How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.
77/400
- Publication/creation
- London : George Routledge, 1932.
- Physical description
- xiv, 374 pages ; 22 cm
- Contributors
- Wolfe, W. Béran 1900-1935.
- Notes
-
This edition was reprinted in 1933, 1934, 1935, 1937, 1942, 1944, 1945, 1946 and 1948.
Copy 1 Note: 1937 reprint. X158203
- Attribution and usage
-
Wellcome Collection
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liabilities into assets, and what holds for the difficulties
of the ordinal position in the family constellation holds
for all the other factors that so commonly produce fear,
discouragement, isolation, and an inferiority complex.
No factor, either in your heredity or in your environ¬
ment, can compel you to be a neurotic or to assume a
pattern of inferiority. There is always some good way
out in terms of compensation in socially acceptable
behaviour. No one is doomed to be a failure ; no one is
destined inexorably to be unhappy.
3. Sex
It is one of the crazy paradoxes of human life that sex,
in and of itself, may be the basis of an inferiority complex.
The fault lies not with sex, because other mammals live
their sex lives without suffering from their sexuality, but
with our history as human beings. It is a sound historical
law that the pattern of any given culture is modelled on
the organization of its food-getting devices. The two
sexes are biologically and psychologically equivalent.
Men are no better and no worse than women, and each
contributes equally to the chromosomes of the child that
is the issue of their sexual collaboration. But economically
and historically one sex is usually dominant, and the
other sex, of necessity, subordinate. In agricultural
communities, such as those of late savagery and early
barbarism, the female is the dominant sex, and the male
is the subordinate sex. The principle of fertility, the
close connection in the mind of primitive man between
harvest and childbirth, enables woman to assert her
dominance, and such a culture is termed a matriarchy.
As soon as a tribe gives up agriculture as its chief source
of food supply, and depends mainly on domesticated
animals for its sustenance, and as soon as the concept of
private property is substituted for the cultural philosophy
of communal acres, the male sex becomes dominant.
Engels, in The Growth of the Family, and latterly Dell
in Love in the Machine Age, and Briffault in The Mothers,
have traced this change from matriarchy to patriarchy in