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

unloading all guilt and blame on its unsuspecting back, leads to the eighth tenet of the neurotic credo, personal irresponsibility and passive resistance to the obligations of the social life. Cain’s query, “ Am I my brother’s keeper ? ” serves to illustrate this point. We hear modern echoes of Cain’s famous retort in the words of the hypochondriac who excuses his idleness with the words, “ Can I help the fact that I was born with migraine and get headaches the minute I sit in an office ? ” One of my patients, when urged to go out and do a day’s work, replied in shocked tones, “ But, Doctor, I’ve had an inferiority complex for twenty years,” as if this fact excused anyone from working. Examine the life pattern of any neurotic and you will find that it leads by a broad highway to the limbo of irresponsibility. Obstinate lack of cooperation, in the face of an intellectual understanding of the problem, the attitude of laissez-faire and latssez-aller, and, in its final form, passive resistance to common sense and logic are constant characteristics of every neurosis no matter what its individual form. The eighth commandment of the neurotic creed runs : Cultivate an attitude of irresponsibility. Resist all attempts of thy fellow-men to foist their common sense upon thee, passively if possible, actively if need be. 9. We are not surprised, therefore, to find that the ninth fundamental characteristic of the neurosis is its futility. No bridge was ever built, no discovery made, no human being made truly happy, no work of genuine art created, as part of a neurosis. In this respect the neurosis is like the spurious psychic phenomena of table-tapping and tambourine-tapping beloved by spiritualists—very interesting, but completely useless. Neurotics frequently become virtuosos in the art of being futile. Thus one neurotic woman, by practice in swallowing air, created a phantom abdominal tumour, which deceived her husband and three obstetricians into believing she was pregnant—surely a futile victory. Another neurotic cultivated her imagination to the extent that she broke into