve your mind, you should not be afraid. The mental energy generated in this process will produce neither stomach ulcers nor an idee fixe; it will be consumed and neutral¬ized by the progress of your worrying activity toward the aim which you have in mind.

Worrying, in the sense of ruminating, in itself is not noxious. But to be fruitful, it has to be done in a certain way.

If your worrying helps you to clarify your situation, if it leads to some new conviction or to valuable resolu¬tions, there is no reason why you should worry about your worries. You are entitled to them.

The only kind of worrying which is dangerous is fruitless worrying. It draws its energy not from the object but from the subject: from yourself, and not from your objectively given life situation. You can discern this noxious kind of worrying by its shape: it resembles a snake eating its own tail. We may call it circular worrying.

Worries of this circular type are symptoms of deeper disturbances. Your mind wants to get some place, but it cannot find its way, it is fixed in one groove like an abused phonograph record.

Your train of thoughts has been interrupted and misguided at one certain spot: instead of leading into the interior of your personal problem, it cannot even approach this puzzle. 

Your conscious mind accumulates strength, it starts out toward the unconscious complex which it wants to elucidate, it gains momentum—and then it is deviated from its aim and forced to spend its energy by moving around in circles.

Your essentially unconscious problem—be it of a sexual, of a social or of an intellectual order—does not want to be disturbed by your conscious mental activities; it has declared itself taboo, and it has put a guard in front of its approach in the form of un¬conscious censorship.

By misleading your thoughts, it gives your whole personality the feeling of being frus¬trated:   you seem  to  know  that  a  tantalizing  aim  is waiting for you somewhere, but you are tied to the worry-go-round.

Worrying of this kind is really a neurotic symptom comparable to nervous, compulsive, repetitious motions of some limb. It is a tic of your cortical function. Neu¬rotic worrying is a stuttering of the mind.

If you feel that your own case falls into this category, you'll have to fill in the details by yourself. Mark all your symptoms and hold them up in front of your in¬ner eye to gain a general view of them.

This will take some time. You won't finish this work in one hour, but you should come back to it for one hour on several consecutive days. Let's call it your daily autoanalytical session.

Have you clearly recognized the neurotic, fruitless character of some of your worries? If your answer is yes, your wish to get rid of these mental tics is more than justified.

You will have observed that your worrying does not always have the same intensity. Periods of highest ten¬sion alternate with less stringent periods. Your worries have their own rhythm, their ebb and flow.

Sometimes they seem to fade away—until out of the depth rises a ground swell to agitate the surface of your conscious, and soon your troubles reach a high water mark again.

Now, with the help of even moderately skillful in-trospection, you should be able to find the weak point of the cycle; it's usually a quasi-logical connection which leads to an old mental scar.

When you have thus found the tail of the snake which is bitten by- its own head, go through the whole course of your typical worries once again. But—and this is the important new factor—while you submit to the usual torment, you should use a bit of autosuggestion: imagine that you are winding up a gray woolen thread, round and round, so that it forms a ball which you hold firmly in your hand.

This isn't more difficult than count¬ing sheep, for instance, while falling asleep. Worry, worry, and wind up your gray thread. After a while, this accompanying picture will fuse itself with your harassing thoughts; you seem to wind up your troubles.

Repeat every bit of the visual and abstract thoughts which have plagued you so often; and while you repro¬duce them, they all go into your soft gray clew of wool. When you get the feeling that you have reached the starting point again, tear off the thread.

And now I want you to imagine the following scene as clearly as possible: go up to the brink of a high cliff above the sea and throw your ball away with all your might. Throw it up to the clouds, and observe how the storm carries it away, away and out of your sight.

In order to make this procedure effective, you must attain a state of complete detachment while lying on your couch. It is almost an act of self-hypnosis which you should perform.

You may spend several quiet hours on successive days training for this autosuggestive per¬formance. Before daring the big throw, familiarize yourself with your soft, gray clew of woundup tribula¬tions.

You must feel that it is firmly enough in your grip. Form some simple sentence such as: “Wind it up and throw it away.” Whenever one of those familiar vexing throughts comes up, associate it with this same sentence: “Wind it up and throw it away.” Then—do it. The wind carries your clew out into the distance, never to bring it back.

The effectiveness of this procedure lies in its fixed correlation to your unconscious processes. Your con¬scious will power alone cannot master your worries, as you may have experienced all too often.

The state of trance into which you must put yourself—even if it is only a light trance—will release unconscious energies, and by coupling and synchronizing these new forces with your circular worries, you will acquire power over them.

Of course, the mental procedure I have just sug¬gested may be changed according to your own prefer¬ence. You may choose some activity with which you have become familiar in your own profession, or as a hobby.

If you are a businessman with a passion for orderly procedure, you may file away every single worry in an elaborate card index—mentally at least— and then, in your imagination, burn the entire collec-tion.

If you have a facile pen, write down a list of your superficial grudges; you may mull over that document, but not for too long, just long enough to let off steam (or, putting it into psychoanalytical terms, to abreact the initial force of your inimical drives).

After one or two weeks, cut it short and use the stove or the fireplace as a complaints department. Make a bonfire of those worries. For women, the soft gray woolen clew is doubtless the handiest “mental tool” for winding up conscious troubles.

After you have accomplished your task and destroyed the symbol of your worries, you will sense an almost bodily relief. This deliverance will snap you out of your torpor and will bring you back to unworrying normality.

Those circular worries are, after all, only surface troubles of your soul. With their persistency and obstructiveness they clog up the approaches to your real, central problem—which may be social frustration, or a deep-seated sexual problem, or some other kind of per¬sonal maladjustment which, at a later stage, we will have to bring into the light of your conscious cerebra¬tion.

We will uncover the secrets of your mind step by step, and you will become aware of the vast, slumbering resources of your unconscious—and be able to utilize these resources.

The first step in this process is to get rid of neurotic, superficial worries. You must regain your inner free¬dom, your freedom of thought. Make up your mind now, do some autosuggestive work now. Wind up your worries and throw them to the winds. Start your self-discovery!

Don't Be Afraid of Your Unconscious!

WHAT is the strange phantom which has the power to mold you into a happy or into an unhappy being? What is the unconscious?

I want to correct a widespread bias, namely, the idea that the unconscious is a kind of menacing demon whose sole purpose is to make life miserable for you. The op¬posite is true; the unconscious acts in most cases as man's guardian angel.

The revelations of the unconscious are not always un¬pleasant by any means. People have come to regard the unconscious as a dangerous, a ghastly thing which mani¬fests itself in tics, paralyses, inhibitions, in hindrances to the desired development of one's life.

This picture is fundamentally wrong. The activity of the submerged part of every mind is, on the whole, beneficent. If you have a horror of your own unconscious—and it would be very understandable if you have, since every horrible and incomprehensible thing from bad dreams to Fascism in recent times has been explained as the workings of the unconscious—you should shed this prejudice, other¬wise you cannot gain the necessary self-confidence to undertake your self-discovery and embark upon your autoanalytic treatment.

The unconscious is a friendly companion and, if treated as a friend, it can be your best and most helpful ally: an inexhaustible source of elation and deep satisfaction, of hidden delights and manifest accomplishments.

However, if you live the wrong way, your uncon-scious will rebel.

The troubles arising from this source—from wrong thinking, wrong emotions, wrong sexual practices, wrong habits, etc.—are the proper domain of autoanalysis. (Of course, the word “wrong” in this context implies no mor¬alistic condemnation, it simply means malfunctioning. During the course of this study I will try to give clearer definitions of such mistakes in living.)

These troubles of the soul tend to overwhelm your whole personality, so that finally your will power alone finds itself unable to overcome the energetic remon¬strances of your superego (your inner censor).

A nervous collapse, severe headaches, a self-caused accident or a welcome sickness relieving you of a hated schedule, or a deep, general disgust of life may then throw you out of your regular orbit.

Only after you restore to the uncon¬scious its right to rhythmical longings and periodic satis¬factions will these symptoms disappear, and only then can the energy consumed in useless repressions, tics and circular worries be put back to its proper use: the task of shaping your existence the way you want it to be. Then the ground swell of your unconscious “id” will help you, instead of contradicting and neutralizing the wishes of your conscious “ego.”

Why is it that the unconscious has become something to be afraid of? This, to a certain extent, is the fault of the pioneer psychoanalysts.

Freud's term “unconscious” is a negation; perhaps it was not the wisest choice among possible terms, for it always seems to negate, to counteract the conscious. The subconscious is pictured as lying below the surface of the waking ego, and this, after all, is only a simile and not an anatomic localization.

Because some parts of the unconscious were first revealed in dreams, and because dreams, as a rule, take place at night, we think of the unconscious as working at night, and many of us are afraid of night and darkness. C. G. Jung, whose research has deepened our insight into the soul, likes to speak about the shadowy part of the mind and the darkness of the unconscious.

This usage has no doubt produced as¬sociations with Hades where the shades of defunct heroes live a joyless life, and even with hell which is usually pictured as being located below our beloved temporal home.

There are no anatomical or even psychological facts which warrant the parable of the mental underworld. For all we know, unconscious drives may be caused or conditioned by hormones, by chemical or electronic phenomena.

Why should we shudder at these goings-on?

Occasionally, Freud likened the human mind to some¬thing even more uncomfortable: to an iceberg. The only avowed purpose of this symbol was to demonstrate that a large part of the mind is submerged, not visible.

We are justified in asking why he did not select some warmer symbol. Using his own method, we have to inquire: what made him choose this most forbidding and uninhabitable of all places on earth—the iceberg? I think that the psyche had, for his inner vision, a catastrophic quality.

There was no objective need to describe our unconscious feelings and wishes as something floating uncontrollably through icy, deserted waters, spreading nothing but cold and disaster; there are many other partly submerged objects from which he could have drawn his lesson.

I have a faint suspicion that the tragedy of the “unsink-able” Titanic may, at the time, have caused Freud's as¬sociation. In any event, the iceberg picture has done more harm than good with his most influential followers.

Many poets have compared the soul to a stream or lake. I like this comparison much better, and it fulfills the same purpose. A mountain lake is refreshing—and sometimes dangerous to the unwary. There one can do some restful fishing. It can be fathomed by poetic intui¬tion and even by science.

Using this friendlier picture as an illustration of the unconscious, let us analyse the old fable of the shepherd boy who amused himself by throwing pebbles into the clear, peaceful lake. Suddenly the waters became angry, overflowed the shores and carried the surprised boy down into the abyss.

This is the parable of adolescence. By throwing out little, inquiring thoughts, by “tryouts” of curious feelings, the powers of the unconscious are released, and from then on the child in you will be submerged. Yet the lake's surface will become clear and smooth again.

The preservation of childhood memories deep under the surface of your everyday life is the factor which makes the exploration of the unconscious so vitally im¬portant for a thoroughgoing self-discovery.

While your first three, or even six years are usually erased by “childhood amnesia,” the following years will have left many conscious traces in your memory; and from your adolescence on you probably are able to re¬produce an almost coherent picture of your inner auto¬biography.

Yet all the precursory stages of your per¬sonality have left deposits in your unconscious. Those you cannot reproduce at will are the most interesting and influential ones. In trancelike states, in a dream, in a high fever, after a shock, these pictures will suddenly float up before your inner eye.

Sometimes when inquiring persistently into your past, you may feel a strange displeasure, a little oppression, a kind of inaudible warning not to go further. This is exactly the spot where autoanalysis should penetrate.

As if guided by a magic divining rod, you will be tempted to come back to this spot again and again. After many weeks, when you think about it the least, the missing memory may float up to the surface. You will rewitness something you regret having seen in the first place.

Sometimes these repressed childhood scenes are family quar¬rels which would seem banal if you should re-experience them to-day; or they may be premature, half-guessing glimpses of erotic activities of which you were an acci¬dental witness (often coupled with unmerited and in¬comprehensible scolding). They may be cruel or cold experiences which did not fit into your parents' conscious rose-colored program for your education.

Psychologists call such an impact a “trauma.” Traumata are early wounds that your ego received, shocks endangering your equilibrium, impressions of which you wanted to rid yourself. But they are still there.

It was one of Freud's greatest discoveries that re-pressed wishes and memories are conserved in the un¬conscious. The superego, a part of your soul largely fashioned after the image of your father, exerts a censor¬ship which keeps those drives out of sight in order to make you fit to live in civilized surroundings.

This (mainly unconscious) censorship prevents the asocial, the unesthetic, the amoral drives from coming up into the conscious part of your personality. So (always ac¬cording to Freud) if you say honestly,”I am a moral person,” you may be quite right—if this 'T' means only your conscious ego.

You don't even know about your in¬cestuous, murderous and even patricidal wishes, and the censor in you will hotly and most emphatically deny the existence of such wishes. They reveal themselves not by becoming manifest, but in dreams, in symbolic actions or in rationally inexplicable aversions against certain conscious decisions. These, say Freud's pupils, are the causes underlying phobias, impotence or even such physical handicaps as asthma.

This true but one-sided picture makes modern, post-Freudian man afraid of his unconscious; and this fear breeds a new complex which, to my knowledge, has not yet been discovered nor analyzed.

This new, wide¬spread fear generates a lot of psychological curiosity in many cultured people, but at the same time it causes a feeling of inefficacy: I cannot master my whole person¬ality, I am not the captain of my soul.

You can dissolve this complex, like many others, by making its causes conscious, by observing, studying and digesting the unpalatable contents of your unconscious.

In every perusal of psychological literature one comes across passages like this one: “Psychoanalysis has re¬leased thousands of persons who were fettered and tyrannized over by their subconscious.” (Oscar Pfister, Some Applications of Psycho-analysis.) Fettered and tyrannized over by your subconscious—I can see you shrinking back in fear from your hidden demon.

The whole menace is due to a quite simple misunder¬standing. It is always some content of the unconscious realm which may fetter you—not the unconscious itself. Would a man with stomach ulcers say: my stomach is a dangerous organ? No. Neither is the unconscious dangerous. A happy person, too, is guided by motives springing from the unconscious: from a healthy un¬conscious.

By no means should you picture your unconscious as something wholly repressed. There is a constant flow back and forth between the different parts of your mind. The unconscious is a vast central reservoir which con¬tains suppressed ugly wishes as well as ideals. These ideals were shoved back upon a shelf in your mental nursery room because they proved to be too frail, too beautiful for this tough world.

If you try to describe your dreams to yourself (a prac¬tice you should cultivate in the course of self-discovery), you will recognize, in all probability, some feelings of childlike beatitude. Quite often you live through some romantic, poetic scenes which in waking life you would deride as childish or mushy.

Infantile games have left their traces in you; while you dream you may feel a wonderful satisfaction in flying around rosebushes. Per¬haps you will gather with spiritual brothers and sisters in an ethereal landscape.

Maybe your dreams (and other phantasies) will be of a more solid nature; nevertheless, some of them will surely lack the hard-boiled quality of the conscious contents of your everyday life. This light-colored strand in the fabric of your dreams just cannot be explained away as sexual symbolism and the like.

An objective view discloses that the unconscious is not all darkness; too much light emanates from it to war¬rant such a pessimistic picture.

There is much repressed good in the central core of your soul.

Open up a path at least to look at it. See if you can-not transplant some of these forces into your conscious. Maybe you will succeed in giving your real environment some mirrored reflexes of this too often satirized, senti¬mental aspect of your inner life.

While lying on your autoanalytical couch, you should practice visualizing the center of your being not as hidden darkness, but rather as hidden light. Joyful moods, innocent experiences from your childhood are certain to radiate from the midst of your personality and to illuminate the outer layers of your growing self —even if the radiation got dimmed and dulled through the opaqueness of many years.

Get acquainted with the hidden part of your person¬ality. Gradually you will overcome the modern fear of the unconscious.

Appointment With Yourself

IF YOU WANT to accomplish anything through discover¬ing your self, you must reorganize your habits.

Designate a certain hour of the day for introspection, and stick to it. During these periods, completely re¬nounce personal ambition. If you meditate about your profession, do not think about expected results of your usual activities. Visualize these activities with disin¬terested curiosity, as if you were observing an octopus, or a strange machine.

Take a few steps back from your¬self and look at the image you have formed of yourself. (Later on, compare this image with the impressions others seem to have of your personality, and analyze the differences between the two sets of images. Sometimes just these discrepancies are the cause of your trouble. But wait until you have gained a clear view of your self.)

Exclude all outer disturbances for an hour or so. If you can discipline yourself and those living with you to leave you alone for an hour each day, or at least four times a week, you will have made a good step forward. Try to produce a mental blank in the conscious part of your mind. Let this blank space fix itself slowly.

Allow your mind to wander off, without conscious control. Then, if you feel that you have gained enough distance, come back to yourself. Startle yourself with some questions like these:

What was my most pleasant experience?

What was my most shameful experience? What must a mind be like which behaves like mine un¬der this or that impact?

Who am I?

This start should not degenerate into the sinister, purposeful atmosphere of “driving out devils.” which some psychiatrists seem to consider beneficent for their patients. It should resemble the “sessions of sweet silent thought” of the older sages and poets.

In modern times with their multiple problems—chiefly arising from mal¬adjustment of human beings to their self-created techno¬logical world—we hardly know the meaning of “sweet silent thought.”

Most city-dwellers, for instance, are afraid of silence, and even in isolation, while driving a car or basking in the sun, like to have a radio blaring in order to banalize their thoughts. We do not like to meet ourselves.

If you feel you should keep your radio or phonograph going while forming the habit of introspection, do so. But I would advise you to tune in some chamber music, for instance.

The purity of a string quartet, if you can bring yourself to let it reach the deeper strata of your soul, will help you to escape the noisy, accidental, con¬fusing snares of your conscious everyday life.

Smoke a little if you want to. Some “bad habits” may be good for you. But after a while when you feel that re¬nouncing your tobacco, your radio or your other pleas¬ure-giving gadgets does not require a conscious, pro¬longed effort on your part—stop! Relax, lay this book aside for a while, close your eyes from time to time and try to concentrate objectively on yourself.

It may be useful to take some notes now and then, especially at the end of your introspective hour. Your aim should be to get the facts of your personal history so that you can remember and reproduce them at will at any given moment.

Here are a few questions you might ask yourself.

How did I function in my play activities when I was a child? . . .

Was I a leader? ... A suppressed member of a com¬pulsory organization? . . .

An admiring follower of a haughty, detached idol?

Did you enjoy solitude? Or did you have periods of unsupportable boredom, even of melancholia?

Did you find a special stratagem to snap out of depression, to shake off the blues?

If you had such a technique—many adolescents have—it would be of the utmost importance to remember it now: was it connected with renouncing something, did you regain your balance through ascetic practices or, on the contrary, through an effort to “have some fun”?

Were your interests generally adapted to your sex? If you were a boy, did you enjoy playing with dolls, cooking, nursing?

If you were a girl, did you try to join organized groups of boys, did you play at soldiering, robbery, crime detection? Did your parents have visible regrets that you turned out to be what you were—a boy, a girl? When you came to choose a trade, were you still influenced in any way by “unmanly” (or by “unwom¬anly”) penchants, or, on the contrary, did you yearn to be” a real he-man” (or to embody all the well-known feminine traits)?

Take your time in digging up those memories. I want you to start a train of thoughts leading from earliest interests, rebukes, encouragements, right up to your pres¬ent job and hobbies.

Let your thoughts wander off without logical connec¬tions, abandon yourself to those loose but inescapable currents of thought which govern our dreams.

Considered from the high standpoint of your con-scious ego, these freely wandering thoughts may seem like the meanderings of a slow river; but even the most extravagant detours of a water current are explained when you measure the lowering level of its surround¬ing terrain.

Similarly, your thoughts avoid unconscious resistances, they make detours in order to circumvent certain danger spots, and the most “illogical” turnabouts are indicative of the contours of your soul's inner landscape.

When you find that your thought current hardly dares touch the outer fringe of some event in your past, you will know that there is a powerful obstacle. The censor sits atop this invisible hill and bids your con¬scious thoughts choose deviations.

Mark such points. Come back to them again and again. They may indicate a complex, a rough spot, a badly healed wound in your psyche. It may take months until you have strengthened and cleared your conscious thoughts to the point where they will suddenly work their way through these well-protected complexes.

Don't think that you cannot accomplish this task. Even the best psychiatrist can do no more than help you to discover these inner sore spots for yourself. There is no shortcut: you yourself must lift such an unconscious trauma into the realm of your own conscious.

A psychiatrist may be convinced much earlier than his patient that there is such and such a complex hidden in the patient; but the healing process can start only when the patient himself discovers and dissolves the old complex.

You are, as your own analyst, at the same time your own patient. That means that you have the multiple task of observing the meanderings of your inner mono¬logue and of solving its riddles. Don't get discouraged, especially not by illogical, even seemingly crazy antics of your mental activity.

Be sure that all these deviations mean something, and take note of them in your conscious mind.

The whole course of your self-discovery depends on your making your memories manageable. Once you have learned to recall them at will you will be enabled to make them disappear at will too. This is extremely important, especially for the haunting, disagreeable memories which you are digging up.

In many cases, conscious cerebration about hitherto repressed recollections will strip them of their neurotic charge; they will be digested and forgotten—this time for good. This neutralizing process is the crux of tradi¬tional psychoanalysis.

However, I have known several patients who had been unable to rid themselves of a feeling of guilt, or of a bad conscience.

What are these people supposed to do in order to get back their mental balance?

If you have been unkind to a friend who has died since, it is impossible to make amends now. Ruminating about that guilt will not free you from it. Of course, it can teach a lesson so that you will behave more decently in the future.

But you have to go on living, and you have no use for the constant menace of ugly memories while you go about your daily business of living.

For these and similar cases, I have developed an analytical technique which will help you to banish un¬welcome thoughts so they won't disturb you when you are pursuing some useful activity.

Keep a special table lamp in easy reach beside your autoanalytical couch. It should have a very dim bulb, ten watts perhaps. Don't use this lamp for any ordinary purpose; for reading, etc., keep a second lamp handy.

When you feel an especially important bit of recollec¬tion coming up, make it a habit to switch on the soft light of this special lamp. Do this every time you have a distinct thought, and don't forget to switch the light off when the thought is about to fade away or to be replaced by some different thought or feeling. This coupling of thought and light will soon melt into one automatic reflex.

After several sessions of this autosuggestive game, you will be so conditioned that switching the lamp off will cause the thought to disappear.

Train yourself consciously for this performance. Lie down on the couch, reach out for the switch and tell yourself: now I am going to reproduce that certain thought which has haunted me so often. . . . And now I have had my fill of this ruminating, I feel the thought slipping back into the subconscious, and I am switching off the lamp.

You'll be surprised how soon you will be able actually to switch off a thought together with this lamp.

Later on, with the help of a new kind of relaxed discipline, you can attach some of your more disturbing symptoms to that autoanalytical light switch too. You can train yourself to say: now I am going to worry—to be bored—to have that twitch under my left eye—to have a fit of bad conscience or of regrets. Even certain neuralgic pains can thus be converted into a conditioned reflex.

You must believe in this: when you have acquired the power to switch your symptoms on, it will also be relatively easy for you to switch them off at will.

We shall talk about this conditioning process more extensively later. It will gradually lead to what I call “autoabsolution.” At the present stage, you should con¬cern yourself mainly with controlling your reminiscences. Learn to manage your memories and soon the uncon¬scious part of your personality will become manageable.

Don't think that you are performing something artifi¬cial or unnatural when you hitch a nervous symptom to a stimulus from the outside world. Many phobias func¬tion that way—involuntarily. The child who feels sud¬den fright when the light in his room goes out has under¬gone the same conditioning, only in an inverted, uncon-scious way.

A shapeless, animalistic fear is latent as part of the child's unconscious, and it becomes manifest when that certain light is switched off. In other words, the child is not afraid of the dark, he is afraid when it's dark.

Examine yourself thoroughly: have you any marked phobias of this kind?

Do you still experience those in¬fantile fears of the dark, of narrow passageways or, on the contrary, of broad streets?

Tie your flow of memories, your tics, your oppressive feelings to the external stimuli of your autoanalytical hour: to the process of locking your door, lying down on the couch, switching on that dim light. But get a hold on your blissful memories, on your mental elations too.

Once you have accomplished this conditioning proc¬ess, you will have a firm grip on the peculiarities of your own personality.

Eros Has Many Masks

A LADY of my acquaintance who seemed to lead a reasonably happy though restless life once surprised me with the flat statement that her marriage was not a suc¬cess. I suggested that having a child might mend her marital difficulties.

She shrank back a little and explained that it was impossible to raise children in their apart¬ment, in this particular city, etc. I felt that those could not be the real reasons. Did her husband not like chil¬dren?—Yes, he loved children very much.

When I in¬quired further as to why she did not want a child, she said, among other things, “Children don't trust their parents/’ I did not regard this remark as a statement but as a symptom. I discovered that she had the feeling of having been betrayed by her mother.

Her mother seemed to have received a kind of poetic pleasure out of telling the little girl that babies grow in a pond and are carried up to the light of day by water lilies. This was a very nice tale, but when the girl was confronted with situa¬tions where she needed more exact knowledge, she de¬veloped a deep-seated distrust of her mother. She no longer knew the reason, but she felt that “children and parents cannot trust each other.”

When she uncovered all her memories and autoana-lyzed the old grudge, the vicious circle was broken. To¬day this lady has two children and is happy in her family.

Let me cite another example of the real dangers re-suiting from sexual misinformation. It was told to me by a Swiss couple.

In many European nurseries there still persists the old story that babies grow inside cabbage heads. This couple's boy was about five years old when his mother expected a second baby. The boy had always heard about cabbage-birth, and when he was told that soon he would have a little brother or sister, nobody thought of correcting that earlier misinformation.

The boy happened to see a child's automobile in a store and told his father how very much he would like to have it. The father explained that he could not afford to buy him that car since there would be many expenses connected with the arrival of the new baby.

In the boy's mind, this answer produced the alternative of having either an automobile or a baby in the house, and natural¬ly he would have preferred the automobile. When the time of birth approached, the boy was sent away to his grandmother.

The baby was stillborn. The parents, very much de-pressed, wanted to make the child's return less gloomy and the father bought the automobile denied him earlier.

The boy rushed into the house and inquired immedi¬ately, “Where is the new baby?”

He was told that there was no new baby and that there would be none. Quite unexpectedly the child fell into deep melancholia. He would not even touch the shiny automobile, he hardly ate, and he had terrible nightmares. This lasted for some weeks.

One afternoon the mother took out her knitting, which she had not looked at for months. A needle was missing in the unfinished pullover. She looked for it everywhere and finally asked her son whether he had taken it.

With all signs of terror, the child admitted that he had. Where was it? In the garden. He refused to go there alone, and when his mother went with him, he led her to the cabbage patch. There the needle was sticking right through the biggest cabbage head, and the boy broke down in tears. He said that he had wanted to destroy the new baby that deprived him of the desired automobile.

Even when it was explained to him that he could not possibly be guilty of the stillbirth, it took many weeks to get the shock out of his system and to transform him back into the nice little boy he really was.

The importance of early experiences connected with love life is too often underestimated. You must learn to admit their impact; otherwise—if you just smile and for¬get about them anew—you will never be able to shake off those handicaps imposed upon you in your earliest youth and carried around unwittingly for years and years.

For instance, you should pose the question to yourself whether you seriously believed in the baby-carrying stork.

Why is this an important inquiry?

It may be that your beloved parents and teachers fed you nothing but lies about sex, and that some bragging urchin brought out the truth. Your evaluation of sexuality may have been influenced by the disappointment that for a long time your loved ones had deceived you about an important matter.

This may have caused you deep-seated disgust for the whole subject or, worse, a cynical view of sex forbidding you to think and speak about it except in a sordid, joking manner.

Were you scolded because of early autoerotic activi¬ties? Did you receive punishment when you were dis¬covered? It is desirable that you should remember these early scenes.

Here is one of the reasons: many wives cannot stand being fondled by their husbands in any but the most kindergarten-like fashion. They have not been able to discard their bad conscience connected with erotic gestures and playful caresses. Some women would rather remain frigid than overcome their bodily shyness.

The obvious remedy is an adult outlook: the knowledge that nobody can punish you now for doing things for which you were punished during childhood. Many a marriage could be saved by breaking through senseless taboos.

Many psychologists maintain that in growing up a young human being has to go through some phases which, in the light of adult judgment, would seem to be perversions.

Freud's pupils are convinced that every person has, buried inside himself, what they call “poly-morph perverse” inclinations. Don't take this for granted; in no case can this theory be a starting point for intro¬spection, but it may turn out to be helpful in getting re¬sults. Don't preclude it as shockingly impossible in your own case; try to collect your material first.

Did you grow up among adults of the opposite sex? As a boy, were your habits formed by elderly women, aunts, elder sisters? As a girl, did you look up to your father, to older brothers as to godlike, admirable, distant beings? Many people who have had this typical pattern of adolescence are apt to have certain difficulties in later life.

They have learned too well that a person of the op¬posite sex can be loved very dearly without being con¬sidered sexually accessible. These people tend to be ex-tremely well-bred, polite, amiable—but incapable of organizing a successful marriage. They have a sexual “jinx.” Often their frustration outwardly is hardly rec¬ognizable; still, they are cases for autoanalysis.

Without going too deeply into the matter now, let me indicate a likely salvation from loneliness and de¬pression of this origin. Everything depends on your ability to reintegrate the split between these two kinds of love: you will have to reidentify the so-called carnal instincts with love—yes, even with spiritual love.

A person worthy of your highest esteem’ can be worthy, too, of deep, warm, erotic longings. Respect should never automatically exclude a libidinous attachment and ful¬fillment. Eros is a god with many masks and many faces; but he is always love.

Suppose your educators were determined to make a sexless being out of you: did you try to find other out¬lets for your vital energy, in sports, in studying or in drinking?

Did ascetic suppressions lead you to feats of endurance, to mental or physical achievements?

Or did they hinder your development by diminishing your power of concentration?

These and other inquiries finally will enable you to judge honestly whether you were a happy or an unhappy child.

Most psychoanalysts try to guide their patients' stream of consciousness to disagreeable memories, to traumata, to things suppressed because of their ugliness and hurt-fulness. This is very important indeed, but pursued with one-sidedness it tends to give many psychoanalytical sessions a morbid atmosphere.

I think you should not prejudice yourself against any kind of recollections. If beautiful, blissful moments start floating up before your inner vision, don't shove them back into the unconscious! Enjoy again whatever was enjoyable in your past! Feel again the wonderful satisfactions of widening horizons, of early achievements and victories.

The act of discovering your self should by no means be a constant brooding over bygone misfortunes. Ana¬lyzing the good aspects of your past will be a great help in overcoming present troubles. If you discover why you felt happy at a certain stage of your life, you may receive encouragement to dispel the dark clouds on to¬day's sky.

The autoanalyst should have at his disposal a com¬plete picture  of his  youth and  adolescence.  He mustintegrate the time dimension into his present person-ality. This can be achieved only by his seeing and feel¬ing how the past shaped his present.

Let me ask you a direct question: have you made use yet of that autoanalytical lamp? I recommended that you put a dim lamp beside your couch, that you switch it on whenever an especially important thought comes up from your unconscious, and that you switch it off to symbolize the end of this particular bit of thinking.

If you have practiced this during a number of sessions, I am sure that you have acquired the power to switch on and off some particular thoughts and feelings, and even neurotic phenomena.

Now—if the conditioning is firmly established—why don't you try the following exercise? When you have hit upon an agreeable reminiscence, or an inexplicably happy feeling, don't switch off that lamp at the end of your autoanalytical hour! Let it burn while you go about some other business, and let the happy thought linger in your conscious memory.

The Homonymy Test

THE following test is designed to give you a clearer picture of your own personality.

If you say the word “right” to a judge, he will auto-matically assume that you are talking about a moral quality; but if you shout “right” at a cabdriver, he will just as automatically think of a direction.

If you ask several people: “What is the opposite, or the antonym, of the word ‘right?” some will say “left,” others will say “wrong.” From their answers and from further elab¬orations you can learn whether their reactions are pri¬marily spiritual or practical. You can conclude that a man who named “wrong” as the opposite of “right” has some elements of a judge in his personality, whereas the man who answered “left” could be a good driver, or a traffic cop, or a geometrician.

Moreover, the answer “wrong” could help to reveal a generally pessimistic philosophy, a bad conscience, a repressed regret.

If you ask someone abruptly: “What is the meaning of the word ‘still?” and he says something about a dis¬tillery, you suspect that his thoughts wander easily in the direction of alcohol.

(Of course he may, just before he met you, have read a liquor advertisement, and nor¬mally his thoughts may not be centered around alcohol at all. But all tests have an element of uncertainty—you just cannot judge a living being by exclusively mechani¬cal means.)

However, the homonymy test may disclose some of your secret inclinations  for your conscious evaluation. In the following, you will find a number of words each of which has at least two distinct meanings.

In the blank space at the right of each word, write a short characterization of the first meaning which comes to mind. Even if you know the other possible meaning al¬most simultaneously, write down the one which occurred to you first.

The best way to make sure about priority is to let mental pictures appear with each word, for you cannot exchange images as readily as you can discard intellectual associations. Don't try to write down exact definitions; the main thing is to fix your first mental snapshot so that you will recognize it later when you compare it with the evaluations at the end of the list.

Don't try to be too clever—don't attempt to discover both meanings together. One is all that's needed.

Work fast! Don't hesitate! Don't try to cheat your-self! Explanations about the possible dual meanings will follow later, but don't look them up before you have written one clue to every word on the list. Some associa¬tion will do, a synonym or even an antonym, or a com¬panion word which is habitually added in some adage. Just jot down a hint for later examination of your pri¬mary reaction to each word.

Eve                        

fall                         

fine                       

right                      

mortarboard                     

spring                   

shell                      

caterpillar                           

plant                     

palm                     

state                     

groom                  

mine                     

crank                    

ass                         

jam                       

major                   

license                 

spell                      

sup                        

present                               

bar                        

swallow                               

joint                      

pussy                   

corn                      

tart                        

flight                     

bat                        

cock                      

match                  

bust                      

box                       

drawers                              

hose                     

suit                        

seal       

spicy                                     

bridge        

racket                  

cricket  

star                       

fan                        

honey                  

Pipe                      

customs                              

scale                     

draft                     

powder                               

race                      

net                        

dressing                              

game                    

nursery                               

arms                     

stock                    

club                        .              

coach                   

sound                  

hop                       

crook                    

bank                     

lobby                    

red                        

pupil                     

loaf                       

date                      

stable                   

nuts                      

Eve. Eve, the eternal female, is at the top of the list only in order to make the capital E less obvious. The chances that you thought of Christmas eve are slight, however. fall.

Did you automatically think of the first sin?

If so, Eve may have influenced your choice. Or did your inner eye see falling autumn leaves?

This may signify that you are overly concerned with the outward symptoms of aging. If you first thought of a fall from a cliff or from your window, you may have a phobia: but all these hints, of course, are significant only in connection with other psychological data.

fine. Do you feel fine—or did you think of a fine you had to pay?

Are you an optimist or a pessimist?

right. Do you primarily apply ethical or geometrical —spiritual or physical—standards?

mortarboard. Did you think of building a wall, or of climbing the ladder of academic honors?

Do you some¬times feel that you missed your profession?

spring. This might mean the season of youth, or part of a mechanical contraption, or a fountain. Your answer, coordinated with other answers, may become important for judging your true vocational interests.

shell. Do you like oysters? Have you been a soldier? Some important experience may come back to your memory if you follow up with reactions to your own answer.

caterpillar. Here you may have shown the inclina-tions of a mechanic, or a naturalist.

plant. Same.

palm. Same. Try to combine your answers in order to get a picture of your true vocation.

state. Did you think of natural condition, or of political organization? Have you a static or a dynamic mind?

groom. Did you think of a servant, or of a bridegroom?

mine. Are you the possessive type—“this is mine”? Did you think of ore and coal?

crank. Did you visualize a mechanical device, or an odd fellow?

ass. Did your inner eye see an animal, or some stupid person?

jam. Are you “in a jam”? Do you like sweets?

major. Have you a military or a civilian mind? This word has a musical meaning too.

license. Your decision to consider license as something very orderly—like a driver's license—or as something disorderly—like poetic license, or even licentiousness-is important for evaluating your own character.

spell. Do you have difficulty in spelling words? Do you succumb easily to a magic spell? Your choice of the “magic” meaning may reveal your aptitude for auto¬suggestion.

slip. “Your slip is showing”: an old play on the dual meaning. Honestly, did you picture a woman's under-garment, or did you think of a sudden mishap, a slip of the tongue, for instance?

present. A gift, or the present time?

bar. “And may there be no moaning of the bar when I put out to sea''—this would probably have been your thought association a few decades ago. Today's reader presumably will think of lawyers, or of drinkers.

swallow. Did you visualize a drinking movement, or a bird?

joint. This may mean a gathering place, especially for the joys of drinking, or the joining point of two bones. Unless you are plagued with rheumatism, you'll hardly have thought of your bones.

pussy. Did you think of a cat, or of a catkin of the pussy willow?

corn. On the cob, or on a toe?

tart. This may be a pie, or a woman. The importance of your selection for evaluating your inclinations need hardly be stressed.

flight. Cowardly impulses may have revealed them¬selves in your definition of flight as fleeing. But if you were thinking of an airplane's or a bird's soaring flight, you may be inclined toward heroism.

bat. Small animal or baseball stick?

cock. Fowl or faucet?

match. Matrimonial union, and/ or something pro-ducing fire by friction?

bust. Honestly: you pictured part of the female anat¬omy! Or are you worrying about “boom and bust”?

box. A slap on the ear, or a receptacle?

drawers. Did you see a piece of furniture, or an undergarment?

hose. Stockings or a garden hose?

suit. Are you concerned with the law, or with your outward appearance?

seal. A fur coat, or the mark on a document?

spicy.  There  are  spicy  meals   and  there  are  spicy

stories. What secret preference does your answer reveal?

bridge. A game, or a connecting construction?

racket. A tennis racket, or a fraudulent scheme?

cricket. “This isn't cricket,” or “the cricket on the hearth”—which was your association?

star. A heavenly body—in the sky or in the movies?

fan. If at the previous word you thought of a movie star, you may have thought of yourself as a movie fan. If it's very hot right now, you may have wished for ventilation from a fan.

honey. Something edible, or something embraceable?

pipe. For water, or tobacco?

customs. Generally accepted conventions, or import duties?

scale. Did you think of a fishy skin, of measuring, or of a series of musical tones?

draft. Did you think of a drawing? Is your mind pre¬occupied with military service?

powder. What smell came to your mind, face powder or gun powder?

race. Do you enjoy seeing horse races? Have you any racial prejudices?

net. Fishing net—or net profit?

dressing. You can put it on a wound, or on a salad.

game. Here you can think of the good taste of a deer-steak, or you can think of some sport.

nursery. Did your inner eye see children, or flowers and shrubs?

arms. “To take up arms against a sea of troubles,” or “to rest in your arms''—which association did you prefer?

stock. Cattle or finance?

club. You want to club somebody, or peacefully join others in a club?

coach. A vehicle or an instructor?

sound. A passage of water? A musical sound? “Safe and sound”?

hop. A leap, or the good flavor of beer?

crook. A pothook or a swindler?

bank. A river bank, a financial institution?

lobby. Did you think of a hotel, or of politics?

red. Politics or color?

pupil In the eye, or at school?

loaf. Are you inclined to loaf around, or did you think of bread?

date. This may be a fruit from a palm tree, a date in history, or a rendezvous.

stable. As the schoolteacher said to her pupils, “Horse sense comes from a stable mind/’

nuts. Did you think of fruit? Or did you, with refer¬ence to this test, add: ”. . . to you”?

Now glance over your list again! If you have con-sistently chosen the erotic meaning in preference to the neutral, your selections may be symptomatic of unful¬filled erotic longings—even if you don't want to admit it to yourself. Analyze your remarks concerning the follow¬ing words: Eve, groom, tart, match, slip, honey, arms, date, etc.

Are you secretly longing for a spree? Look back at your reactions to license, bar, joint, spicy, racket, jam, swallow, loaf.

A mechanically inclined mind may reveal itself in certain reactions to mortarboard, spring, caterpillar, mine, pipe, etc.

If you are inclined to social gatherings and sports, you will see it from your answers to club, cricket, game, stable, etc. These significant test words are interspersed with neutral words to put you off guard; but perhaps they too will have given you some hints about your pre¬occupations.

In evaluating the results of the homonymy test, try to be as objective as possible. Don't change your mind about what you really wanted to say: there is nobody around to be deceived but yourself. Count how often you chose the “bad” significance when there would have been a “good” one at your disposal (as in the case of jam, tart, racket, license, slip, etc.).

Don't “feel bad'' if carnal thoughts did pop into your mind first! Admit the fact to yourself, try to digest it, and integrate it with the rest of your inclinations.

Often one word may start a chain reaction leading right down to an important complex.

It might have happened that you just could not think of a second sense for one of the words on the list. It may have seemed to you that there was only one absolutely obvious meaning.

If this happened to you, take a closer look at the meaning which originally escaped you. This elusive subject may be the clue to one of your com¬plexes, it may stand for something repressed and erased by your own unconscious censorship.

A word bringing up a thought which you do not like may serve as a stimulus word to excite a slumbering complex. That's why it is important to think about the meaning you did not choose—and to think about it right now.

Remembrance of Things Past

ONCE I subjected a lady of sedate habits to an associa¬tive test. I called out certain words and asked her to give me the one meaning of each word which occurred to her first. I chose such words as ”bow” which may to certain people sound like “beau,” or “eye” which in pronunciation resembles the word “I”: the choice of the latter meaning usually reveals a certain overemphasis on the ego.

When I came to the word “steal,” she choose the meaning “steel, a metal” but then she added, “It tastes sour.”

I kept this enigmatic remark in my mind, and after we had finished the test I guided her thoughts back to associations with “sour,” for I felt there was more behind this remark than she herself knew.

She described a very definite sensation of a sour taste, and her lips even con¬tracted in the typical reaction to sourness. She insisted that this was a delicious sensation. After I let her rumi¬nate for a while with closed eyes, she remembered that this taste belonged to sour apples—to apples she had taken from a neighbor's tree when she was a child, prob¬ably in her eleventh year.

She had not thought about this scene in the neighbor's garden for three and a half decades; all of a sudden she actually felt the cool, waxy skin of that apple, she heard the crunch of the hard fruit between her teeth, and she felt a deep delight about the whole recollection.

Why did that lady first give the definition “steel, a metal”? Together we discovered that her first subcon¬scious impulse had really been to say “steal—apples.”

After she committed that peccadillo many decades ago, she did not like to talk or think about stealing, so her inner censor ordered her to decide on “steel.” Had her unconscious not produced the extracurricular sour taste, she would not have found out about that old repression of hers.

I told her that she would feel better if she gave up her sedateness from time to time and indulged in inno¬cent peccadillos; after this she got more fun out of life.

Some people have developed a real virtuosity in for¬getting repulsive facts, bothersome appointments, etc. Some of us are plagued by this kind of forgetfulness, which makes disagreeable duties even more complicated and disagreeable. Others are apt to forget what they learned for examinations and other special occasions.

Anyway, it seems that forgetfulness is madness with a certain method. It often has something to do with secret fears and secret compulsions. We know that fears and compulsions are always present when a person has a neurosis. This does not mean that forgetfulness is a neurosis, but that it is closely related to neurotic phenom¬ena.

How can we explain this relationship?

There is only a difference in degree between amnesia and forgetfulness. Amnesia is a spectacular sickness. Its characteristic symptom is that a person cannot reproduce any memories whatsoever from a certain period of his life.

Usually it is the consequence of an external trauma, of a blow on the head, of a tumor, or a bullet in the brain. But there is such a thing as everyday amnesia.

If you observe your parents or some elderly friends, you will notice that the anecdotes and little tales from the past are not taken with equal frequency from all periods of their lives. They have favorite memories, and these come from perhaps four or five relatively short stretches of the past.

The vast majority of events from their personal autobiographies seems nonexistent, blotted out, subject to everyday amnesia. If you ask about it, they will tell you that “nothing special” happened during these forgotten years; but what does “nothing special” mean?

In most cases, it means “nothing to brag about.” But it may, on the contrary, mean ‘“nothing to complain about.” In other cases—and they are more significant psychologically—it means that the person who lived through these years does not care to remember his own personality as it was at that time.

Many instances of everyday amnesia are caused by the person's own inner censor: they express the attitude of his semiconscious superego. The superego forbids the ego the enjoyments (or the bittersweet regrets) which certain recollections would offer to this conscious ego.

Autoanalysis aims at breaking down this censorship. If you want to obtain relief from irrational fears and compulsions by analyzing yourself, you must remember the significant events of your past.

You have to work your way back through the walls of censorship, you have to dissolve the inhibitions which your unconscious has developed against remembering certain events from your early life. You have to cure your everyday amnesia.

Remember your past, relive your life—in small doses. It is impossible to remember everything for a simple technical reason: there is not room enough in your con¬scious for more than a few facts at a time.

We can make this clear by means of a simple experiment. You are con¬fident that you know the English language. That means, no doubt, that more than a thousand English words are somewhere in your psyche. But does this mean that all the  words  you  “know” are  simultaneously present  in your conscious mind? Not at all. Your conscious—and that includes your conscious memory—has in its posses¬sion perhaps six to eight words at a time, the last part of this sentence, for instance; and it has a kind of cross index, an enigmatic but extremely efficient system of general rules which gives your conscious mind the com¬mand of the English language.

This is all we mean when we say that in order to discover your self you must remember your past. You have to gain command of the important facts of your life, you have to acquire the force to reproduce and to coordinate your salient memories according to your free will.

Search for the very first trace which any event left in your memory. Many people can go back to things which they saw or heard in their third year. Is there any strong feeling connected with the earliest picture in your mind-any fear, hatred, love?

Can you possibly determine why you remember this particular event?

Don't try to establish a rational continuity between your memory pictures as yet. Select those remnants which have a special charm, a heightened significance —memories that disturb, stimulate, refresh, embitter, delight you.

Work on these; reconstruct the whole scene with all participants, reimagine the events which took place before and after, and ponder the immediate and later consequences. If visual memories seem to elude you, try to conjure up smells, or taste impressions from your childhood. You can circumvent an inhibition against a visual recollection by thinking about sounds.

Gradually you should progress to more difficult work on elusive and disagreeable memories. At this stage you may take some notes for yourself. After ruminating for an hour or so on your couch, write down in a very few words what thoughts prevailed in your conscious mind; two or three days later, reading these cues will help you to plunge back into the mysterious recess of your un-conscious.

If on some day you feel incapable of devoting yourself to self-analysis, don't force yourself. Try to find the reason why you feel distracted; try to discover a differ-ent approach. Should infantile memories refuse to ap¬pear before your inner eye, select a different period— the first days in your present occupation, or some period of your life when you fell in love.

Whenever you have difficulty in approaching a certain epoch of your develop¬ment, think about your inner censor—is there something your superego with its high-strung morality would not want you to remember?

After several unsuccessful efforts to gain access to lost memories of a certain period, you may assume that this particular blank in your mind means something. You have probably hit upon the kernel of an everyday am¬nesia, upon the symptom of a deep-seated complex.

Circumscribe this amnesic void as closely as you can. Take notes of all the associations which come to the fore¬front of your mind while hankering after the lost remem¬brance.

Some of these thoughts may not seem to be re¬lated to the event in question, yet they may have sym¬bolic significance. A dream may lead you on, or a chance remark of a relative who knew you at that period.

Don't become discouraged if the missing reminiscence does not appear in a few weeks. Sometimes it will pop up when you think about it the least. The appearance of this memory will cause you very strong emotions, and then you must get a firm hold on these repressed events.

You must actually relive this part of your past, and by conscious cerebration try to get rid of the emotional charge which plagued your unconscious.

Many so-called laymen have mastered and even healed their own neuroses. The gravest obstacle to the discovery of one's self, as well as to classical psychoanalysis, is the patient's own resistance; he seems to cling to his sickness.

Unconsciously he does not want to renounce those un¬fair advantages which sickness offers him: the attention of his family, which he would not have to such a degree if he were healthy, the services rendered him in his ca¬pacity as a sick person, even the flattering interest of the doctor.

A partial paralysis or a heart disease are extremely disagreeable; nevertheless they offer some protection against too strenuous demands from a tough environ-ment. When this paralysis or this heart disease are scru¬tinized clinically and revealed as neurotic symptoms, such a patient does not want to acknowledge this.

He wants to continue his life in the accustomed frame of “being sick,” he even manages to reinforce the symptoms in order to make them appear entirely organic. He will not do so consciously: neurosis, of course, is by no means identical with simulation.

His unconscious tells his somatic con¬stitution how to gain certain unfair advantages, and his conscious does not even know about this order. But the body behaves in perfect accordance with the commands from the unconscious.

The autoanalyst has to fight his own resistance. His wish to be healthy must become so strong that it is able to penetrate and remold his unconscious.

There is a striking resemblance between complexes and demons (as described in the New Testament and in medieval treatises on demonology). A demon does not want to leave the human being whom he has chosen as his dwelling place, and it takes much art and energy on the part of the healer to drive out a devil—or to over¬come the resistance of a complex.

The complex which is at the bottom of the neurosis has found a willing host; and the healer in many cases is even hated for the dis¬turbance of the patient's neurotic equilibrium.

In the case of an autoanalytical attack on the demonic complex, the healer must be the patient's own conscious. You must first strengthen your conscious by giving it wider scope, more power, some success—by letting it di¬gest your past.

Once the unconscious and semiconscious parts of your life have enriched and strengthened your conscious, you will feel that you can embark on the ad¬venture of attacking the almost unknown demon within you.

Don't think that psychoanalytic treatment would spare you this effort. In psychoanalysis, too, your own con¬scious has to have the strength to prevail against sub¬conscious menaces. The psychoanalyst who informs you that you have such and such a complex is not healing you.

If your own conscious does not make the discovery for itself, your unconscious will never give up its re¬sistance. It is not a question of knowing but of living.

For some of us, the most painful memories are those which give cause for regrets; and by regrets I don't mean a bad conscience. I mean regrets for not having dated that certain girl—regrets for not having grasped this or that opportunity.

Many people with whom I have talked about problems of their past suffer from too good a conscience. One young man of my acquaintance was so unselfish that whenever there was a decision to make he decided against his own interests. He thought about the right of his competitors to the job he really wanted, he retreated at the first sign of displeasure which he fancied in the eyes of a lady whom he wanted to date.

He always did and said and thought what was right; he never got any place, and when I first met him, his clear conscience had made him a neurasthenic. I demonstrated to him that his subconscious really contained regrets about missed opportunities.

After he had thought a great deal about the bad results of his supposedly good deeds, he got a new start in life; and the first few successes helped him to overcome the secret fears which were the under-lying   causes   of  all  his   supposedly  unselfish  retreats.

Many people would feel much better if they could admit to themselves that they have remorse—if they could think in clear, conscious terms about things un-done and words unsaid. A squeamish conscience applied to the hustle and bustle of everyday life may be as noxious to one's fellow men as it is a hindrance to one's own development.

Don't misunderstand: a bad conscience, a definite re¬morse about a definite misdeed is, of course, much worse. A bad conscience, in the sense of classical tragedy, is apt to poison a person's whole unconscious and make him unfit for life.

Here, too, repression is not the way to cure the suffering of the subconscious. The age-old view is absolutely right: only admission of a secret guilt will restore balance and make a healing process possible.

In the light of modern psychology, we can explain the heal¬ing power of confession: it takes away the need for re-pression, it reinstates the free communication between the conscious and the unconscious, and it reintegrates a broken character.

Regrets about something left undone are far more difficult to neutralize.

An opportunity once missed will seldom offer itself a second time. Rarely will life develop the same con¬stellation all over again. But if it does—don't hesitate.

Your analytical rumination will have borne wonderful fruit if you obtain a better result at the second try: if you have learned to know what you want.

In case you should find no opportunity to correct a past mistake, you may find consolation in the thought that much worse things might have ensued had you chosen a different path. Think of all the trouble you avoided by not having asked that girl to dance with you —by not having taken that job with all its crushing re¬sponsibility.  

Naturally, there is no way of verifying what conse-quences any action or nonaction might have engendered. So there are no limits set to the activity of your imagina¬tion.

Sometimes you don't want to live with memories which have become painful or senseless to you. Against such unpalatable remnants you must learn to utilize your faculty for everyday amnesia. With the help of auto¬suggestion, you can actually learn to erase some recol¬lections.

Buy a slate or blackboard with a piece of chalk and a sponge or cloth. We'll call it your “autoanalytical slate.”

Suppose you are bothered by disagreeable memories of which you cannot rid yourself through complete abreaction or by other thoroughgoing methods; you want to make room in your conscious mind for some urgent and important cerebration; then I would advise you to concentrate on the following symbolic act.

Write the most characteristic word from that memory complex on the slate. This may be the name of an unfaithful girl, or an enemy, or some city, or a certain date. Read this word a hundred times, and think about it during one full autoanalytical hour. Look firmly into the phantom's eye.

At the end of this hour, when you are completely disgusted, wet your sponge and solemnly wipe the symbol off the slate. You may accompany this with the statement, “Now I'm going to make a clean slate of it” —or something to this effect.

Such simple manual acts have the power to precipi¬tate or increase your abreaction. Their concreteness evokes conditioned reflexes from your school days—re¬flexes so deeply imbedded in your subconscious that you will unthinkingly turn away from the clean slate and start working on an entirely unrelated task, as you once may have done at school.

The gray woolen clew with which you wound up your circular worries and which you then threw to the winds, the little lamp with which you have conditioned your¬self to switch on and off certain symptoms—they all be¬long in this category of helpful elementary symbols or mental tools. Don't just think about them: get your autoanalytical slate right now.

The Balance of the Mind

THE DISCOVERY of your self can be helped by another kind of mental training. Whenever a bad thought comes into your mind, you can associate it with a good thought.

The brain has the faculty of coupling two thoughts so firmly together that on every occasion when you think of one the other will appear too. Think, for instance, of the gong in your grandmother's house which was sounded to announce that dinner was ready.

Try to hear that hollow, vibrant sound with your inner ear, and to think about nothing else.

Can you do it? Probably not.

Don't you automatically think of the food which followed that sound?

But, now that you think of it, what does a metal gong have in common with food?

You have it in your power to associate a number of thoughts taken at random if you practice this coupling for a while. They will link more and more firmly to each other, and soon thought number one will unfail¬ingly generate thought number two. (This faculty of the brain, if properly practiced, allows astonishing mne¬monic feats.)

Try to tie an agreeable reminiscence to each disagree¬able reminiscence which periodically plagues you. Sup¬pose your unconscious cannot get rid of the emotional charge which a certain recurrent picture carries on and on through the years; if there is no chance to abreact these old emotions in real life, you have to neutralize that charge some other way, and you can do it by creat¬ing a new equilibrium.

“Why didn't I propose to that girl that evening? A little more straightforwardness on my part might have changed the whole course of my life. Am I really too lazy, too shy, too indolent to be a success?”

Whenever some recollection like this starts a discouraging train of thoughts, you must think of an occasion where you were successful and courageous. “Yes, I was silly then. But two years earlier, when I had made up my mind that I wanted to be friends with that boy down the street, I was able to develop a very fine comradeship.”

There just isn't a life which is entirely devoid of success. If your unhappy constitution forces you to brood over your failures, you have to discipline your soul so that it reproduces this or that success; and you will see that after a while your brain automatically, without con-scious effort, will bring forth satisfying memories and thoughts. You can dwell on these until you have found enough encouragement to laugh at past misfortunes.

You regret that you lied to a certain dear person? Then think of an occasion when you were brave and truthful. If it's the memory of a sexual mishap which plagues you, think of an outstanding instance of happi¬ness in your past, and link these memories together so that the first one engenders the second one (not vice versa).

You will soon discover how easy and satisfying it is to build up this mental balance.

Even if you suffer from a recurrent headache or other inescapable pain, you can transform this very pain into the signal to think about the happiest period of your life.

This autoanalytical practice is related to some other autosuggestive exercises I have recommended previously: I asked you to wind up your worries into an imagined gray woolen ball—to “wind it up and throw it away.”

But you may have found that this winding-up, as well as the exercise with the slate, worked only with surface troubles and that some essential components of your personal history cannot be dismissed radically from your inner life. It is these stubborn, annoying memories which must be integrated with agreeable recollections into one new, balanced unity.

Thought association (or, for short, association), as a rule, works this way: a stimulus from the outside world penetrates your mind. Your brain gets a reaction akin to that of a tuning fork which starts vibrating when a tone of the corresponding wave length is sounded in the vicinity.

Your nervous system produces always the same reaction to certain stimuli, whether it seems rational or not. Your mental reactions are, in many cases, as auto¬matic as your psychophysical reflexes.

For instance, when you are horrified at the approach of an enemy, you feel goose flesh creeping all over your body: this is explained by physiologists as a remnant of prehistoric times when your ancestor's fur bristled at the approach of a foe.

Your bristling forefather looked bigger, more imposing, better protected. You cannot con¬trol this reflex by will power; nor can you control a gen¬uine thought reflex once it is firmly established.

In autoanalysis, we make use of this faculty of the human mind. It is very easy to form associations and re¬flexes by hypnotic processes. You can order a hypno¬tized person automatically to sweep a vase from its pedestal when the hands of the watch reach seven minutes past ten; and after awakening from his trance he will do it, without knowing about the order any more and without being able to explain his weird action. By autosuggestion you can issue orders to yourself which have an amazing force.

On the other hand, auto analysis relies  on the free flow of associations. Therefore, it is important to loosen your associative thinking. Your inner life must become firm but flexible.

You must dare to admit all thoughts which want to appear. This requires some training; and this training does not necessarily have to take place when you are alone in your room, you can undertake it in everyday life.

Speaking of an approaching formidable foe: next time you see your boss walking through the office, try to let your thought reactions come naturally to the forefront of your conscious.

In case you are a stenographer, just jot down on your pad whatever comes to your mind. (Of course, since these free associations sometimes may not be altogether flattering to your superior, you must take care that he does not read them.)

By this simple abreaction, not only will you “blow off steam” where it does you no harm, but you will get a written indication in what direction your heavier abre-actions should lead you. Take notes—irresponsible notes —when your husband or wife or mother-in-law leaves your room.

Maybe you will receive, by association, the mental picture of an animal, or of some happy, or un¬happy, moments you lived through with this person, or of a wishdream.

Don't be alarmed at yourself if an unretouched por¬trait turns out to be a caricature. Don't think that you are lacking in respect if your secret judgment differs from your normal attitude toward the same person. I don't believe that even a boy in school who draws an ugly caricature of his teacher on the blackboard is really lacking in appreciation; he is only suspending his respect for a little while.

Any imposing personality produces such a heavy strain on the nerves of those living with him that they need a safety valve just in order to remain their own selves. A caricature is not a sign of hostility.

It is only a harmless revenge for the suppression of free, uninhibited judgment in the face of an imposing figure; in this sense it is, paradoxically, homage to the intimidat¬ing might of this personality.

As a boy of fourteen I had a very good, very cultured teacher whose tics and mannerisms got on my nerves, and I wrote a poem about him. It was a spiteful and badly exaggerated little rhyme.

Unfortunately, one of my classmates showed it to another one, and it was con¬fiscated and read by the teacher. The ensuing scenes were unforgettably terrible. Finally, the poor teacher called my father and told him that the hatred and disgust which were revealed in my poem convinced him that he had missed his profession, that he could not be a leader of youth.

I was not able to forgive myself for this “juvenile cruelty” which apparently had broken the spirit of a teacher whom I really did not hate at all, and for whom I had, on the contrary, too much respect—so much that I needed an abreaction.

The analysis of my changing inner reactions to this oppressive memory from the threshold of my adoles-cence went on for many years, and I believe it taught me so much of what I know about the psyche that in retrospect even that discouraged teacher might be proud of his pedagogy.

Through all the layers of any ordered society we find much superfluous resentment. Many a superior (boss or prince, teacher or father) is shocked when he acciden¬tally discovers what he believes to be a sign of hatred in his subordinates.

He is, in most cases, mistaken: the apparently inimical utterance is, in general, only the reverse side of a too high-strung attention. Constant de¬pendence generates a contrary reaction often verbalized in spiteful terms. But respect and willingness to follow the leader don't suffer from these abreactions.

To get back to our little experiment: when you study your secretly taken notes about the persons in your daily environment, don't be shocked if they sound inordinately rebellious. There is one definite use which you should make of these random jottings.

After you have isolated yourself for an analytical session, you should let these scribbles provoke all possible thoughts while slowly reading and rereading them. They will excite further as¬sociations, leading your conscious mind down toward inhibited regions of your unconscious mind.

They will bring the hard shell of your complex into vibration and thus start the opening-up process, abreaction and cure. From your scattered notes you probably can gain a clear picture of your real reactions to your environment.

Then, you can draw your own conclusions as to whether it is worthwhile trying to adjust yourself to your job, to your family, even to your own professed philosophy and religion—or whether you and your present surround¬ings are plainly incompatible. You will find out whether the trouble lies in yourself, in your environment, or in the lack of harmony between those two factors.

You can then make the decision to carry on in your present position and “make the best of it” or to change your external circumstances and transplant your ego into some more congenial environment. We will take up this matter again in the next section.

If the psychotechnical devices prescribed earlier—the lamp, the blackboard, etc.—were useful and beneficial, you may facilitate the further course of your self-dis¬covery by marking down the negative and positive ele¬ments of your personal life on a balance sheet.

Arrange this register so that each negative fact (on the left) corresponds to a positive feature (on the right). Coordinate one “plus” to one “minus” (even if there is no objectively given correlation) and memorize these coupled thoughts.

Continue this work during the next few sessions. After the combinations of bad with good are firmly impressed on your memory, you will find that they have a strong influence on your daily thinking.

Whenever a familiar negative thought comes up, you will have at your dis¬posal also a nice, hopeful, refreshing, or humorous in¬spiration, and you can readily balance the two thoughts one against the other.

If your memory is of the visual type, you can even push an actual negative experience over to the left and watch a good thought appear on the right of your men¬tal balance sheet.

Don't let yourself be shocked by the slight parlor-game flavor of this mnemonic procedure! It serves only as an aid in your mental training. After having acquired the habit of weighing good against bad, you will almost automatically acquire a balanced mind.

No life is entirely devoid of pleasurable aspects. The balance depends on how much weight you attach to the positive elements of your psyche.

I have often experienced the effectiveness of this kind of coupling. At the age of puberty, I was frequently plagued by fits of melancholia. (Many adolescents have these deep depressions, but each adolescent usually thinks his own desperation quite unique and well founded on fact.)

These depressions had a disastrous influence on my studies and on my personal relation¬ships. During these fits I yearned desperately for help while wandering aimlessly through dreary streets.

Quite accidentally I heard a little melody coming from a win¬dow, played on a violin, probably not too well, but floating through the air with an indescribable charm. The surprise, the sudden realization that there was such a thing as a beautiful melody in the world had a strong effect on my mental state.

In later times, whenever that dreaded feeling of abject depression came over me, I made the effort to reproduce the little piece of melody in my mind, and its beauty immediately counterbalanced my melancholic mood.

The intensity of my pleasure while hearing those few notes was clearly derived from the intensity of my de¬pression. My subconscious jumped at the proffered help, so to speak, and tipped the scale to the other side.

Insignificant as this example may seem, it might never¬theless remind you of some similar experience in your own life. The material importance of the “plus” is irrele¬vant; its effectiveness depends solely on the way it is used to counterbalance a “minus.” I am sure you will find this mental balancing act quite practicable.

Automation Neurosis

CHILDHOOD traumata are a vicious source of trouble-no doubt about that. Yet there are, indeed, other causes for being dissatisfied with life; we might call them “everyday traumata.” The impact of harmful features of your daily environment is, in my opinion, at least as im¬portant as those early wounds which your ego may have received.

Do you have a bad conscience when you blame some¬one or something else for all your misfortunes? Don't feel guilty about it. Strangely enough, you may be right in “blaming the other fellow.”

The environment which modern civilization offers to its members is not designed expressly to make you happy. It is easy for you to find a scapegoat among the many oppressing factors of your surroundings.

Very likely your wishes were never entirely fulfilled because of outward interference; quite possibly you were unable to attain the desired development of your own person¬ality because other people or institutions (or “fate”) were standing in your way.

Don't feel shy about shifting the blame away from yourself! But be sure to ask yourself if you are not seeing scapegoats where there are none. Find out which of the environmental factors are really responsible for your frustrations; but don't neglect to examine your own reactions to those inimical factors. Perhaps you yourself have only chosen the wrong way of coping with these objectively given obstacles.

We may find a better approach to dealing with these external difficulties if we gain a clearer view of them.

Our contemporary scene is characterized by a stifling overorderliness on the one hand, and by an exasperating absence of order on the other. The most extreme reac¬tions to these diverging factors are the Automation Neu¬rosis and the D.P. Neurosis.

The victim of automation and the inmate of a dis-placed persons camp are at the opposite extremes of a scale which comprises practically all of our environmen¬tal ills. To some extent, we all are mixtures of these two extreme types.

Let me analyze first what I call the automation neu¬rosis. In the next chapter we will deal with the opposite phenomenon, the displaced person's complex. The D.P/s deepest problem is the lack of rational order; automation means an overabundance of order.

Our mechanized culture produces types of men who were unthinkable in any other age or clime, such as the assembly-line worker or the calculating machine opera¬tor. Our entire production apparatus more and more resembles an assembly line, and millions of specimens of Homo sapiens are nothing more than connecting links between the output of one machine and the input of another.

As soon as the latest form of “progress” gets around to dealing with a specialized job, the man is replaced by an ingenious feedback mechanism, and the automation of the production process is completed.

This is all right as long as the consumer has enough absorbing power. Still, it generates an almost eery undercurrent of futility in the back of the minds of many productive individuals.

While they are on the job, they are part of an inescapable routine. They are irreplaceable for eight hours—but they are very much replaceable in the over-all pattern of technological progress toward full automation. This dual tension creates the strange combination of stability and futility which tinges the lives of so many of our contem¬poraries.

Too orderly a life produces a troubled soul. Does this sound paradoxical?

It's like the good man whose wife had a nervous breakdown, with ravings and weird hallucinations. When asked by the physician what could have produced the trouble, he said: ”I can't imagine where she could have gotten such wild ideas. She practically hasn't left the kitchen for the last ten years.”

How can order produce trouble?

If you ever have observed a polar bear in a zoo, you will have seen an illustration of a compulsion neurosis. For hours the bear will trot along a fixed path in his cage, throwing his head around always at the same corner, extending the same paw with exactly the same motion, never changing his speed, never deviating.

A captivity neurosis of this kind may produce all sorts of harm, from inflammations caused by wearing off a cer¬tain spot on an animal's skin to deepest depressions and lethal hunger strikes.

If you have raw spots on your character, if you suffer from unnatural “frozen rhythms,” if the paths of your personal biography seem worn out like a treadmill, it may be the fault of the invisible bars enclosing you.

The given frame of your personal and social world may be so incongruous with your inner longings that you feel ill at ease all the time. And un-ease may degenerate into disease.

Many segments of our civilization have a compulsive function similar to the polar bear's cage. A commuter rising every morning at six o'clock, gulping down his coffee at 6:28, kissing his wife good-bye at 6:31, jump¬ing into his 6:35 bus in order to reach the 6:50 train—and performing a reverse procedure every night—may develop something very similar to a captivity neurosis, especially if his daily performance at the office or fac¬tory kills off his personal initiative.

In mild cases, this compulsion will strangle his faculty for cultural self-improvement—unfortunately not considered serious by many—but in severe cases even the ability to enjoy an occasional vacation and to profit from it will be de¬stroyed. It may lead to melancholia or, in combination with other causes, to complete collapse.

The standardizing compulsions of our business civili¬zation can produce phenomena which show impressive similarities to the symptoms of the neurotic polar bear. The symptoms are by no means confined to the “mod¬ern” mode of living, however.

Many procedures of tra¬ditional infantry drill, for instance, are designed to pro¬duce certain kinds of compulsion neuroses, of unnatural behavior, of conditioned responses. The association of verbal order and reflex will become so compulsive that it will function when applied to the destruction of life— others' or your own—and this, even if necessary, cannot be called normal behavior.

Many civilian activities fol¬low the same principle of forced conditioning. Once you have started to look at your environment from this angle you will find compulsions by conditioned reflexes in the most unexpected places.

Our civilization prides itself on its rationality. In order to produce rationally planned effects, however, it uses the mechanical reflexes of most of its inhabitants. On a “speed-up” assembly line, your precious heritage of human freedom can only be a disturbing factor.

The commuter (this term extended to cover every psycho¬logical commuting process, every frozen rhythm) can¬not but be disturbed by manifestations of his own free will, by his subconscious drives, by his higher interest.

He has to repress these drives if he wants to hold his job, if he wants to be a dependable cog in our business civilization. The man with an automation mentality tends to become an institutional fixture, and nothing more.

Here is one of the greatest dangers in our method of coping with the complicated problems of modern life. We seem to be forced to mechanize our work in order to live efficiently—and by this very compulsion we lose our aptitude for genuine living. It is a frightening dilemma.

Western man (as well as his westernized imitations) is conditioned by the clock. The hands of your watch have become the warning fingers of fate. Even on a beautiful carefree Sunday you may feel uneasy and for¬lorn if you discover that your watch has stopped.

You hurry to a neighbor, or to the telephone to synchronize yourself, to plug yourself in. You turn back during an otherwise leisurely walk or drive for fear of being late— you don't know too late for what, just too late.

All this means that you are already the victim of a compulsion neurosis. You don't dare to abandon your life to its own rhythm, you cannot trust your unconscious to steer you through the day.

Let's recapitulate briefly how the conditioned reflex works. If you make a tinkling sound whenever you feed a dog, the dog will associate this sound with food. After a while, when he hears the tinkling noise, even if he sees or smells no food at all, his gastric fluids, his be¬havior, his unconscious will react as it would to the ap¬proaching food.

With you, the position of the hands on your watch has replaced the tinkling irritation of that bell. And if it's not the watch you are probably complying with signals from your office, or from “what neighbors would say” or (silliest of all) from advertisements.

If you are one of the countless army of mechanized job-holders, your only salvation lies in keeping your un¬conscious (the best part of your soul) strictly aloof from your official mental processes.

A hidden reserve in you should remain untouched by this kind of civilization. Once the assembly line, the eternal circle of production and consumption of the (vastly overestimated) requisites of life, gets hold of your subconscious vital forces, you will gradually lose your faculty for personal happiness.

Keep your unconscious out of the unfeeling, mechan¬ical rhythm of civilizations assembly line. Keep a wild¬life preserve within yourself.

A dog's head, severed from its body, connected to a blood pump and kept alive by artificial circulation, will still show some reflexes. His mouth will water when you approach it with meat.

It is possible that it will have longing and pleasant sensations on contact with a dog of the opposite sex. I imagine that after a while it will be thoroughly reconciled with its situation on the laboratory table.

Connected to an artificial circulation machine—is this the life you imagined for yourself when you were a child? Certainly not.

Do you detect danger signals of automation neurosis in yourself?

Are you listless and sluggish when some out-of-the-way activity is demanded of you?

Have you lost the initiative for adventure?

Are your nerves on edge at the slightest deviation from the ordinary?

Ob¬serve the opinion of your friends, your boss, your sub¬ordinates: do they consider you as a fixture, a predicta¬ble man whose every action is really a reaction?

If you want to break up the rigidity of an assembly-line existence, you must liberate and reactivate your own natural, vital rhythms. Those of your reflexes which have become hitched to the mechanical, rotat¬ing routine must be freed from their fetters.

You must regain your detachment—or, to be exact, the detach¬ment of your unconscious from the frozen rhythms which your professional activities seem to impose upon your mode of living.

Your life must cease to be a series of conditioned reflexes: you have to learn to un-condition your reflexes.

Certainly, you cannot afford to sacrifice punctuality and efficiency to your private moods; neither is that necessary. But start to un-condition your private actions. Begin by severing the ties which connect your private activities to the hands of your watch. Be yourself in pri¬vate life, and you will eventually become a more out¬spoken, more imposing personality on the job too.

Start with easy, agreeable changes. Talk to your wife at breakfast instead of reading the newspaper. Change your diet, try out some outlandish kinds of food. Don't be a slave to the strange modern habit of name-brand fetishism.

Take a different route to your place of work, even if it means getting up somewhat earlier. Observe your habit patterns, and try to bring variation into them. Don't start every second sentence with “Well. . .” Don't use the same two hundred words over and over again, don't shy away from an unusual vocabulary.

Your train of thoughts will start on a different circuit. Tackle some more important tasks in a different manner, even if there is a risk involved. You will soon develop a yearning for deviating procedures, for fresh ideas, for a new outlook on your old environment.

Of course, this un-conditioning involves mental ef¬fort, but there is no harm in that. Living exclusively by conditioned reflexes means unconditional surrender of your souls liberty.

If it's not the job which forces you into an assembly-line existence, but if you are the prisoner of other ex¬ternal conditions, you can practice detachment by vari¬ous means. Balancing bad with good associations is a help, as I have shown in a previous chapter: think of something good whenever some familiar evil comes up.

In a normal, reasonably cultured environment, there is always an opportunity for modifying your conditioned reflexes so that they comprise something useful and healthy.

If your own special case resembles the automation mentality, study the coming chapters in this book about the power of decentration and about your vital rhythms. Avoid frozen, ceremonial behavior; it always tends to degenerate into compulsions.

Don't accept fate passively. Look around you: there is nature, there is art to take your mind off your occupational troubles, and the value of a worthwhile hobby can hardly be overstressed.

One of the most disagreeable symptoms of automa¬tion neurosis is insomnia. If you find it hard to fall asleep, try the trick which has helped some of my friends: when you lie down to sleep, close your eyes and smile. Don't think about any reason for smiling, just pro¬duce a mild, relaxed smile on your face.

You are, of course, conditioned the other way around: your smile usually follows a feeling of pleasantness. But this con¬ditioned reflex can be inverted: when you smile, a pleas¬ant, relaxed feeling will spread inside you and your tension will give way.

Your well-being depends upon your ability to let your unconscious reflexes run their natural course.

In order to dissolve an automation neurosis, you have to liberate your real self from the tyrannical rhythms of a rotating environment. Only when your unconscious can live out its own free-breathing, pulsating rhythms independently of the machine rhythms of the external world, will you be out of danger.

The relief of your unconscious from the pressure of a scheduled life (so that it can follow its own laws) is a prerequisite for the serene feeling of being a free per¬son, and that serene feeling is the aim of self-discovery.

D. P. Neurosis

LET'S turn to the other extreme.

Suppose you didn't recognize yourself and your own typical difficulties in the portrait of the automation slave just sketched. It's possible that your disturbances don't stem from an oppressive excess of order, but from too little order.

In this case, your reactions would probably resemble those of a displaced person. We'll try to di¬agnose whether you are suffering from a D.P. neurosis.

Perhaps you have no real hold on life. Those environ¬mental factors created to protect you, as if by black magic have turned into inimical forces. You feel that you cannot trust the traditional values which your fathers ac¬cepted without question. You are uprooted, but not strong and unconcerned enough to lead the life of a lone wolf.

Typical D.P. complexes can appear in millionaire heiresses as well as in the real displaced persons, the flotsam left in the wake of the cyclonic path of Fascism and wars, and augmented by ever-new disasters. D.P. complexes are as common today as migraine used to be in quieter times.

Again—as in the case of the poor polar bear with his compulsion neurosis—you must excuse me for compar¬ing you to a beast.

Neuroses in animals have been studied extensively; and psychologists feel relatively certain of one result: an animal develops neurotic behavior patterns when faced with an insoluble task.

To make this point clear, let me give a summary de¬scription of some of these experiments.

Dogs are intelligent enough to discern between a triangle and a circle. They can be trained so that they will look for food only when it is hidden underneath a circle and to remain unconcerned when a triangle is shown to them.

After a while they will rush forward whenever they perceive a circle. Now, if you train a dog to choose between a circle and an oval, he will learn this too if the oval is definitely stretched out, let's say like a sausage or like an egg. But if you show him ovals more and more resembling a circle, his faculty for dis¬cernment will finally give way.

When faced with the choice between a circle and an ellipsis which is almost a circle, the dog will not sit quietly, shrug his shoulders and indicate that this task is beyond him: he will show so-called catastrophe-reactions.

These typical reactions to insoluble tasks are very impressive: the animal will get into a state of uncontrollable excitement, then it will fall into a deep depression. All its conditioned reflexes will suddenly disappear. The animal as a whole becomes useless.

Psychologists have made similar experiments with sheep, mice and rats, and they have found this catas-trophe-reaction whenever an animal which had learned a lesson well was overwhelmed with the mounting dif¬ficulties of its task.

It seems impossible for the animal to shift its concentrated attention to something else: the task, instead of just puzzling it, actually destroys it

A rat, for instance, was trained to discern between cards of different design—always with a bait of food as a reward for the right choice. When this rat was shown designs whose difference he could no longer make out, he jumped up and down in his cage as though mad and finally collapsed into catalepsy, an almost deathlike state during which all his limbs stayed completely rigid. Other animals cried senselessly, got cramps, refused any kind of food.

Brought together again with its old com¬panions in the accustomed common cage, such an ani¬mal would withdraw from the others, sink into melan¬cholia and become a social.

If you could pity a rat, you would have agreed that this rat offered a pitiful sight.

Psychologists have not as yet made corresponding experiments on human beings, but politicians have. As a matter of fact, some human neuroses show a striking resemblance to these animal neuroses which are arti¬ficially produced by insoluble conflicts.

Let us note three particularly instructive phenomena: first, an animal will never fall into a neurotic state as long as it is in the midst of adequate biological sur¬roundings; its inner equilibrium is only endangered after it has been educated to serve purposes which have nothing to do with its free natural life.

Only if it has been subjected to what we may call (without irony) “civilizing influences” will it become susceptible to the neurotic menace. Second, if the animal is faced with a dilemma which it cannot solve, it will not “take it easy,” or wait in resignation, or philosophize in some other way. It will feel compelled to concentrate on its hopeless task until it develops the most senseless, inefficient and self-destructive attitude, namely the catastrophe-reaction.

Third, when the animal has gone through this terrible experience, it will stay neurotic. It will have lost its normal reactions, its conditioned reflexes, its acquired habits. It will remain distrustful and unsocial, and it will prefer to stay apart from its fellows.

All this amounts to the following rules and observa¬tions: civilizing influences make a living organism sus¬ceptible to neuroses. As long as this “educated behavior” serves useful and agreeable purposes, there is no acute danger.

Only when civilization itself turns into its very opposite, into a senseless menace, into a dead end street with nothing but insurmountable obstacles on all sides—only then will neurotic symptoms replace the acquired useful habits.

Catastrophe-reactions are most dangerous when they grip one who has previously been torn away from what could be called “everyday life”; this is why I am using the term D.P. neurosis. Homelessness coupled with the threat of catastrophe: that's the situation in which even the strongest, healthiest character may be destroyed.

Self-control becomes impossible if it cannot draw its force from old acquired habits. All conditioned reflexes which have previously made sense by fulfilling vital purposes are left dangling loosely around the explosion which has suddenly become the very center of the per-sonality.

The terrible concentration which the hopeless task requires consumes every bit of energy and leaves the rest of the character without power.

Such catastrophes can come upon you at any time. Certainly our civilization, despite all its shortcomings, usually offers possibilities for the satisfaction of our normal biological and cultural needs. Nevertheless, we cannot close our eyes to the fact that this same civiliza-tion periodically subjects us to war, to mass unemploy-ment, to all kinds of bureaucratic interference and to political uncertainty.

For people with a nervous or otherwise unstable dis-position, private catastrophes will often take on the overwhelming dimensions of war and earthquake. A beloved companion may die.

Somebody whom you love -^ desperately may happen to have an erotic fixation for¬bidding him (or her) to reciprocate your love. It won't do much good if well-meaning friends try to console you by saying that death, after all, is only natural, that the object of your love is really unworthy of so much adoration, and the like.

You cannot look at your mis-fortune with the detached eye of a rational being: your exclusive concentration upon the catastrophe has taken all the energy out of your cerebral activity, and that's why you feel so helpless.

What advice can autoanalysis offer to victims of en¬vironmental catastrophes?

Above all: Dont concentrate on your misfortune.

Any activity which will take your attention away from an insoluble task will be beneficial to your soul. There was much psychological wisdom in the behavior of the condemned Christians who went into the Roman arena singing psalms while being devoured by lions and tigers. If it did not save their lives, it made death less terrible for them.

I had many occasions to observe and to interview dis¬placed persons of all races at the time when the Ameri¬can army opened the gates of Hitler's concentration camps. It was a shocking experience to listen to these emaciated people between stacks of corpses with blue-penciled numbers on their white chests.

It always struck me that those individuals who had been able to perform some kind of professional activity in these hor¬ror camps had come through in better shape and in relatively greater numbers. Their own explanation of their survival was that shoemakers, tailors, doctors, etc., had been useful to their masters and therefore had been spared a little longer.

They were ordered to mend the clothes and bodies of their fellow inmates. But I think it was important that these men had something to take their minds away from the horrible prospect of being burned up in the furnaces the next day or week.

They did not show the typical catastrophe-reaction, they re¬mained free of cataleptic symptoms, and this decentra-tion gave them the necessary vitality and the advantage which perhaps made their masters select somebody else for the death cell.

They remained relatively rational in the midst of hell. By helping others, they helped them¬selves. This lesson may sound like a platitude, but it could be of utmost importance for practical psychiatry.

Doctors and nurses who perform their work in the midst of plagues have been more immune to infections than ordinary people. It is quite possible that their whole organism was strengthened by being inattentive to the menace and by not concentrating on their personal danger.

This, then, is my advice for autoanalytical protec¬tion against catastrophic events: Don’t ever permit ex¬ternal danger to become the center of your personality.

Too much order is as noxious as too little order. Your own case may lie somewhere between the two extremes. I presume that your life is not flowing quite as uniformly and undramatically as if it were rigidly coordinated to an automation process; and it is, I hope, not uprooted by tragic events like that of a D.P.

But since you are living in the twentieth century, it would be strange indeed if your own environment problems were not tinged by one or both of these modern night¬mares.

The practical lesson which we have learned from examining two extreme exigencies holds good for all hurtful impacts coming from the outside world. First, detachment; and then, mental digestion through rumi-nation.

Don't let the effects of disagreeable events sink so deeply into your unconscious that your conscious ego cannot grasp them any more. Don't try to “forget about it” in the sense of repressing the feeling that you have been hurt. Admit that something has hit you—other¬wise the wound will continue festering in the hidden center of your psyche.

The influence of bad environment must never become so deeply embedded in the very core of your soul that you can't dispose of it any more. You must regain the power to abreact your complex, as psychoanalysts say; you must be able to “sweat it out,” as the vernacular puts it.

Don't be afraid of your unconscious. This funda¬mental rule of autoanalysis is especially valuable when applied to the aftermath of environmental catastrophes. You must not bury the memories of a catastrophe and put a heavy mental stone upon it. Your living and pulsat¬ing unconscious cannot bear to be treated as a grave.

During a catastrophe: detachment; after a catastro-phe: slow, thoroughgoing, conscious rumination; these are the two rules of autoanalysis for coping with over¬whelming traumata inflicted by the outside world.

For this purpose, you’ll have to learn the technique of “decentration.”

Concentration and Decentration

I WAS DRIVING to my dentist's office. My toothache was so strong that my vision became blurred, but stopping the car would only have meant more pain.

Suddenly an idea struck me: what's so bad about one aching tooth?

You still have twenty-eight other teeth, and every one of them is feeling fine! What is one against twenty-eight?

The idea amused me and helped me to overcome the pain for the remainder of the way.

Besides, it was a valuable experiment in decentration.

Only life can master life.

Your soul must stay thoroughly alive in order to tackle the problems of life: there must be no dead, rigid parts in your psyche. Your soul must breathe, just as your body must inhale and exhale, inhale and exhale.

The living rhythm of the psyche cannot be better described than by the words concentration and decen¬tration.

The necessity for concentration is well known; there is hardly a problem which can be solved without your concentrating on it. During your sessions of rumination, there is a periodic need for utter, conscious concentra¬tion.

But just as you cannot continually inhale, your soul also must relax, decentrate, diffuse, slip back from the hard forefront of the conscious and work on in the re¬cesses of the unconscious.

The technique of deceleration is especially beneficial during exposure to injury, pain or loss. It could be de¬scribed as psychic decentralization, but since it is the exact complement of concentration, we might do well to coin the special word decentration for it.

In order to learn and acquire the method of decen-tration, you can start by keeping one thought in mind while actually working on a different problem.

You can cushion almost any traumatic shock by know¬ing (or by believing) that your whole soul cannot be hurt. In danger or in awkward and hateful situations, I recommend that you have one sentence ready which you can repeat to yourself: ‘‘This does not really concern me? or “I am above this.” If not the exact words, you should at least have a very definite feeling at your dis¬posal: “This is so strange to my real personality that it cannot even touch me.”

It will prove amazingly helpful if your inner reserves are brought into play automatically by just one little phrase of this kind. You can decentrate while the threat (or the seduction!) lasts by repeating one adage over and over again.

Even strong bodily pain can be almost neutralized if you hold on to these four words: “This is purely exter¬nal.” Long before the pain will have passed, your un¬conscious will have caught on to the autosuggestion.

“This will pass” or “This cannot last forever” is a useful autosuggestive formula—which has the advan¬tage of being the truth in almost any event.

I am almost tempted to recommend the custom which Orientals and Christians alike have practiced through centuries: the custom of fingering a rosary and repeat¬ing some formula with each single bead which slides through your hands.

In an emergency, however, you may need both hands; and a phrase like “this is only temporary” can be reiterated just as well without the aid of any manual pro¬cedure.

“This does not concern my innermost being” expresses the attitude which people with philosophical or religious inclinations will take under external menace.

The words in themselves are not of primary impor-tance. The main thing is that your subconscious gets something to cling to—something entirely different from the immediate threat, something which expresses your inner detachment. With each repetition, the words will carry more conviction.

Now take your pick from these formulae. Memorize your sentence and keep it in reserve. Call this your “handy-thought-technique.”

If you can bring yourself to feel aloof, you will detect much more easily how to escape from the danger spot than if you picture yourself drawn into the very middle of a maelstrom. The egocentric loses all true perspec¬tive.

By all means, avoid behaving like the compass which is transported to the magnetic north pole: the magnetic needle swings around in all directions without indicat¬ing anything.

Similarly, the ethical and psychological maxims of any person lose their sense and force if this person fancies himself the center of the universe. In dangerous situations, a self-centered person becomes useless to others, useless for mastering the objectively given situation, and therefore useless to himself.

Don't let your ego become the center of the world; but, and this is even more important, don't let anything external become the center of your being. If some dis¬turbance seems to arise right in the middle of your psyche, by autosuggestion you can dislodge it and put it aside.

To choose a rather banal example: you wish terribly hard for a new fur coat you have seen. It's not a rational wish, for its fulfillment would force you and your hus¬band to eat hamburgers for a year. Still, you cannot get rid of the temptation, you cannot decentrate.

n this case, say to yourself: is it really I who wants this fur coat?

No, it is just my vanity. Try to externalize the wish; dis¬lodge it from your center.

This decentration is feasible in almost any case.

You feel unhappy because you have a strong sensual desire every time you see a certain woman. She does not want you, she is happily married, you haven't a chance. You know yourself that she is not your great, spiritual love.

Yet you cannot rid yourself of this sexual attraction.

But is it really you who has this longing?

Tell yourself, quite prosaically: “It's only my glands.” If you repeat this sentence long enough, there is no doubt that you will regain your detachment.

Perhaps you are plagued by the thought that you would feel happier in a certain job, but the obstacles prove to be absolutely insurmountable. Don't go around feeling sorry for yourself; tell yourself: it was only my ambition which wanted that job, not myself.

This procedure has some elements of sophistry in it, of course, nevertheless it is a useful autosuggestive exercise. You can start practicing it with simple re¬nunciations. For instance, I want that steak dinner way down on the menu—no, it's not really I, it's only my digestive tract that wants it.

Learn to observe, in times of stress, the unconcerned parts of your own being. Every human, in reality, is an immensely complex and multiple organization. You can never be completely overwhelmed, totally defeated, wholly devoured by anything external—as long as you stay alive.

Learn to look toward your unconscious as your best helpmate; it has so many resources that even if your conscious wants to give up the struggle your unconscious will carry you across the abyss.

In so-called normal, uneventful times too, the rhyth¬mical change of concentration and decentration offers, psychologically, great advantages. Don't concentrate all the time on being a busy person, for instance.

If you actually lead a very busy, very strenuous life, you should act as if you were not overwhelmed by a hundred tasks; learn to act as if you were the master of your time. This decentered attitude may save you from stomach ulcers.

On the other hand, if you actually are a useless bum, don't let everybody know it. Learn to act as if your dealings had some importance. This deceit may gradu¬ally develop into real importance. You will find things to do which nobody but you can accomplish.

The first few times you insist on doing some chores for an old neighbor, fix some toys for the kids in the street, or do something for the club or for the community, some people may smile at your unusual activity; they are accustomed to seeing you decentered all the time and they won't trust your newly found concentration.

Later on, they will depend on you for doing this and that, and before you know it you will be a valuable member of some circle, small or large.

On slipping back, excuse yourself from your super¬ego's reproaches by thinking or saying: “This wasn't my real self, it was only my damned old laziness.”

You should never concentrate on being exclusively one well circumscribed character. It isn't natural; we all have deviations from the “straight line” which we nor¬mally follow and of which some of us are inordinately proud.

The busiest man will enjoy being busy if, for a con¬trast, he squanders a few of his valuable minutes every hour. It will do you a world of good to wake up five minutes earlier than you are wont to, and to stretch lazily in bed before hopping into the routine of your day.

This will decenter your thoughts and feelings, it will give them wider play and a new opportunity for re¬freshing ideas.

Of course, if an overburdened executive has become a practicing autoanalyst, the danger of being exclu¬sively busy has passed. The “lazy” hour of rumination every second or third day will afford him the necessary safety valve. And why not consider it “being lazy”— lazy with a good conscience?

Snap out of your nervous tension by repeating to your¬self: “This isn't I—it's only my attitude during business hours. My real ego wants to relax now!” You'll see, you can do it.

The person who does not have a circumscribed task in life should, on the contrary, consider his self-dis¬covery session as the most important work of the day. A rigid schedule will help him maintain the feeling that he is accomplishing something necessary.

After he has become accustomed to this mental activity, it will be necessary and highly important to him—without auto¬suggestion.

Mental health depends on balanced contrasts, on not being one hundred percent this or that, on being a de-centered, multiple organism.

Take care that you don't select a “handy thought” which just isn't true in your specific case. This was probably the main reason why Emile Coué's spectacular successes in teaching autosuggestion during the twen¬ties wore off so quickly.

If you keep telling yourself, “I'm getting better and better every day in every re¬spect,” sooner or later you'll strain your credulity be¬yond the breaking point, and your subconscious won't believe your ego any more.

Whereas if you choose a little formula like “This is only temporary” or even “This concerns only my body, not my soul,” you can persuade your subconscious to go along with it.

The difficulty with autosuggestion is that “thinking” and thinking are not the same. I can very clearly “think,” word for word, “The sky is yellow,” even while seeing that it's blue. I can “think” any lie I choose to, but my subconscious will be unconvinced by this kind of surface thinking, even if I repeat the lie under my breath a thousand times.

Adopt a comfortable and comforting formula like: “This could be better, but it could be worse too.” Re-iterate this sentence on those occasions which you formerly thought intolerable. It's the truth, isn't it? Train yourself to decentrate with a “handy thought.

What Is Happiness?

I ONCE witnessed a charming little scene. An old lady with umbrella and high buttoned shoes opened the door of her house and looked out into the wet street. She turned back and said to her son who came out to the doorstep after her: “I don't want to take a walk, I tell you. My goodness, look at all these dreadful puddles?”

“Don't you see how pretty the street looks with the reflection of the sky in every puddle?”

The old lady laughed a little and stepped out with her son; quite obviously she enjoyed her walk.

The majority of people view happiness as something caused or at least conditioned by external factors. Of course, this is partly true, but I have found it relatively easy to free some of my acquaintances from too material¬istic a viewpoint, at least for a short time. I have often noticed that a little suggestion can accomplish a lot.

I have found it helpful to explain that nobody is com¬pletely happy or completely unhappy.

For one thing, there is the persistent and all-pervad¬ing rhythm of your life. A woman during her menstrua¬tion may define herself quite rationally as an unhappy person—only to forget the arguments for her own unhappiness a few days later.

Depression and elation follow one another in every normal person (which makes us “normals” somewhat akin to manic-depressives). Usually we don't consciously observe our own rhythms and cycles, but it is very important that we do; we want to avail ourselves of the consolation of physiology.

It helps considerably to tell yourself that the deepest depression will give way again to normal enjoyment of life.

Naturally this is hard to keep in mind in the middle of apparently hopeless difficulties. Here again, decentration would be the remedy. Many suicides would not occur if the person who wants to throw away an ap¬parently worthless life could imagine his own state of mind as of a few days later. The rhythm of our uncon¬scious automatically will free us from the clutches of even the most vicious depression.

If you will only decentrate from your apparent mis¬fortune, unhappiness can be overcome even during the lowest ebb of your vitality.

To clarify the inborn rhythms of your constitution (depression and elation; concentration and decentration, etc.) you must visualize your past. You must include the time dimension in the four-dimensional picture of your own personality which you are building up in the course of your self-discovery.

If you include past events, you just won't be able to call yourself “one hundred percent unhappy.”

The traces of all the years you have lived are still within your psyche. You are still that same person who was happy on some spring morning. Of course, you may say that you have changed, that your environment, your looks and your spirit have changed; but where is your past if it is not in you?

It belongs to you, it is part of you. Everything depends on reactivating that faculty for feeling happy, be it only in memory. This will tide you over the gap, and the ebb and flow of your unconconscious vital forces will do the rest again to brighten your outlook.

The feeling of elation which is the periodic comple¬ment of depression appears in various forms. For some of us, it is a moment of outright happiness, of exaltation, of bliss, and it comes to us without our knowing how and why.

Usually, however, it is occasioned by some¬thing external—occasioned but not caused. The cause is our inner rhythm which makes us ripe for harmony and elation. This happiness can be brought on merely by looking at a piece of blue sky between clouds, by the smile of a passer-by, by a few bars of music.

Sometimes we are willing to ascribe our feeling of happiness to the occasion, but sometimes we wonder why this or that unimportant little event all of a sudden produces such an unaccustomed, enigmatic impact on our soul.

Our imperfect organism is unable to sustain this feeling of perfect bliss for more than a few moments. Yet these moments and their unconscious aftermath are of tremendous importance for our mental economy. They seem to charge a psychic battery in us which makes it possible for us to continue life through dreary weeks and months.

Without the knowledge that this bliss is possible, most of us would not have the force to overcome our regular depressive periods.

There are other people who don't know elation in such a concentrated form. For many, it is diluted with the neutral color of every day and stretched out over longer periods. Contentment is perhaps a better word for this feeling.

Much depends on what you understand by happiness. With one and the same word, you can associate wild orgies, or a quiet hour in your easy chair listening to a string quartet on the radio. You can associate the word “happiness” with something entirely out of your reach or with something which every ordinary day may bring you several times.

This is not to say that happiness as such is something relative or even something unreal; in different persons the feeling of being happy occurs on widely divergent occasions.

Everything hinges on your adopting a definition of happiness comprising situations and sensations which you yourself can procure.

This is not as difficult as it may sound. You have a reference file in your conscious and subconscious mem¬ory. When you pronounce the word “happiness,” some mental images will respond almost automatically to this sound.

Find out where and when these images were actual reality in your past, or how they occurred in your dreams and fantasies. You must condition yourself to this definition, you must try to rearrange your situation according to your own personal idea of what constitutes happiness.

If this is impossible, choose the next best definition and learn to modify your life accordingly. This is bitter for some of us, but it is feasible. In many cases, it is exactly what transforms us from adolescents into adults.

It cannot be the purpose of this guidebook to list the definitions of happiness proffered at various times by various sages. We may content ourselves by stating that they range all the way from licentious abandon to severest seclusion.

No agreement has ever been reached as to what constitutes happiness, or which conditions are likely to produce this elusive sensation.

There is no harm in mentioning, though, that if the advocates of seclusion and unworldly asceticism want to have their wishdreams accepted by large multitudes, they usually combine them with the opposite wish-dreams: they combine, for example, the renouncement of worldly joys with a promise of an unusual kind of bliss. Nuns are married to Jesus; hermits have a deep craving for communication with Kwannon, Isis, or the Madonna.

Even the vestal virgins seem to have had the sacred duty of once giving themselves to a stranger in the temple. It may still be a subliminal wish to meet this stranger which drives women into temples in various civilizations.

Another strong attraction of ascetic and monastic life can be explained psychoanalytically. Children have a strong urge to hide in a little corner which they consider their own home.

They build a small hut by turning a table upside down and spreading a tablecloth on top of the four legs, or they hide in a bush. An adult's life in a cell, the seclusion of anchorites is a direct continua¬tion of this little game: it wants to fixate the protected bliss once and for all.

So-called “normal” people usually get claustrophobia if they are to spend some time in a cell; and all the penal codes of the world make use of this claustrophobia to dissuade potential criminals from their deeds.

Now what attraction can a cell hold for a monk? Self-punishment is not the whole answer. The cell stands symbolically for the lost mother's womb. Nicodemus asks (John III, 4): “How can a man enter the second time into his mother's womb, and be born?”

This question possibly carries a libidinous charge. Its attraction may stem from the incestuous wish to en¬ter the sexual parts of the mother, a wish repressed and sublimated with such tremendous moral stringency that under any ordinary circumstances, it never dares to come out into the open.

Nevertheless, there are those who con¬tend that the existence and strength of this wish have been demonstrated by analyzing patients who broke through their own censorship.

Many people have but one definite idea of what con¬stitutes happiness, namely, to sit quietly in some corner and be relieved of all worldly concern. This ideal of hap¬piness—the opposite of Don Juan's ideal of a wild, stormy happiness—this ideal of quietism appears in many cultures of all times; even today it has more force than one would imagine when observing our busy metropo¬lises.

It is quite possible that we preserve a very, very faint memory of those sweetly quiet nine months in our mother's womb, and that from the very moment when we came weeping into the world we shelter a secret longing for that blissful place—a longing for the past “golden age” of peace and plenty, a longing for seclu¬sion and safety.

I do not want to recommend this ideal of happiness. It has been misused too often for reactionary purposes. And yet, if people ask my advice, I have to admit that it is the second-best ideal of happiness.

The conscien¬tious psychologist can recommend less the ideal at the other end of the scale, that of Don Juan—momentary happiness through licentious abandon without any in¬terest in the consequences of one's enjoyable actions.

Is it necessary to go to these extremes? Very few people are extremists at heart. Humans are not alike, some are the Don Juan type and others are quietists by fate and conviction, but most of us search for happiness somewhere between these extremes, changing our ideals according to our age and our outer and inner possibili¬ties.

Diversity is the best gift which nature and experience can bestow upon us: it enables us to make the best of various situations and to find some happiness even in adversity.

The consolation of physiology holds good in practi¬cally all cases. Your automatic cycle of ups and downs will be stronger than what you may consider your ration¬al condemnation of life in general and of your own circumstances in particular.

“Happiness,” I firmly believe, is the normal state in humans—even if some philosophers have chosen to define it as the mere absence of pain. You are normal when the fluids and currents in your body circulate vigorously, when the rhythm of your psyche is unobstructed, when your appetite for the good things of life, from nourish¬ment to sexual intercourse, are suited to the rhythm of your psyche and to the opportunities of your environ¬ment.

Is it so impossible for civilized humans to attain a goal which most animals have no difficulty in attaining? Let me close this discussion with the little allocution a Hindu priest delivered to a new-born child: “Babe, you come weeping into the world while all people around you smile. Endeavor to live in such a way that one day when you leave the world you can smile while all people around you weep.”

Your Ups and Downs

IN THE late afternoon, most animals consider their day closed, their tasks accomplished, and they look for quiet shelter. Not so Homo Americanus. We are terrified by the feeling that our organism is slipping into an ebb, we rush to some gathering where we pump our body and spirit full of alcohol and gossip.

If we were not afraid of that blue hour when the afternoon draws to a close, we would pass through it much more easily and comfort¬ably. But many of us cannot bear the feeling of a let¬down, even if we know that it will last only for an hour or so. ”I am slipping’’: this sentence has something of irresistible doom. We won't allow ourselves to slip, we don't trust our faculty for a comeback, our automatism, our rhythm.

If you have acquired some practice in analyzing your¬self, you can easily discern between a dangerous depres¬sion and the temporary complement of too much previ¬ous concentration. You can then decide for yourself whether you should just let nature take its course.

A short period of complete, lonely decentration often will bridge the gap—but only if you are not afraid to let go of yourself. Your usual hour of seclusion will prove most helpful in this respect.

To formulate the method somewhat paradoxically: The best way to make an ordinary depression pass is— to be depressed for a while.

Depression and elation, to a lesser or greater extent, will rule the inner lives even of persons with perfect equanimity. Nobody should try to suppress these rhyth¬mical changes in himself. The only thing one should strive for is the inner stamina to wait confidently until the depressive period gives way to brighter moments and happier times.

Most religions have acknowledged and even sancti¬fied the periodic changes which seem to grip all living matter. The ebb and flow of depression and elation finds its correlation in the cycle of fasting and feasting, of re¬turn to the grave and resurrection, of the reign of shadow and the reign of light, and even in the weekly change of depressive Friday and elated Sabbath.

This wisdom of the religious leaders has made it easy for the worldly authorities to channel and control those otherwise al¬most irresistible and therefore dangerous individualistic and collective rhythms.

Many young people are afraid of life—of that same life for which they long. In many old people fear of death takes the place of the former fear of life. Very often those same persons who in youth were plagued by fear of living will have an especially strong horror of dying.

Both forms of fright are, at bottom, symptoms of a rigid opposition to the natural course of events, to our biological rhythm, to the normal toll which is exacted from all animated entities.

Resistance against growing up and renouncing the irresponsibility of infancy, resistance against ageing, re¬sistance against renouncement and decline: all three are closely related, and they usually embitter a whole life which, following its natural rhythm, could be deeply satisfying.

The “consolation of physiology”—the consolation that even the most urgent problem of Me loses its importance after a while, because life has something else on its agenda—is often made ineffective by the nervous im¬patience of moderns. Instead of considering our ups and downs as something natural, we are terror-stricken when we feel our vitality fail a little.

Your own physiological rhythm will take care of you. After some time, hunger or other banal requirements will probably snap you out of it. Even a sink full of un¬washed dishes may dispel your depression by giving you something with which to decentrate.

Disturbances of your rhythm curve are less dangerous than the eventual monotony of life. Nothing is as omi¬nous for mental health as a frozen rhythm. A rhythm graph which shows exactly the same figure for each and every day would be a certain indication of approaching mental sickness.

To have unobstructed vital rhythms is one of the basic requirements for mental health. People who never laugh and never cry may be impressive personalities, but I don't think they can master the full scale of life's values. Laughing and crying are urgently required for getting rid of excess emotional energy.

“Only girls cry” is what Occidentals automatically shout at their weeping sons, but an occasional weeping spell is not “unmanly” or otherwise undignified. It is an occasion for breaking through the hard shell of repres¬sions and for letting the soul breathe more freely. Very often the immediate cause which makes you start crying has nothing to do with the deeper reasons.

Laughing and weeping gain their explosive strength from repressed, accumulated psychic material which is swept out in one big, noisy, cathartic operation. For the sake of your men-tal balance, it's extremely important that you give in when you feel yourself gripped by laughter or tears.

There should not be too much of either, you should find a certain changing rhythm according to your type, let's say that approximately a thousand fits of laughter should be counterbalanced by one crying spell. When you feel like “crying it out/’ why on earth should you suppress this very natural wish?

There are psychologists who advise us to let important tasks wait for our ascending rhythm period and not to tackle anything too difficult during times of biological low ebb. This is not always possible, of course; business does not wait for our moods. But whenever it is feasible, take full advantage of your biorhythmic periods.

Instead of waiting for your changing moods before tackling a difficult task, you might do the opposite: you can change your mood by tackling that task. You can in¬fluence your biological rhythm to a certain degree by creating, out of your own deeper resources, the condi¬tions for a new biological ascension.

Once started by volition, this new cycle will take its involuntary course. Some persons can subject their physique to their own will power much more efficiently than others.

But even the most plantlike, apathetic person has enough reserves within him to shake off the shackles of his own moods— if he can find the propitious moment to alter his rhyth¬mical pattern.

Nevertheless, in situations of less urgency, it remains advisable not to fight your rhythm at all, but to trust the cycle. Your knowledge about the “consolation of physi¬ology” will then be a modern kind of “bliss of solitude/’

The reflection about past and future elations (or at least spells of optimism) will sustain your spirits even during the lowest ebb.

Listen to the silent but urgent voice of your cyclic moods, but don't let them enslave you. There are certain tasks for each phase of each cycle. As the Chinese put it, there is a time for fishing and a time for drying one's nets.

Intelligent women take their cycle into account when they plan their lives in advance, vacation, bodily exer¬tion, love affairs, and so on, but they are not the slaves of their bodies.

Men, too, should observe their moods and find out about their periods of efficiency and inefficiency, or their periods of extra- and introversion. It may be useful to mark bleak days and days of high spirits on a calendar and to design your own rhythm chart.

You will find that self-observation is both necessary and easy. Your auto-analytical training will help you to discern your own vital rhythms.

Try to discover the “system” behind such phenomena as an unmotivated spell of melancholia, a sudden rage, a foolish desire to throw away money, etc. You will prob¬ably find that such supposedly inexplicable deviations occur at a time when two or more of your rhythm curves add up their forces to throw you off balance.

The sea, under the joint gravitational influence of moon and sun pulling from the same direction, will rise beyond the measure of an ordinary high tide. Just as inevitably, your psyche will be drawn away from its usual gravita¬tion center if there are two or more instinctive urges taking possession of it at the same moment.

Through patient self-observation you will be able to presage a coming storm by the signs in your own mind, and then you can take your countermeasures beforehand. Ob¬serve the periodic force of your urges, such as hunger for crude food or for a refined cuisine, your longing for friendship and companionship, or for out and out sexual¬ity, your cultural appetites for music, theatre, books.

All these longings undergo periodic changes. For some days or months one of these propensities may seem like an irresistible craving, and then again you will forget about it. Those phases coincide with periods of expansion and of solidification of your personality.

All living matter has an inborn drive to grow. A tree will never shrink, it will put out new limbs every year until it falls to pieces as a whole. The same holds true for a properly managed human mind. Under prosperous circumstances, the mind will have periods of expansion and solidification, expansion and solidification. Except in very old age a shrinking mind is something unnatural.

Be on the alert if unimportant and trivial things take on an appearance of world-shaking significance. Try to catch yourself in an early phase of this shrinking process. Put all your intellectual and sentimental reserves into the struggle against pettiness and narrowing of your interests.

You must avoid mistaking such a shrinking process for one of your ordinary depressions. It is much more dan¬gerous. Once you have settled down in the middle of a narrow horizon, you will regard this state of affairs as the final result of your development.

You will then con¬sider your youthful aspirations as something to smile about in retrospect; but I am sure that most of these aspirations deserve a better fate.

You will know that there is danger ahead if, during a walk through a bright summer day, you find yourself ruminating about your last telephone bill instead of considering the inexhaustible mysteries of life all around you.

In such a mental situation it is high time that you lift yourself up by your own bootstraps. Not to be de¬pressed about one's own lack of interest in the higher aspects of life is much worse than a deep, poignant de¬pression.

As long as you are alive your body and soul together will perform the miracle of overcoming injuries which would put any machine out of function. Wounds will be healed automatically, and psychic traumata will be coated with protective layers of repressions and inhibi¬tions which, later on, when the mental wound has healed underneath, should be taken away gradually like a dress¬ing.

If hit hard enough by misfortune you will wish that you were dead, but hardly ever will the body comply with this wish. Your blood will continue circulating, your lungs and your inner secretions will perform their tasks automatically, and your brain and nerves will re¬pair the damage physiologically.

The rhythm of ups and downs will guarantee your recovery to a certain extent, and if you complement that consolation of physiology with your own will to live again, you must come out on top.

Waves of Your Vital Rhythms

LEE DOWN on your couch during the last hour of day¬light and keep your eyes open. Switch on the lamp be¬side your couch—that lamp you are conditioned to use as a thought-generator.

Arrange this lamp so that it throws one small spot of light on the ceiling. Shield the light from the rest of the room. Fixate your eyes on the spot of light on the ceiling without blinking. The falling dusk will make this spot appear brighter and brighter.

When you still know your room to be there and when you no¬tice at the same time that your immobile eyes don't see the familiar surroundings any more, you will have at-tained a light degree of self-hypnosis.

Now picture yourself floating on the sea in a little boat which is gliding down the side of a big wave. Down and down you go; you cannot help arriving at the bottom, and quite automatically your little vessel will be carried up again.

You will have to practice this several times. Sooner or later you'll feel an intense joy when approach¬ing the crest of a wave—a joy reminiscent of the naive elation you felt as a kid on a swing—and at this very mo¬ment, before reaching the top, you should snap yourself out of it.

As soon as you have learned this procedure, start co¬ordinating your depressive moods with the picture of the waves. The waves will take you further down—and then, inevitably, up again.

Your mental state by now should be thoroughly con¬ditioned to self-clarification. It can stand a strong dose of autosuggestion without slipping into a helpless trance. The vision of an ocean full of waves will not appear frightening to you because you have learned to master your visualization.

And even if your autosuggestion gets so irresistibly strong that you cannot stop imagining yourself riding up and down in your little boat, there will be no harm done: you can let yourself fall into a deep, relaxing, forgetful sleep.

Or—and this might be even better—you should con¬dition yours elf to snap out of it by a different mental picture, for instance, by an approaching ship which is hurrying to your rescue. Nearer and nearer it comes; sailors are throwing a rope ladder toward you.

Just when your boat is again lifted to the crest of a huge wave, you seize the rope ladder, you are pulled up—you blink your eyes, and you find yourself on your familiar couch.

This mental rescue, too, should be practiced many times until you can let yourself go completely and still be confident that you will snap out of it at the right moment—at the elated moment of an ascending rhythm.

It will do you good to visualize your inevitable periods of depression as necessary components of the changing tides of your personality. High tide, low tide, they both are only parts of a cycle; and so are the monthly, daily and hourly changes in your mood and vitality.

You should not strive to even out this change; the only thing you should strive for is a balanced rhythm.

The benefit derived from this mental exercise can be great. Whenever you feel yourself slipping you will be able to picture yourself rising again; and this will give you new courage.

The most important rhythm in any man's and woman's life is probably the ebb and flow of the sexual drive, the change of sexual desire and fulfillment, or of lust and resignation, or of hope and frustration—whatever the case may be.

Not only is the sheer intensity of the sexual feeling, the amplitude of its rhythm curve, superior to most other sensations, but it also has a deep influence on other human functions, from the endocrine glands up to the most sublime artistic creativeness.

Very often a disturbance of this rhythm will throw your other rhythms out of gear. A frustrated love may cause you palpitations, perspiration, a neurosis; the rhythms of your heart, your lungs, your skin may change.

You can expect them to settle back into a neurotic equilibrium after a while—which you may choose to call philosophical resignation, and rightly so. The more natural solution, however, would be—another try. Ful¬fillment of secret sexual wishes, from a psychological point of view, is much more important than the ob¬servance of narrow-minded social taboos.

The dammed-up energy of unfulfilled erotic urges may play the crud¬est pranks on its bearer; only in relatively rare cases is it completely converted or sublimated into satisfying cultural activities.

Here, too, the mental picture of irresistible waves carrying you in a little boat will help you to regain your zest for starting anew—if not on a fresh sensual adven¬ture, at least on the adventure of cultural sublimation.

Some people like to combine their rhythms. A bon vivant who has a rendezvous with a lady will want to satisfy his appetite with a choice meal and his sentimen¬tal urge with gipsy music, and these fulfillments will gradually lead up to sexual gratification.

These three rhythms (taken at random from many other possible combinations) will augment each other, just as the new moon and the sun together, pulling from the same direc¬tion, will produce a high tide on the ocean shores.

This may or may not be a good prescription for get¬ting a full measure of fun out of life. It seems more important to me to do the opposite—to space the bad things. If you have several disagreeable duties waiting for you, don't delay your actions until everything comes to a head.

Bad moments have a way of combining them¬selves into bad years. Try to be perspicacious by tack¬ling your worries one by one. This way, they won't get you down.

Two or three evils together will depress you much more than the force of each of them would let you sup¬pose; they convey a feeling of inescapable catastrophe which each of them, singly, would not produce.

If hun¬ger and muscular exhaustion come together, and if lack of sleep is added, the mixture is explosive. The ampli¬tudes of three rhythms piled on top of each other will tax your opposing will power to the utmost. The func¬tioning of your stomach depends on a rather narrow schedule; so does the efficiency of your muscles, which demand a constant, rhythmical change between exertion and relaxation.

The chemistry of your body hinges on the regular alternation between the states of wakeful-ness and of sleep. Three cyclic lows coming together will almost certainly throw all your bodily and mental functions out of order.

Space your lows; and it might be a sound idea to space your highs too. You will get all the enjoyment you are capable of from the fulfillment of one urge.

Rhythmical change is more important to your psychic economy than the striving for a permanent state of “hav¬ing fun'*—which is just not attainable to mortals anyway.

You cannot tell whether an electric battery is well charged or dead, or something in between, just by look¬ing at it. You need the proper tools to judge the battery by its effects.

Exactly the same is valid for your psyche. You cannot say, “I feel fine right now, so my subconscious is in splen¬did shape.” You have to judge the charge of that unconscious by its effects.

If you stutter nervously, if you shrink back before entering a narrow, though perfectly harmless alley, if you have a ritual of useless activities which you feel compelled to perform even though you don't like to do so, then your subconscious actually is in bad shape, even if you “feel fine.”

Your subconscious vital energy which should be used to solve the task of living is diverted from this natural goal and used up in inhibitory activities.

On the other hand, even if you feel depressed without apparent reason you cannot jump to conclusions: “I feel rotten today, so my unconscious must be out of order and playing me some bad tricks.” It may be quite natural for you to feel low on certain days.

Depression may be exactly what's needed for a short while by your body and soul in order to digest something which happened to you recently. Don't get panicky when a fit of the blues hits you. It will probably pass after it has accomplished its purpose in the strange interplay of psychic cycles.

Never be afraid of your own ups and downs, of your own rhythm. Trust the change of ebb and flow which governs your mental and glandular activities. Don't re¬sist changes if they seem to be natural changes.

I know a woman who wakes up in the morning, looks at the beautiful young day, and moans to herself, “How terrible, another day, soon I'll have another birthday!” She forgets that what she is getting in return for spent time is—a life.

Would she renounce the life which she has lived and which she keeps on living if that would give her back just the empty flow of abstract time? Cer¬tainly not; she convinced herself of that very quickly when I put the question to her.

There is what we might call an optimal rhythm for every one of the human urges. If you eat too often, the enjoyment and the efficacy of the nutritional process will suffer. If the accumulation of sexual desire is over-strained (or if it is discharged much too often) no sat-isfying love life will be possible.

Our instincts, our drives, our longings, even our most spiritual interests come in waves. On Sundays many of us mortals feel a longing for things spiritual which, once satisfied by a few beautiful hymns and dignified words, again falls into a deep slum¬ber for six days.

On Mondays some of us are eager to go to work—though not all of us. On Friday night even the most genuine need for professional exertion will prob¬ably have dwindled away; our urge for work is satisfied. This is the seven-day rhythm which seems to hold a general attraction for mankind.

At times you feel that you need some unusual adven¬ture, at other times you feel a need for retirement, peace and mulling over your experiences. There is a very defi¬nite rhythm to these periods, and with the help of a diary you can find out their approximate duration.

Don't fight your own biological rhythms. Allow them to swing out freely and to lose their stringency according to their own laws.

The over-all sexual rhythm of the human female is, of course, roughly adapted to her monthly period. There have been numerous attempts to find a comparative rhythm in men, and these tabulations have been set at 23 days.

The male seems to be more independent of his glandular cycle than the female, however; on the other hand, he depends very much on the rhythm of his diges¬tive system.

A man called on to accomplish some task before breakfast generally is a fearful sight; so is a man interrupted in his digestive leisure period when he wants to read the ads and obituaries in his paper. Woman is more flexible in most of her rhythmical activities, except in the one where she is actually chained to the wheel of her ovary functions.

Most women would do well to pay their monthly trib¬ute to the large ebb and flow of their physiology more willingly. If you are depressed during those days, don't try frantically to snap out of it; be depressed for a few days!

There is no harm in it. Try to be left alone, try to get some relief from too strenuous duties, pamper your¬self as much as possible. You know that this depression will pass anyway, so don't make it a point of honor to carry on as usual.

If you “swim with the stream” during these days, you will save your inner strength for a good fight against real disturbances.

The time of menstruation, with many women, is es¬pecially propitious for autoanalytical sessions. During these days there is a tendency toward introspection which might as well be used advantageously.

For clar¬ifying and evaluating the results of your introspection, you had better wait until you can detect, or amplify, or produce an ascending vital rhythm in yourself again.

Many city-dwellers have experienced that the rhythm of elation and depression has completely flattened out. To them, there seems to be no change any more, no novel sensation to excite the dulled nerves.

This insensibility to normal everyday happenings, this loss of zest for biological and cultural functions amounts to a danger¬ous devaluation of life. The natural cycle of divergent, overlapping and competitive rhythms has lost its mean¬ing, and the result is boredom.

Some people rush about their business all day long in order to get it done, and yet when they have finished their chores they don't know how to utilize their free time.

They go to some party, they put up a show of hav¬ing fun, and yet they are bored to the bone, but they don't go home to read a valuable book either. Nothing holds their attention.

Boredom is a psychological disturbance of the first order.

Only in captivity does an organism have too much time. In freedom, the natural shift between the urgent tasks   of  feeding,  fighting  and  love-making  provides enough excitement.

In a cage, waiting for the scheduled moment of feeding consumes much of the inner energy; and everyone knows that waiting and leisure are two entirely different things. A free animal chewing his cud has leisure; a captive criminal chewing his nails has only time, nothing but time.

The phenomenon of boredom is the common denomi¬nator of over organized civilization and of captivity.

It is, indeed, a paradoxical occurrence: we feel that our life is altogether too short, and yet many of us when released from our duties have too much time on our hands.

Whether it be external iron bars or internal inhibitions which hinder the rhythmical change of longing and ful¬fillment, the result is always the same—loss of interest in the present time.

The declining Roman Empire was permeated with this mood. The fall of the Romans may have been caused as much by their taedium vitae as by barbarian inva¬sions.

To housewives with several children, to businessmen and women in responsible positions, to any kind of hard¬working people the following paragraphs would be mean¬ingless.

If you don't know the meaning of boredom, skip the next few pages. But even to many intelligent, busy people, boredom has become a constant companion of their leisure hours. To these, the ensuing analyses and precepts might be of help.

Boredom is not depression. In a depressive mood, you feel sad, anxious, hunted. In a bored mood, you are not sad and not gay; you may even feel an unconscious long¬ing for a deep, poignant grief. Any emotion would be welcome.

Obviously, you cannot apply the autosuggestion of falling and rising waves to boredom—because there is no falling motion in the first place which you could con¬vert back into an interesting rhythmical pattern. You must use a different autoanalytical approach if you are plagued by boredom.

The procedure should start like this. Lie down on your accustomed autoanalytical couch and let yourself be bored. Tell yourself: How tedious is life in general, and in particular on this couch. Gosh, how bored I am! Honestly, I'm bored to death!

Soon you will feel an impulse to jump up and do al¬most anything in order to escape this elaborately boring situation. Resist this impulse. Drink the cup of boredom to the dregs. Even if you hate it consciously, your un¬conscious, for once, has to get its fill of boredom—which it may need for some important psychoeconomical rea¬sons.

Repeat this hour of intense boredom on three consecu¬tive days. Study your own tedium from every angle. Wrap yourself in boredom. Build an autoanalytical stor¬age dam against your interests. Don't give in halfway!

When you get up, after exactly one hour, you will no¬tice that almost anything seems interesting, attractive and vital to you. You will have stored up enough un¬conscious energy to get a fresh start.

During several of your next sessions, you should lie down even though you don't feel bored at all, and strive with all your might to reproduce that tedious feeling in yourself. You should yawn and stretch, you should even simulate yawning in order to generate tedium.

When you are able to reproduce your tedium at will you will also have acquired the power to switch it off.

This you should practice extensively. You must come to grips not with a shapeless generality like “lack of in¬terest in life,” but with the very specific sensation of “boredom,” which you know well in all its aspects.

After this experience, you won't halfheartedly start some silly activity at random because it might possibly amuse you. You will first dispel your bored feelings and then—after boredom is out of the way—start a fresh, active, useful occupation,  some philanthropic or  com¬munal activity, or a worthwhile hobby.

If you feel boredom coming again—let it run its course! Be bored for an hour! Don't distract yourself from it, but generate a very pronounced low: you will overcome it easily after it has reached its deepest ebb.

Boredom is nothing to be ridiculed; it is a most serious problem, with severely inhibitory effects. It is closely related to melancholia, and if it degenerates into the latter, it can be even fatal.

Many of the higher animals, especially the primates who are most closely related to humans, suffer from mel¬ancholic boredom when confined to a cage. Zoo-keepers have had to struggle with this eminently psychological problem whenever they had to care for orangutans.

Around the year 1900, captive orangutans who became too depressive were treated with red wine or cham¬pagne—which amused the spectators but did not cure the animals. Later zoologists concentrated especially on the orangutans' infectious diseases; it was thought that their habitual dejectedness would be relieved when their bodies were healthy.

This did not work out either. Today depressed orangutans are cured by a very simple pro-cedure, they are shown affection. In a Swiss zoo, there is always somebody busying himself with these interest¬ing “cousins” of ours; and they respond to this intensive care by becoming surprisingly gay, good-natured crea¬tures.

Apes are not humans, of course. Still, the conclusion can be firmly established that affection is the most effec¬tive antidote against boring melancholia.