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

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