How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.

Neuroses as False Compensations When obstacles to compensation, external in social adjustment, and internal in the art of living alone, become too great, it is a common human tendency to seek escape from, situations intolerable to our sense of self-esteem in that vague limbo ot subjective “ make- believe ” compensations which psychiatrists call neurotic behaviour. Probably there is no human being who does not show certain neurotic manifestations in some vital activity. Men who find objective and real compensa¬ tions in their work often show neurotic patterns in so far as their sexual activity is concerned, and women who meet the problems of sexual union, marriage, or mother¬ hood, are sometimes neurotic in their desire to evade the problems of earning a living. Mental normality is not the rule, it is an ideal which we approach as a limit but never completely attain. The purpose of this book is not to demonstrate how to be a perfect human being, but to illumine the major mistakes of unhappy living, and indicate a method of substituting minor, unimportant aberrations from the ideal for grave and tragic errors in the fine art of living. The description of the neuroses^ which follows, therefore, is intended solely as a map of a large portion of human life which may be avoided by anyone who understands its dangers. False compensations may be catalogued under several headings. The artificial overcompensations of the superiority complex occupy one. The whining protesta¬ tion of inferiority with its correlate appeal, “ I am so unworthy, you must expect nothing of me!” falls into another. The life patterns based on the neurotic “ ifs ” and “ buts ” fall into still another category. The neuroses which depend on a circumscription of the sphere of activity to some unimportant sector of human activity, and those neuroses which represent such a wide detour about the obstacle that the individual becomes completely perplexed in his way, form another group. One group of neuroses commonly known as neurasthenia consists in