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

not only his good intentions but the existence of some accidental, unhappy, undesirable disability which prevents him from performing. The reader will have guessed the sixth commandment in the neurotic decalogue : Thou shall, in the face of problems and perplexities, establish thy good intentions and demonstrate conclusively the weakness of thy flesh to perform thy obligations. 7. In the seventh place we find that, in every true neurosis, some scapegoat is established. The neurotic believes that his failures are not due to his deplorable lack of courage or knowledge, or to his defective sense of humour or to his lack of social responsibility, but to the existence of this scapegoat. The scapegoat is always chosen unconsciously with an eye to its effectiveness in attaining the neurotic goal. The neurotic who seeks a unique sense of power, and finds that he is about to fail, establishes some physical ailment as the cause of his failure, and thus demonstrates his helplessness to achieve his conscious goal. Thus a man who demands a fortune by the time he is forty, and finds that he has not made the first ten thousand pounds at the age of thirty-five, develops sleeplessness as a scapegoat. He trains himself to become a virtuoso in insomnia by tossing and turning all night in his bed. He wakes up tired in the morning and cannot go about his business with the necessary zest. “ If I did not suffer from insomnia (and no drugs can cure me, because when I take drugs I sleep all night but cannot rouse myself in the morning), I should easily have made a fortune.” Minor physical ailments are favourite scapegoats. But the badness and inconsiderateness of other human beings, or the actual persecution of hostile and envious com¬ petitors, compulsive habits, misunderstood character traits such as a bad temper, laziness, or impatience may also be chosen as the scapegoats. The seventh command¬ ment runs : Thou shalt not assume responsibility for any failure so long as thou canst find a scapegoat for thy short¬ comings. 8. The discovery of a scapegoat and the process of