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

has appeared as a good man for the first two and a half acts, only to be unmasked as the villain in the last scene, we think it a bad play because it outrages this unity of the personality. If you are sure of five or six important facts about a man’s life, you can practically fill in the rest of the pattern. Good psychiatrists can sometimes tell a patient all his symptoms before he has said a word, from watching him enter the room and sit down. Good salesmen seize on one aspect of a prospective customer, and modify their sales talk to fit into his pattern. The whole art of character interpretation by graphology depends on this unity of the personality. For this reason we can almost chart the life of an individual from five or six known facts. The tedious and unnecessarily long analyses of the psychoanalytical school are false and dangerous for this reason. They tend to involve the patient in a useless research into the past when the pattern of the personality can be determined after a few weeks of conferences— even if the patient lies. People have learned to lie with words, but they cannot lie with their gestures, their dreams, or their handwriting—and if their words are a contradiction of their unconscious acts, the unconscious acts are always the true basis of their personality. 7. ’The goal of life is fixed in early childhood, and tends to persist, according to the previously announced law of psycho¬ logical inertia, unless it is modified boih from without and from within. The goal-idea may experience many modifications, however, with the growth of the individual, without suffering an essential change. Thus, a psychiatrist of our acquaintance began life with the ambition to be an animal trainer. Later, as his knowledge of the world grew, he desired to be the conductor of an orchestra. He studied medicine because he wanted to be a “ leader ” in his community, and finally, after an analysis of his own personality pattern by his teacher in psychiatry, he became a psychiatrist. Psychiatry represents the final stage in the evolution of his goal-ideal from its beginning