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

and was brought home by a policeman after wandering perplexedly past her own house half a dozen times. The tenuousness of her family’s fortunes had kept this fear alive throughout the years, and now the spectre of old age and of desertion by her children or her husband drove her to redoubled efforts to maintain her security, in terms of reassuring expressions of concern and attention from everyone about her. Surely no better tool than worry could have been chosen for this end. She not only worried about possible accidents to her husband during his engineering trips, or injuries to her son who was in his school football team, but she worried about cancer and death, the seduction of her daughter, the possibility of her eldest son’s getting syphilis from an infected towel in his boarding school, the danger of crossing streets in the city, the appalling prevalence of infantile paralysis, the danger of communism, and similar vague bogeys. What did she gain by these fears ? Why did she choose worry as the best means of attaining her ends ? The Purpose of Worry If we formulate Elizabeth’s unconscious goal with the phrase : “I must have greater security than anyone else in the world, and everyone else must help me to attain it,” we can readily understand how important worry is in her armament for gaining both attention and security. Her entire family is tyrannized by her solicitude, because the simplest everyday activity becomes fearful danger in her eyes. Moreover, worry makes her very superior to every other member of her family, because by contrast they appear far less solicitous for the welfare of kith and kin than Elizabeth. Like the trait of hypersensitivity which we have already analysed, Elizabeth’s worry imposes an obligation on every other member of the family. Her worry makes abnormal caution the rule in her family ; independence of action, thought, or social contact is out of the question