How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.
103/400
- 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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The image contains the following text:
which is a compensation for the inferiority complex, no
matter what its source. Here again the basic rule of all
successful compensations, that the compensation must
result in socially useful activities, holds as the true
criterion of eventual happiness. Perhaps one of the most
beautiful examples of socialized compensation in which
the entire personality becomes a compensating machine
is the example of Braille, himself blind, who gave the
blind the famous raised alphabet that brought them light.
The discovery that the individual as a whole seeks a
style of life which is in its entirety a compensation for
some defective organs or for the sense of inferiority
derived from the liabilities of the family constellation,
from hate or from cloying love, or from social, economic,
or religious disability, is one of the most significant
contributions that have ever been made to the science of
psychology. We owe this knowledge to Dr. Alfred Adler,
the Viennese psychiatrist, who announced this epoch-
making discovery in a thin volume entitled Organ
Inferiority and its Psychic Compensation in 1907. Examples
of this tendency of the total individual to compensate for
single inferiorities fill the history and biography of
mankind.
In the matter of organic inferiorities the story of the
numerous physicians, notably Trudeau, who, themselves
tuberculous, contributed most largely to the treatment
and cure of tuberculosis, is a case in point. A famous
French physician who suffered from asthma, bronchitis,
and pneumonia as a child was responsible for the
introduction of artificial ventilation in French schools ;
he eventually became minister of health, and developed
open-air schools for pre-tuberculous children during his
regime. To those who have experienced the tragedy of
death in their families, the profession of medicine, indeed,
is the most significant compensation.
It is part of nature’s compensatory tendency to make
those who have seen death most clearly, the most ardent
champions of life. Death and disease are two sources of
the inferiority feeling which very few of us escape. In