How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.
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was extremely vain of her physical beauty, and disliked the thought that her beauty might some day be marred by pregnancy and childbirth. She married solely as a gesture to her mother’s insistence, and remained completely frigid during her marriage. Her husband was penniless at the time she married him, and she regarded him not as an equal to be loved, but as a child to be mothered and nursed. She pampered him as much as she wanted to be pampered herself. The husband found this state of enforced parasitism very unpleasant, devoted his efforts to work, and after a few years was able to support himself and his wife very well. Although our patient was outwardly well pleased with this situation, in reality she felt that she had lost an important prop to her self-esteem. She could no longer maintain her position of uniqueness in her family. She now developed an anxiety neurosis, showing phobias of every imaginable description. She finally became afraid of her own fears which led to a state of continuous panic. At this point she consulted the psychiatrist. After her analysis the patient lost all her phobias, became sexually adjusted, and developed her musical talent to a high degree. The Substitution oj Techniques for Goals While we are discussing the patterns of compensation we must consider one other aspect of compensation which occurs constantly both in the world of nature and in the realm of human conduct. It is a well known fact that every end must be attained by the employment of definite means, or tools. To go back to the analogy of self- sculpture which we proposed in the first chapter, if your purpose is to make a marble monolith, then you must use tools appropriate to the end, and not tools designed for carving ivory. There is a general human tendency to use over and over again a tool that once has proved effective. Sometimes this favourite tool is used so often that it becomes more important than the end itself. The