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

feeling, but in some cases, such as that of Ralph, the secondary implications, and the child's misinterpretation of the seriousness of the attack, may be elaborated into an inferiority complex. I am indebted to one of my colleagues for the report of a similar case of a boy who became obsessed with the idea tnat he was suffering from juvenile paresis after reading Ibsen's Ghosts during the storm and stress of his adolescence. The boy’s father had died of a mysterious disease which had defied the diagnosis of several specialists, and the reading of the Ibsen play, together with the surreptitious study of psychiatric textbooks in a medical school library to which he had access, convinced this lad that his father died of paresis and that the germ of syphilis had been transmitted to him. Complete laboratory tests demonstrated normal blood and spinal fluid, but the boy persisted in his belief for months. At my suggestion, my colleague utilized the young man’s literary ability to cure him. He was urged to write a play about himself and work out a happy ending, and during the course of literary criticism of his play, he was convinced that it was better to act “ as if” he were not infected, and “ as if ” he were as sound as the laboratory tests indicated. New horizons and new triumphs at school served to dispel the black butterflies of a too close identification with Ibsen’s Oswald, and a too rigorous and over-imaginative inquest into the probable causes of his father’s death. These few cases serve to show of what thin stuff the inferiority complex may be constructed under unfavour¬ able environmental conditions. 'We are as miserable as we think ourselves, and most of our fears and doubts and anxieties are based on ignorance, misconception, and narrowed horizons of human activity. There is hardly a human being who has not at some time or another experienced a sense of inferiority whose roots were deeply anchored in one of the seven unhappy sources we have so briefly described. These are the obstacles which stand in the way of every man and woman. They need not be