How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.
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shifting the blame for personal failure to pain, sickness, or the inadequate functioning of certain organs. The profession of sickness, hypochondria, is a very common false compensation in whicji the responsibility for failure is shifted to the shoulders of society. The hypochondriac says to society, in effect, “ If I were well I would contribute, but I am sick, and you must take care of me. His secondary goal in life then becomes the maintenance of his illness. In hysteria the obstacle is imagined as non-existent, or the hysterical patient converts his unwillingness to meet the obstacle into an actual paralysis which prevents him from approaching it. The general neurotic tendency to shift the responsibility for one’s own shortcomings and failures finds its most crass expression in those forms of insanity which we call paranoia, in which the unfortunate patient believes that there are organized plots to deprive him of his rights, money, or the opportunity for happiness, and in dementia praecox, in which the discouraged patient withdraws from the problems of life completely. The characteristics of all good compensations are these :— They lead to 1. Social usefulness. 2. Social responsibility. 3. Closer contact with humanity. 4. Acceptance and conquest of difficulties. 5. Social courage. 6. They lead, secondarily, to a sense of power, to social esteem, and to security. Neurotic compensations reverse the emphasis. Their characteristics are these :— 1. They lead to an immediate heightening of the ego¬ feeling. 2. They furnish a make-believe security. 3. They produce an immediate, but subjective, sense of power.