How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.
286/400
267 (canvas 287)
The image contains the following text:
This is the vicious circle of every neurosis. Ignorance
produces fear, and fear leads the neurotic to whittle his
cosmos to the dimensions of his oyster-shell. The more
he restricts his horizon, the fewer his opportunities for
growth and strength. In turn, this abets his ignorance
and exaggerates his fear. Frantically he builds his walls
about him and retreats into his self-made castle, while his
subjectivity grows apace and his futility increases inversely
as the radius of his activity is lessened. The ultimate
limits of this process lie in the slow disintegration of
insanity or in the more dramatic annihilation of suicide.
The final commandment of the neurotic decalogue is :
Thou shalt isolate thyself from thy fellow-men and their
problems and perplexities, and thou shalt restrict thy sphere
of activity to the least possible radius consonant with life.
Types of Neuroses
After this description of neurotic patterns and their
essential elements we may well proceed to the discussion
of the various types of neurosis and attempt to under¬
stand why one man chooses one neurosis and his
neighbour another. Neuroses have been known and
described for a long time, and many writers have attempted
to explain them. The failure of all but a few modern
psychiatrists to understand the neurosis is due largely to
the fact that most human thinking in modern times has
been under the tyrannic thumb of a causal philosophy
and a mechanistic point of view. X he attempt to explain
the neuroses from a mechanistic angle was doomed to
failure, a priori because the neuroses are purposive and
must be interpreted in terms of conation, not causation.
Modern science has been frankly afraid of the conative,
hormic, or teleological explanations of human phenomena
because of their superficial resemblance to the outworn
teleology of the theologians and the Book of Genesis.
The difference between theological teleology and scientific
teleology is very simple. The theologians say, “ an egg
is smaller at one end than at the other because it is part