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

H5 two hidden intra-psychic forces or “ drives ”, the sexual libido and the super-ego (the social part of the personality according to the Freudians) should be apparent to any intelligent reader. Some Psychoanalytic Bogeys One reason for the popularity of such analyses in the past has been the fact that the analysts have fallen into the traps which their patients have set for them, if you are wealthy enough to allow an analyst to search your past for months or years in an attempt to determine whether the fictional “ id ” is stronger than the fictional “ super-ego ” you not only go through the noble gestures of exposing yourself to a cure, but you very effectually put off the real decisions you must make for the period of the analysis. You may thus indulge yourself in orgies of self-pity or the delicious masochistic tortures of self- examination, without once attempting to look the real problems in the face during the entire procedure. If you wish to know the meaning of conflict, doubt, and indecision, do not search for causes in the limbo of the unconscious, or in the dead past, but look to the immediate future. Every conflict is a spanner which the individual throws into his own psychic works—to keep them from working. A splendid test is to ask yourself: “ What would I do if I didn’t have this conflict ? ” In the case of Helen the answer was “I’d get married in a minute and settle down to married life ”. The answer to this question usually betrays the cause of the conflict— it is the obstacle, the obligation, or the responsibility that the conflict is designed to avoid. The more intense your conflict, the more impossible it seems to find a reasonable solution for it, the more you wish to avoid the solution of your problems. This common-sense explanation of the nature of conflict and doubt coincides with our previous demonstrations of the unity of the personality, the unity of the pattern of conduct, the unity of each individual’s style of life. The