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THE 

DANGERS 

OF BEING 

HUMAN 

*, 

F. CLAUDE CALMER, M.A. 




THB.BODLEY-HBAD 
tOMDVN 



first PUD us ne a 



This book is copyright under the Kerne Convention. A\art from 
any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, I research, 
criticism or review, as permitted under the Copy/ight Act 
1911, no portion may be reproduced by any pror ss without 
written permission. Enquiry should be made *** >.ne publisher. 



PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY 

BRISTOL TYPESETTING GO., BRISTOL 

for JOHN LANE THE BODLEY HEAD LIMITED, 

28 Littlt Russell Strttt, London, W.C.I. 



CONTENTS 

Preface 7 

1 What This Book is About 9 

2 Who L Normal? 23 

3 Some Everyda, Problems 34 

4 Headaches and Habits 45 

5 Alcoholism and Drug Addiction 56 

6 The Dangers of Being Born 66 

7 Children and Grown-ups 76 

8 The Child : Some Problems 84 

9 Dreams, Nightmares, and Insomnia 94 

10 Why We Worry 104 

11 Why We Fall 111 117 

12 The Meaning of Illness and Accident 126 

13 Some Asides and a Summing Up 136 
Index 145 



PR V E FACE 

IT WILL be clear to the reader that I have drawn upon mr ay 
and varied sources in preparing the present book, and it 
would be impossible to make acknowledgment to them all 
individually; where possible, I have given the reference wi- 
the text. A number of more specific references, however, 
require special mention. 

I wish to make grateful acknowledgment to the Editor of 
The New Republic of New York for permission to repro- 
duce in Chapter T>e parts of an article which appeared 
originally in his papei and was later reproduced in the 
Manchester Guardian for January llth, 1952. I should also 
like to acknowledge references to the following authors and 
publications : Professor Sir Cyril Burt's " The Subnormal 
Mind " and his article in The Family Doctor-, Howard 
Whitman's article in The Woman's Home Companion of 
New York, for April 1952 and the foreword to that article 
by Dr. R. H. Felix; Dr. Denis Leigh's article in The 
Lancet for May 3rd, 1952; and an article on " Sleep 
Paralysis " by Chapman Pincher in The Daily Express. 

I wish to acknowledge my special debt to Miss O. L. 
Fuller, B.A., for her assistance in preparing this manuscript; 
and her comments and criticisms on reading through the 
typescript have been a very real help. One critic of a 
popular book on a scientific subject complained that, when 
the scientist writes for the layman, the former always seems 
to have in mind the colleague who is looking over his 
shoulder! Miss Fuller indeed looked over my shoulder, 
but in so unobtrusive a manner as to leave me quite free 
to write as I thought best, having in mind my desire to 
make this a book for the Man (and the Woman) in the 
street. 

I have also to thank my friend Mr. R. M. Prideaux, M.A., 
for supplying me with the title for this book. 

F. CLAUDE PALMER 

29 Welbeck Street, W.I. 



One 

What This Book Is About 

I AM attempting to explain in this book what psychotherapy 
is, and what it is not. I shall ^eal with some of the problems 
to which the psychotherapist can bring his special know- 
ledge, and I hope in the process to clear up many mis- 
understandings concerning psychology in general and 
psychotherapy in particular. 

This book owes its existence to suggestions made to me 
from several different sources. One of these sources was a 
group of adolescent boys and girls at a Further Education 
Centre, to which I was asked to give a series of lectures. 

The talks were grouped in a general way around a central 
theme, but their substance arose to a very great extent from 
questions asked by the students themselves. 

Another source was a Christmas party at which I was 
present. The talk turned to psychology and psychological 
medicine, and it soon became very obvious that the other 
members of the party had very little idea of the role of 
psychotherapy in our society. One of the party suggested 
that there was clearly a very great need for a book to explain 
in simple language precisely what types of patient could 
turn to the psychotherapist for help and healing: to explain 
this, in fact, in much the $4me way as I had explained it to 
the party. 

Since then many of my friends have repeated the sug- 
gestion in slightly different ways, and it has become clear 
that this need for information is very widespread indeed. 
This is even true of those of my friends who have had an 

9 



10 The Dangers of Being Human 

expensive an\l, in many other respects, a- very good educa- 
tion. 

All these people revealed that they possessed a mixture 
ofignorance and misinformation concerning the "Jews and 
the work of the modern psychotherapist. 

In thi& book, then, I have attempted to deal in plain 
language with the mental aspect of all illness, and in parti- 
cular to show thai many of the ills that flesh is heir to, 
can be successfully treated by psychotherapy. Some of 
these illnesses appear to the man in the street to be ordinary 
physical afflictions, which he would usually regard as quite 
distinct from those which are more obviously mental in 
origin and nature. 

This in itself is one of the popular misconceptions, for 
I shall hope to show that there is a psychological factor in 
all illness, and that the various forms of illness could be 
arranged in an ascending order; at the one end of the scale 
there would be the surgical case which seems to have no 
psychological factor about it at all, and at the other end 
would be those illnesses which have for centuries been 
recognised as being of a mental nature. In between, how- 
ever, we should find ranged all the other disabilities from 
which we suffer from time to time. 

I have mentioned the many misconceptions which exist 
concerning psychotherapy. These are of different kinds, 
and arise from different sources. These differences can best 
be shown by examples of some of the ideas which quite 
intelligent people entertain about members of my profes- 
sion and about their work. 

One person to whom I was introduced, when told of my 
profession, remarked that he would never be likely to have 
to refer anyone to me, as he did not number any ' loonies ' 
among his friends. Another friend of mine numbered among 
her own circle of friends one ' or two people who were 
experiencing difficulties of a psychological nature, and these 
she recommended to consult me; in most cases the reaction 
was to ask if my friend were trying to drive them into a 
mental home ! 

Another viewpoint is illustrated, rather tragically, by 



W hat This Book 1 About 11 

the remarks of one of my friends which he *nade when I 
was considering the outline of the present book. Tt is man 
is a general s medical practitioner, with a bugy and particu- 
larly difficult and worrying practice. He had always been 
opposed to the idea of a mental factor, and stil) more to 
that of a mental origin, in illness, and scornfully rejected 
the suggestion that illness could be cured by psychological 
methods. 

Not long ago, however, he had an attack of coronary 
thrombosis, that dread affliction which is the doctor's own 
' occupational dicease.' Fortunately, my friend recovered, 
but since then he has noticed that he has particularly 
severe attacks of angina (the pain in the chest which is 
associated with this disease) vhen he is more worried than 
usual. Then, as he says himself, he worries because he has 
the pain, and the pain get worse because he worries, and so 
on, in a descending vortex of disease. 

He adds that this is the first time that he has suffered 
from an ( imaginary illness ' and now realises that these 
are just as real as ' real illnesses.' He is made even more 
painfully conscious of this fact by the knowledge that he 
lives continually under the threat of another serious attack, 
which may well prove to be fatal. 

This doctor's earlier attitude towards psychological medi- 
cine is unfortunately representative of the attitude of many 
members of the medical profession, and especially of 
general practitioners. A typical case was brought to my 
notice not long ago. 

A student was sent by the principal of his college to see 
the doctor, as he had acute stomach pains which the 
principal guessed to be mental in origin. Sure enough, the 
G.P. examined the boy, patted his shoulder and said, 
' Well, my boy, you hav<* absolutely nothing wrong with 
you, now just run along and forget all about it ! ' This advice 
the boy would have been only too happy to follow, if he 
had been able. 

This attitude on the part of the G.P. arises out of the 
mainly materialistic approach of his medical training, based, 
as this is, on the science of the last century. The doctor is 



12 The Dangers of Being Human 

either an avowed materialist, as was my friend, or keeps 
things^ of thd mind, or spirit, in a compartment separate 
from matters appertaining to the body, which he regards 
as nothing more than a very complicated machire. 

This state of affairs is gradually being changed, as the 
newer recruits to the medical profession, both doctors and 
nurses, have some training in psychology included in their 
curriculum. The effect of this change was shown, for 
instance, at the end of a public lecture which I gave last 
winter! 

The chairman, who was a friend of mine, had invited 
along, unknown to me, several friends who were physicians 
and surgeons, expecting that during the questions which 
followed the talk, they would take me to task for my 
* peculiar ' views. 

In this he was disappointed, and so he asked one young 
surgeon why he had not taken issue with me, since I even 
went so far as to suggest that there was a psychological 
factor in the common cold. The surgeon replied " And why 
not? Psychological factors make all the difference to the 
recovery of my patients after I have operated on them!" 
It should be noted that this surgeon had only recently 
qualified. 

It wil) be seen that misconceptions concerning the psy- 
chology of illness are entertained both by the layman and 
by the medical practitioner. The ideas of the latter, as I 
have suggested, seem to have their origin in his train- 
ing, while the mistaken opinion of the man in the street is 
due mainly to the way in which the subject is treated by 
the cinema, the theatre, and the press. In fairness I should 
add that the members of my profession are not entirely 
blameless in the matter. 

The utterances of the lunatic fringe of psychiatry tend 
to get into the press, and such statements are usually left 
to speak for themselves, the sensational effect being 
heightened by suitably startling headlines. One such recent 
statement concerned the young artists who were caught 
cutting works of modern painters out of their frames in the 
Musee d'Art Moderne in Paris. 



What This Book /A About 13 

A psychiatrist who had had one of the artistr under treat- 
ment since the attempted theft gave evidence in a report 
on the young man's condition. He stated : l His crime has 
saved him. His act has liberated him. He has thus spared 
himself a deterioration of his personality which mi^ht have 
led him later to some more tragic decision and to the emas- 
culation of his intellectual virility.' 

The Manchester Guardian, in a typically restrained com- 
ment, remarks "... the report, . . . unfortunately, will not 
increase the reputation with the French public of his more 
serious colleagues in this branch of medical science . . . 
It seems a pity that the prestige of a serious branch of 
science should be endangered by this sort of statement." 
Most other sections of the press would be only too pleased 
to exploit such a sensational statement. 

The presentation of the more striking instances of mental 
breakdown, in the cinema, on the stage, or in the novel, 
and even in the popular account of psychotherapy, is excus- 
able, since ours is a sensation-seeking civilisation, and the 
owner of the film, play or book must sell his product in 
order to live. 

Certain psychological films and plays have shown fairly 
adequately one side of the work of the psychiatrist, but they 
have completely failed to illustrate the type of work which 
makes up the bulk of the practice of most members of the 
profession. This work is possibly less sensational than that 
shown on the screen, yet in many instances it is not the 
less dramatic in its results, and in the enormous gain in 
human happiness which it brings with it. 

That there is a need for psychological medicine was 
demonstrated not long ago by a statement issued by a body 
representing the medical profession itself. This statement 
was made in response to the attacks which had been made 
on the profession for the alleged abuse of the National 
Health Service in connection with prescriptions of ' un- 
necessary' medicine. 

The statement made public the fact that forty per cent 
of all prescriptions under the N.H.S. were ' placebos,' the 
annual cost of which was nearly six million pounds. These 



14 Th* Dangers of Being Human 

placebos are harmless, but useless, medicines, (often no 
more than coloured water,) which members of the public 
insist c upon having from the doctor whenever .they fe'el ill. 
The prescription of these placebos has been dei ended on 
two grornds: first, that the doctor is forced to prescribe 
them or else risk losing a patient; and, secondly, that 
the patient does : n fact derive benefit from these medi- 
cines because he thinks that they will help him to get 
better. 

This is a very roundabout and, in the long run, very 
expensive method of applying psychology to medical prac- 
tice. Some members of the profession, with whom I have 
discussed their use of placebos, have in fact realised what 
the practice means in terms cf psychology, but they would 
still be inclined to question the scope of psychology in 
healing the sick, and many would even oppose the practi- 
tioner who wishes to use psychological methods. 

In fact, there is a mental element in every illness, and in 
many illnesses it is one of the most important, if not the 
most important, factor. These illnesses include not merely 
the afflictions which the layman looks upon as psychological, 
but also the very many which would usually be regarded as 
of purely physical origin, and thus requiring the attention 
only of the physician or surgeon. The picture in the mind 
which underlies this view is of a human being who is sud- 
denly attacked by bacteria or a virus, and, if he or she has 
not enough ' resistance/ becomes ill. The problem then 
appears to be to find some drug which will kill the bacteria 
or virus and so ' cure ' the patient. 

Bernard Shaw long ago pointed out some of the weak- 
nesses of this view of illness; and even the physician nowa- 
days tends to think of the problem ac one of dealing with 
' patient-with-bacteria ' or ' p?tient-with- virus/ and so 
to recognise that each case is different; and I have men- 
tioned the young surgeon who adopts this more enlightened 
view. The psychologist would go further and hold that each 
case is unique; no two are alike. 

The range of psychological medicine, then, is very wide 
indeed. I shall not attempt to make a list here of all the 



What This Book Is About 15 

illnesses which can be dealt with, some of which can only 
be de,alt with, by psychological methods. I propose to make 
a convenient grouping of the various types of illnesp and 
to deal witn each group in subsequent chapters. This group- 
ing will include the range from worries and anxievies, and 
problems which seem to have no physical symptoms, to 
those illnesses which, as I have said, one usually regards 
as being exclusively the province of the physician or sur- 
geon. 

Here I should like to deal with another mistake which 
my friends commonly make with regard to my profession, 
and that is concerned with methods of treatment. The infor- 
mation that the layman has concerning methods of treat- 
ment of mental illness is usually derived from one of two 
sources, either the accounts of those who have relatives in 
mental institutions, or the films. 

In consequence, the methods most commonly thought of 
in this connection are either those employing physical 
means, such as electric shock therapy or drugs, or the 
' couch ' treatment : in the latter the subject (usually a 
glamorous blonde) is told to lie on the couch in the psychia- 
trist's consulting room, she answers a few simple ques- 
tions, to which the psychiatrist knows all the answers, and 
very quickly gets up completely cured. 

As a variant, she may even fall in love with the 
psychiatrist, which makes, in the film world, for a 
happy ending, I was asked, after a recent public lecture, 
whether this really represents what goes on in a psychia- 
trist's consulting room : so great is the suggestive power of 
the film! 

Now it is true that there is a very wide and very varied 
range of methods of treating mental troubles. The psychia- 
trists who have had a lo^g training in medicine before 
turning to psychology tend to stick to physical methods of 
treatment such as the use of drugs, of ' shock ' treatment, 
(either by the use of electricity or by insulin injections) or 
the use of brain surgery. Opposed to them are the members 
of the various analytical schools. Of these, there are the 
three original schools started by Freud, Jung, and Adler 



16 The Dangers of Being Human 

respectively, and then there are later schools started by 
f ollo\\ ers of these three pioneers. 

The Freudian school is particularly strong m this 
country, and the orthodox follower of Freud insists upon 
the strict application of f reud's principles. These involve 
the use of the method of * free association/ and this can 
only be carried out, according to these practitioners, while 
the patient is reclining on the couch in the consulting room. 
It is also laid down that the analyst must adopt a com- 
pletely passive role during the analysis, which occupies the 
patient an hour a day every day for a number of months 
or even years. The orthodox analyst of this school also 
applies the same method to all his patients, and interprets 
the patient's associations according to a definite theory 
as to the structure of the mind and the nature of 
neurosis. 

This over-strict adherence to one or other method of 
treating psychological cases tends to put people off con- 
sulting the psychological consultant, for many laymen feel 
that one cannot apply any method in all strictness to every 
case. In this view, the intelligent layman has the support 
of a growing number of practitioners. These psychia- 
trists are prepared to regard each case as a fresh problem, 
and to adopt any method which promises to help the 
patient. 

Dr. V. E. Fisher has recently published a book in which 
he boldly proclaims the fact that he uses all methods of 
treating mental illness; as one reviewer puts it, he uses 
every trick there is in the bag. Dr. Fisher even discusses 
when a patient may be allowed to sit in a chair to give his 
free associations, instead of having to lie on the couch 
throughout the session. This is very heretical indeed, but 
many therapists, including the writer, would agree with Dr. 
Fisher. 

Many practitioners, of whom I am one, would avoid 
the use of physical methods, in every case, if that is at all 
possible; they would rely upon psychological methods of 
treatment. These alone are very varied in nature; they 
include the various methods of analysis : the psychoanalysis, 



What This Book It About 17 

analytical psychology and individual psychology of Freud, 
Jung and Adler respectively, and the methods developed by 
otheiA analysts, who have evolved their own variations of 
method ai*d theory. Then there is direct suggestion. 

Suggestion can take the form of mere encouragement, or 
it may he in the shape of advice as to auto-suggestion; 
(remember M. Coue and his famous formula!); or sugges- 
tion may be given during the hypnotic trance. 

Some therapists rely a good deal upon hypnotism, and it 
is true that with some patients it is possible to achieve 
rapid and dramatic results by the use of hypnosis; but many 
practitioners are opposed to the use of this method, for a 
variety of reasons. The chief of these is that only a limited 
number of people can be put into deep hypnotic trance with 
any degree of ease, and those patients with whom the 
method might be most useful are the least likely to be 
easily hypnotised. 

There is the added objection that hypnotic cures tend not 
to last; the symptoms return after varying periods, either 
in the same or in a different form. Added to these difficulties 
is that we know very little at present about what happens 
during the hypnotic trance, and there is a real danger of 
substituting one mental disorder for another by this 
method. 

In addition to these methods, there is the possibility of 
giving expert advice, of acting as a kind of substitute for a 
parent or husband or wife who is missing, or who is un- 
sympathetic towards the patient's difficulties. The advice 
and help is backed up by the wide knowledge and experi- 
ence of the psychologist, and may be helped by a number 
of methods which can be used to discover possibilities which 
lie hidden in the patient. These, when discovered and 
developed anu 6 lvcn an opportunity to be exercised, may 
effect a profound change in the patient's outlook and way 
of life, and often lead to a great gain in happiness and well- 
being. 

These last methods can be applied to quite a large 
number of patients, and do not take up so much time as a 
full analysis and are consequently much less expensive. 



18 Tljf Dangers of Being Human 

At the sairijp time, such methods carr only be properly 
applied by a practitioner who has the background of train- 
ing and experience in deep analysis. He may not need to 
dig Very deeply into the patient's mind, but he must be 
fully aware of what is limy to be going on at the deeper 
mental levels. 

There are certain types of patient who are regarded 
by many therapists (including the writer) as not suit- 
able for deep psychoanalysis, but this is a difficult and 
controversial matter, and is outside the scope of the present 
book. 

The reader is thus able to see that, should he or she 
decide to consult one of these psychiatrists, they will 
receive the treatment most, suitable for their individual 
needs, and will not automatically be given a full deep 
analysis. The therapist may, nevertheless, recommend a full 
analysis, if the patient can afford both the time and the 
expense; (the two necessarily go together, where the train- 
ing of the consultant has been so long and so expensive, 
and each patient occupies so much of his time and atten- 
tion). 

This is because we realise that analysis of old and deeply 
repressed conflicts in the mind can only result in better 
mental health, and therefore in improved general well- 
being; and quite a number of normal healthy people under- 
take a full analysis for this reason. Indeed, one's friends 
often remark upon the enviable effect of analysis : ' You are 
in colour/ they remark, ' You are never upset, whatever 
happens. Other people do not seem to annoy you. And you 
always look so cheerful 1' 

To seek the advice of a psychotherapist is not, as some 
people mistakenly think, the first step towards a mental 
institution. It is the aim of the, therapist tu prevent mental 
illness and to save the patient from the progression which 
may, if neglected, lead to such an end. In this aim he is, 
in the great majority of instances, successful. There is no 
need to be afraid to consult the psychotherapist; he is there 
to help, and will help if he possibly can. 

The first visit, then, to the psychotherapist's consulting 



What This Book Ir About 19 

room is for very many people the first step towards a 
healthier, happier, and more balanced life; and this 
improvement in mental health is reflected in the imp ^ved 
physical health which accompanies it. 

Professor Sir Cyril Burt has aptly described the typical 
appearance of the neurasthenic : * Often/ he writes, ' the 
neurasthenic patient may be picked out at sight from his 
posture. His gait is usually slouching and even flat-footed, 
his stance limp and lop-sided, with the shoulders bending 
forwards, the back curved and bent sideways, and the 
stomach laxly protruding. Visceroptosis, indeed, is a pos- 
tural defect that frequently arises from a. depressed mental 
state, and in turn reacts upon it: as has often been said, 
" drooping spirits and a drooping body go together." ' Con- 
versely, we may say that a well-balanced and healthy mind 
will lead to the possession of a healthier body, and a general 
sense of well-being. 

I have to admit that on a number of occasions I have 
been told of psychiatrists who are so attached to a parti- 
cular theory that they are prepared to go to any lengths 
to fit into the theory the material which the patient pro- 
duces. 

This material is the product of the patient's emotional 
life; one could almost say that it is his emotional life, and 
it is quite wrong, in my opinion, to do violence to this 
material in order to arrive at an interpretation which 
accords with one's own pet notions. If we make the attempt, 
then we shall never arrive at a correct interpretation of the 
emotional conflicts which have brought the patient to our 
consulting rooms; and in some instances we shall frighten 
the patient away from any further treatment, and leave him 
with an unpleasant t^te in his mouth, which will probably 
result in a wholesale condemnation of psychology and of 
everything connected with it. 

One of my acquaintances has, in fact, behaved in just 
this way. She had been advised by her doctor that she 
was suffering from 'nerves' and had been sent to a 
psychiatrist. According to the patient, he opened up the 
conversation at the first interview by asking very blunt 



20 The Dangers of Being Human 

questions about the lady's sex life, and her relations with 
her husband. f 

V'nv, as it happened, this lady had had *a great deal 
see, he was not lacking jn any way. Consequently, she 
se, she t was not lacking in any way. Consequently, she 
thought that the interview was ridiculous, and did not go 
again. 

Yet she manifestly is in need of psychiatric advice, and it 
is not* unlikely that her sex life is involved in her diffi- 
culties, at any rate as one factor, but the problem would 
have to be approached from quite a different angle. The 
analyst would have to bear in mind the distinction within 
sex experience, which I have made elsewhere, between the 
physical experience and the emotional meaning of that 
experience. 

However that may be, this lady is not likely to seek 
further psychological treatment, and goes about telling her 
many friends what rubbish psychology is! 

The consultant who uses one approach for all his 
patients is not so common these days, and is becoming less 
so. The psychiatrist may have a central theory against 
which he works, but, if he is wise, he will leave it suffi- 
ciently elastic to accommodate new findings, which he is 
bound to make from time to time as the infinite variety of 
human nature unfolds itself in his consulting room. With 
such a practitioner, the patient may rely upon obtaining the 
truest interpretation and the wisest advice. 

Some readers may have noticed that I seem to have 
used the terms ' psychologist/ ' psychiatrist/ ' psycho- 
analyst ' and ' psychotherapist ' as though they were inter- 
changeable. This is not strictly the case, but as this is 
intended to be a non-technical account of the work of 
members of these professions, I have chosen to use the 
terms rather loosely, as they are by most laymen. There is, 
in fact, no legal definition of these different types of 
practitioner, nor is there any agreed scientific defini- 
tion. 

Some definitions have been suggested from time to time, 
and very roughly one may say that in this country a 



What This Book 7$ About 21 

psychiatrist is one who has taken medical degrees and then 
has proceeded to the study of psychology, probably ending 
by taking the Diploma in Psychological Medicine. Froir* Jie 
nature of his training, such a practitioner tends of .en to 
have a bias towards physical methods of treatirsnt: by 
drugs, by shocks, or by operative surgery. 

An analyst is a person trained in one of the analytical 
schools; strictly speaking, only a follower of Freud is known 
as a ' Psychoanalyst/ while adherents to Jung's system are 
called ' Analytical Psychologists ' and followers of Adler are 
' Individual Psychologists/ There are, however, a large 
number of practising analysts, probably the majority, who 
do not adhere strictly to the theory and practice of any one 
of these schools to the complete exclusion of the others; 
analysts nowadays tend to be eclectic, and to make use 
of concepts and techniques from all the main schools of 
analysis, the first aim being to help the patient. 

It is clear to me that one can find psychiatrists who are 
medically qualified and analysts who have not taken medical 
degrees, working along the same lines; I have friends who 
have approached psychotherapy from these two very differ- 
ent angles, and who nevertheless are now carrying out the 
work of mental healing by methods which are indistinguish- 
able from one another. In addition, many of the bebt contri- 
butions to psychoanalytical theory and practice have been 
made by ' lay analysts/ as the non-medically qualified prac- 
titioners are called. 

The term ' psychotherapy ' includes all the methods of 
dealing with mental ill-health. The term 'psychologist* 
is even wider, and includes all those who have qualified at 
a recognised university by taking a degree in psychology. 
This includes all the qualified therapists just mentioned, 
as well as vv^ikcib in other fields of psychology, such as 
Educational Psychology, Industrial Psychology, Psychology 
in the Armed Forces, Prison Psychology, and so on. 

Some practitioners, including myself, prefer to call them- 
selves ' Consulting psychologists/ to avoid the necessity for 
having to attach a label indicating adherence to any parti- 
cular school of psychology. We desire to avoid being com- 



22 The Dangers of Being Human 

mitted to the acceptance of the whole of any one method or 
theory of treatment, and prefer to avail ourselves of all 
iric'tiods, as the circumstances of the patient seem to 
demalid. 



Two 

Who Is Normal? 



AT THIS stage the reader may be saying : ' This is all very 
interesting, and is most probably quite true: but I am 
perfectly normal, and have nothing wrong with me, and so 
I have no need of you chaps.' With this you may be 
inclined to close the book. But if you will bear with me 
for a little longer, I shall try to show that modern psycho- 
therapy can be of value, can be of help, in a number of 
unexpected ways. 

I am frequently asked what is meant when psychologists 
speak of ' normal ' and ' abnormal ' behaviour, or ' normal ' 
and * abnormal ' personalities or minds; and I usually begin 
by replying that, to paraphrase a famous political witti- 
cism, ' we are all abnormal, only some are more abnormal 
than others/ (The reader will probably recall the assumed 
delight with which Bernard Shaw greeted the statement 
of his optician that he was one of the very few people 
with normal eyesight!) 

In music we recognise that there is a continuous scale 
of audible tones, with a continuous scale of vibrations of 
increasing frequency as we go up it. For convenience's sake 
we divide th: scaL up in a conventional manner, and sub- 
divide it to suit our purpose. If we did not do this, it would 
be impossible to compose playable music, or even to write it 
down. We thus obtain a scale from very low to very high 
notes, and assign agreed names to certain positions between 
the extremes. 

In much the same way, we can arrange patterns of 

23 



24 Thf Dangers of Being Human 

human behaviour in a continuous scale, and assign names 
to certain positions on this scale. The analogy is too simple, 
aric so cannot be pressed too far: for there is no simple 
relaticiship between positions in the scale elf human 
behaviour, as there is between positions on the musical 
scale; and the actual behaviour scale is not by any means 
complete and continuous. Nevertheless, we are able to 
arrange behaviour along a scale, as I have suggested, and 
can then agree to regard certain parts of the scale as 
' normal/ and the rest as ' abnormal.' But what is regarded 
as normal in one social group may very well be regarded 
as abnormal in another group, and vice versa. 

What is regarded as abnormal in a group depends at any 
rate to some extent on the pattern of behaviour within that 
group; but there are limits in this scale, as there are to the 
scale of audible tones. The anthropological psychologist 
here gives us a great deal of very useful information about 
the behaviour of members of social groups different from 
our own. It is the knowledge which we have thus gained 
which prevents us from arriving at too clear-cut a defini- 
tion of abnormality. 

That this difficulty about the normal and abnormal is 
not one merely imagined by me, was demonstrated not long 
ago by the discussion at a meeting at University College, 
London. The meeting was a Symposium to discuss ' The 
Concept of Normality.' There were a group of experts in 
the various social sciences on the platform, and the hall 
was full of people qualified in those sciences. Yet at the 
end of several short contributions by the experts, followed 
by a long discussion, there was still no agreement as to 
what we can regard as normal. 

For the sake of convenience in discussion, and in writing 
books and articles, certain types of behaviour are regarded 
as abnormal and are given suitable names. The reader may 
be familiar with some of the extremes of mental abnor- 
mality, for a number of instances have been made the sub- 
jects of successful plays and films, which have given in 
varying degree some idea of the illness, its cause and its 
cure. 



Who h Normal? 25 

I do not intend in this book to describe such illnesses 
in detail, since that would be outside its scope, tnd in 
any case it has been done by a number of other writ .rs 
on abnonrial psychology; but perhaps I may give the Barnes 
and brief descriptions of the more frequently dramatised 
illnesses,, if only to contrast them with the less dramatic, 
but more prevalent, disturbances with which I intend to 
deal in later chapters; disturbances which, if ignored, can 
lead to a great deal of unhappiness, both to the person con- 
cerned and to those related to or otherwise associated with 
him. 

The most frequently dramatised mental illness is schizo- 
phrenia, or ' split mind/ In this state the patient's per- 
sonality has dissociated into two or more parts, which take 
charge of the person's activities in turn, both mental and 
physical, and produce behaviour which is strikingly incon- 
sistent for example, in one phase the patient may be 
extremely pious, given to righteous living and good works, 
and in the next phase he or she may indulge in a wild orgy 
of unrestrained behaviour, with a good deal of sexual 
immorality; the person so affected cannot connect the two 
phases, and in one phase may have no recollection at all 
of the other. This type of illness was the basis of the film 
' The Madonna of the Seven Moons/ 

Another mental illness with dramatic symptoms is 
paranoia, which may be seen in some schizophrenics, or may 
be observed as a distinct illness. In this the patient suffers 
from delusions of persecution, often accompanied by hallu- 
cinations of accusing voices or even of pointing and accus- 
ing fingers or hands. In this state * all the world is against ' 
the patient, or so he or she imagines. This has been the 
illness round which a number of films and plays have been 
written, including the film ' The Upturned Glass/ and 
Neilson Gattey's play ' The Enemy of Time/ although in 
the latter the theme of paranoia was, so to speak, subsidiary 
to the main theme. 

Yet another major affliction is the manic-depressive state, 
in which, as the name suggests, periods of acute depression 
alternate with periods of wildly excited behaviour : during 



26 Tty Dangers of Being Human 

the former the patient often attempts to commit suicide, 
while rn the latter he may attack another person. Examples 
Oi this were seen in what was probably the best pf all 
psychological films, ' The Snake Pit/ in which the struggle 
between psychoanalysis and orthodox medicine was very 
well portrayed. (Incidentally I wonder how many of my 
readers, who saw this film, realised that the portrait on the 
wall in Dr. Kik's study was a familiar one of Sigmund 
Freud? a point of some significance to the understanding 
of the film). 

Finally, a disorder which has also lent itself to dramatic 
treatment is kleptomania a good psychological play, 
1 Black Chiffon ' had this as its central theme, and the con- 
vincing nature of the presentation owed not a little to a 
magnificent performance by Flora Robson. 

These then are the most extreme forms of mental abnor- 
mality, so extreme that the patient almost inevitably comes 
under the care of a psychiatrist. But there are innumerable 
cases of lesser disorders which could benefit from psycho- 
therapy, the majority of which never come to the notice of 
a psychological practitioner, whether because it is not 
realised that such ailments can benefit from psychotherapy, 
or because the persons concerned can manage to live a 
comparatively normal life in the social group to which they 
belong; if they are unhappy or feel frustrated or ill-at- 
ease in their particular social milieu, then many of them 
tend to regard such a state as normal and so do not feel 
impelled to take any steps to remedy the situation. 

Another reason for accepting such conditions as normal 
is the absence of any very striking symptoms; some of these 
afflictions do in fact bring symptoms with them, which can 
be recognised as such by the trained practitioner, but which 
the layman will regard as having no connection with his 
emotional disturbances; other conditions may have no vis- 
ible symptoms at all, and may therefore be regarded by the 
sufferer as completely unaccountable. In such instances the 
symptoms may be internal and may only be revealed when 
they have become so acute as to require medical or surgical 
treatment, as in coronary thrombosis or duodenal ulcer. 



Who Is Normal? 27 

In other instances there may be no symptoms, either 
external or internal, and yet the person concerned may he 
acutely aware that all is not well with him or her. Some 
of them may, more or less by chance, come into ontact 
with a psychologist, and may only then realise thuc some- 
thing can be done to remedy the situation in which they 
find themselves. 

For example, one of my own patients met me when I was 
lecturing; she may indeed have come to my lectures because 
she felt the need to do something about her condition. She 
had, in fact, had a * nervous breakdown ' some years pre- 
viously, but had been regarded as cured for a long time 
past, and so would not normally have again consulted a 
psychotherapist. She still suffered from an acute sense of 
inferiority along with which went difficulties in establishing 
satisfactory relationships with members of the opposite sex : 
all of this arose out of a very difficult family situation, and 
had led to a series of unsuccessful attempts to establish 
for herself a satisfactory position in life, either as regards a 
job or as regards social contacts. As it happened, the cir- 
cumstances of this case precluded anything more than a 
short series of discussions with the psychologist of the 
problems involved, but these proved so effective that it is 
unlikely that deeper therapy will be needed at any later 
stage. 

Another instance is that of Lady C M , who lives 

in constant dread of her husband, and has done so for a 
number of years, and yet never manages to break away from 
him, in spite of the fact that she has a sufficient private 
income, and is not economically dependent upon her hus- 
band. The therapist with analytical training, given only a 
few additional details of the case (which I must here sup- 
press) would very quickly *nze up the situation and would 
be in a position to help Lady M to deal with her prob- 
lems. At the time of writing the unfortunate woman does 
not realise that her difficulties have a psychological origin 
and can only be resolved satisfactorily by someone specially 
trained to give this kind of treatment. 

Another instance is afforded by an extremely attractive 



28 Tfc Dangers of Being Human 

and charming young girl, coming from a very good family, 
who nevertheless is unable to make satisfactory social con- 
tacts, and so withdraws into herself and misses all the 
happiness which normal relationships, especially with mem- 
bers or the opposite sex, could afford her (and them, for 
that matter, since she is so charming and intelligent). 

In this case there is one obvious symptom which takes 
the form of a rather pronounced stammer, but this may 
well npt be connected in the young lady's mind with the 
rest of her difficulties. The correct psychological treatment 
of the case would deal with both the stammer and the 
other symptoms, probably in the opposite order, since in 
this case, as in so many others the therapist will not attack 
the most obvious symptoms directly, but will try to get 
down to the causes, and deal with those, when the other 
symptoms will disappear, quite often as if by magic. 

Even those who regard themselves as normal may in 
special circumstances feel the need for and seek the advice 
of the psychotherapist. The writer has recently been 
approached by a successful business man who is now turn- 
ing his attention to politics. His new career necessarily 
involves speaking in public and private to audiences of vary- 
ing size and composition and the new situation has forced 
this man to face his own personality difficulties which up 
to the present have not interfered with his leading a fairly 
satisfactory life, including building up a successful busi- 
ness. The difficulties are not new, but the new situation 
has focused attention upon these difficulties. 

(A more extreme version of the same sort of thing is 
illustrated by the large number of cases of neurosis in the 
R.A.F. during the war, when the extra strain of the war 
situation, and especially the flying situation, brought about 
a breakdown in a member of tbe crew, who would other- 
wise have continued to lead a more or less satisfactory 
life. In most, if not all, of these instances, there was already 
a personality difficulty in existence, but in the even tenor 
of civilian life the difficulty was not felt acutely by the 
man concerned, who could lead a life which he would 
regard as more or less normal. It was the additional strain 



Who If Normal? 29 

of the changed conditions of wartime, and especially of 
flying operations, which proved the ' last straw ' for such 
men). 

I have in this instance recommended a complete an dysis, 
which will remove all the underlying causes, whicli prob- 
ably date back to early childhood, and leave this man able 
to deal with social situations, however rew they may be, 
or, in extreme cases, at least to know fully why he cannot 
deal with them. Thus, in this instance, we have a normal 
person undertaking a full analysis for personal reasons. In 
this case, as in some others, the full analysis will not in- 
volve the person in as much expense as usual, for a special 
technique has been developed for treating such cases. 

This brings me back to the consideration of the problem 
suggested by the heading of this chapter. It will have 
become apparent to the reader that I regard the normal 
person in Great Britain as being comparatively rare, if 
indeed he exists at all. At the same time, I recognise that 
the majority of people in this country do not depart so 
far from the normal that they cannot lead reasonably effi- 
cient and happy lives, although even in these, the majority 
of instances, it may well be that the minor abnormalities 
add up to a considerable sum in the aggregate, and may 
have profound, and even tragic, effects in the histoiy of the 
world. 

The possible effects of minor personality maladjustment 
in the field of politics have been studied by Ranyard West 
in ' Psychology and World Order ' and very recently, by 
Money-Kyrle in ' Psychoanalysis and Politics/ as well as in 
more general discussions such as FlugeFs ' The Psycho- 
analytic Study of the Family ' and ' Man, Morals and 
Society.'* But we have not reached the stage of develop- 
ment at which a serious attempt can be made on the 
problem of removing by psychological methods some of the 
causes of world tensions. 

In any case, this book is concerned with problems at a 

* After these words were written there was published an interesting 
account of the psychology of totalitarianism: ' The True Believer ' by 
Eric Hoffer. 



30 The Dangers of Being Human 

purely personal level, and from that point of view the 
ijnajority of pfople in the country can manage to get along 
well enough. The reader may have noticed that I qualified 
these ^ast remarks by confining them to Great Britain, and 
you m<*7 ask, ' Why pick on us?' Well, the answer is that 
the substance of these first two chapters, and indeed of 
most of the present book, could well be applied to many 
other civilised countries both in Europe and America. The 
inhabitants of the United States in particular exhibit the 
same kinds of personality difficulties as do those living in 
these islands, but to an exaggerated degree and in far 
greater numbers. 

This is due to the greater pressure of living in the States, 
where there is a great deal more competition and striving 
for worldly success than there is in this country in parti- 
cular, they attach even greater importance than we do to 
the problem of ' keeping up with the Joneses '. 

This is so much the case that, with the realisation of the 
psychological origin of duodenal ulcers, it has been sug- 
gested that the more important and responsible positions 
in America should be ranked according to the number of 
ulcers developed by the unfortunate (but successful) men 
who occupy them. This awareness of the relationship 
between the worry attached to the striving for worldly 
success, and the development of stomach ulcers, is implied 
by the cartoon in the New Yorker, in which one wife com- 
plains to another of her husband, ' He has ulcers and he is 
not even successful ! ' 

At this point the reader may well ask whether it would 
not be better to change one's way of life and so avoid all 
the mental difficulties, problems, conflicts, neuroses and the 
like which I have mentioned : and, incidentally, to remove 
the necessity for frequent recourse to psychological con- 
sultants. A great deal can be done in this direction, and 
some psychologists are beginning to feel that they should 
try to make some positive effort in this direction, rather 
than remain the purely passive and detached analysts of, 
and commentators upon, the contemporary scene, with its 
many dilemmas and their attendant dangers. 



Who Is Normal? 31 

It is perhaps for this reason that the psychologist has 
been called ' the fifth columnist of society ', s'nce any psy- 
chological examination of social groups must lead at least 
to a re-examination of some of the assumptions on T 7hich 
society is based, and may in time lead to some G* them 
being modified, or abandoned altogether. But this must 
necessarily be a gradual process, and may not affect at all 
any one particular individual and his problems: indeed, 
during any period of social transition, new problems for the 
individual will arise and have to be dealt with. 

One variant of the social solution of personal psycho- 
logical problems which may occur to the reader is the 
suggestion of a ' return to nature '. The argument runs that, 
if our problems and neuroses and psychoses arise out of 
our civilised way of life, then the obvious way to remedy 
the matter is to live more simply, and to do away with 
many of the complexities of civilised, and especially urban, 
life. It may even be asked whether it is not possible to live 
happily simply by ' doing what comes naturally '. This 
question could be made the basis of another book, and the 
present writer will probably try to deal with this once the 
present book has been completed. But for our present pur- 
pose we need not attempt to answer the questions, for two 
reasons. 

The first is that it is not possible to alter the way of 
life of a nation completely and quickly in any given direc- 
tion, even if the desired way of life is ' simpler ' than the 
existing one. 

The second reason is that very few even of the primitive 
groups of which we have any knowledge have managed to 
achieve a happy and harmonious way of life; and the con- 
cept of the ' noble savage ' leading a good life is completely 
mistaken. It is true that one or two primitive societies have 
solved their problems in a way which allows them to live 
happy lives, with little or no crime, problem behaviour, or 
neurosis, but the price paid for achieving this may well be 
considered too high by many members of civilised com- 
munities. And the majority of primitive communities have 
not solved their personal problems satisfactorily; to para- 



32 The Dangers of Being Human 

phrase the words of the New Yorker cartoonist, * they have 
neuroses and ( are not even civilised '. 

For example, the Samoans, as described by Margaret 
Mead, have achieved a pleasant harmonious way of life in 
which there is very little neurosis, and in particular there 
are none of the difficulties which are so frequeitfly found 
in our society associated with puberty and adolescence; 
even here, however, there is one well-defined sexual aberra- 
tion, ,and there are two situations in which an inferiority 
complex may develop; in addition, a great deal of what 
we value in emotional life is lost to the Samoans. 

The Muria, about whom Verrier Elwin writes so persua- 
sively, have also managed to achieve, by their own methods, 
a happy life free from stresses and strains in personal rela- 
tionships, but their basic training could not possibly be 
introduced into European life as we know it. 

On the other hand, the Bondo, another primitive Indian 
group of whom Elwin writes, shows a great deal of aggres- 
sive behaviour which results in a very high incidence of 
homicide, and the general pattern of their life strikes one 
as emotionally extremely uncomfortable, judged by our 
standards, or the standards of many primitive communities. 

As I have said, I hope to be able to deal with all the 
problems which I have mentioned here, at greater length 
in a subsequent book. Meanwhile, we are forced to the con- 
clusion that we must try to deal with personal problems as 
they arise within our own community, and the only methods 
which can cope with many of these problems, and in par- 
ticular with the problems with which I have dealt briefly 
and which I now propose to discuss more fully, are the 
methods of psychotherapy. The problems themselves are 
inescapable, and arise, as I have suggested, from the way 
in which we live. It was from this last idea that the title 
of this book arose. 

It is in fact dangerous from a psychological point of 
view to be a human being, and more especially to be a 
human being born into a modern civilised community. As 
fair as we know, animals in the wild state do not develop 
problem behaviour, or neurosis, but even animals can find 



Who Is Normal? 33 

the * civilisation ' of captivity too much for them, and it is 
possible to produce problem behaviour, and even neurosis, 
in such diverse creatures as ants, rats, dogs, monkeys ana 
anthropoid apes. 

Briefly, we may say that neurotic behaviour in aMmals 
may be produced by setting the creature a problem too 
difficult for it, or one which produces too great a strain or 
tension in it, or one which gives rise to a ' mental conflict '. 

It will be seen during the course of the remaining chap- 
ters of this book that it is in very similar conditions that we 
humans develop personality difficulties, neurosis or psycho- 
sis. We develop them the more readily because, as the 
highest members of the evolutionary scale, we are very 
much more complex, and much more delicately fashioned 
than other animals, and, in addition, we are born into 
groups which of themselves present problems of adjustment 
to the growing child. 

A modern family group, and the modern national group 
of which the family forms a part, is in fact a very difficult 
situation in which the child has to ' get itself grown up '. 
I myself think that it says much for the resilience of human 
nature that so many of us do ' get ourselves grown up ' 
with more or less success, and that the proportion of people 
in our midst with personality problems or neurosis, while 
high, is not higher than it is. 

Perhaps I should mention here that, in general, the more 
intelligent the human being, the more likely he or she is 
to develop neurosis; for example, an investigation at one 
of the English Universities revealed a very high propor- 
tion of students with neurosis of some kind, with a large 
number so seriously affected as to require psychological 
treatment. 

We should not therefore confuse personality problems or 
neurosis with mental deficiency: it is the average or 
brighter than average boy or girl, man or woman, who so 
often needs the advice and help of the psychotherapist. I 
shall now proceed to deal with these problems in turn. 



Three 

Some Everyday Problems 

I AM dealing in this chapter with some of the quite common 
problems about which I have been consulted from time to 
time, which, in general, have no very noticeable symptoms 
attached to them. Many of these problems seem rather 
vague to the untrained observer, and yet they are obviously 
taken very seriously by the people concerned, and quite 
clearly cause them acute discomfort and suffering. 

There are a large group of problems of behaviour in 
young children which, while they vary in detail, have a 
great deal in common and have a common background. I 
will outline three cases within my own personal experience, 
and then indicate the points of resemblance. 

The first was a boy of about nine. He was very excit- 
able, given to exhibitions of temper, aggressive towards 
other children, and often knocked down smaller and less 
pugnacious children, who were not prepared to fight. He 
made violent attacks upon his mother, which were, never 
theless, to some extent sham attacks, since no very grievous 
harm was ever caused to the mother. This young boy, who 
was considerably above average intelligence, was also a per- 
sistent bed-wetter and, in his -nore excited moments, was 
given to wetting his trousers. In despair his parents sent him 
away to an expensive boarding school, which prided itself 
on being able to manage problem children. At the end of 
the term the school refused to have the boy back for the 
next one, and reported unmanageable behaviour and con- 
tinued enuresis. 

34 



Some Everyday Problems 35 

The second case concerned a boy a few years older. Here 
there jvas no very great degree of excitement rather the 
reverse, in fact; this boy was sullen and morose, and would 
bury himself in a book and ignore the rest of the family. 
He was regarded as very difficult at school, and did very 
badly at his school work. In spite of this his intelligence 
appeared to be normal. He made frequent attacks upon his 
younger sister, and was brought to my notice when he tried 
to gas her by turning on the gas taps in a room she ^as in. 

The third case was again a boy, this time much younger 
only about five years old. He was not particularly diffi- 
cult to manage at this age, but was a bed-wetter, and was 
always liable to be suffering from some childish ailment or 
other. 

Now these three children differed in a number of ways, 
but there are certain striking resemblances between their 
respective behaviours, and they all had one thing in com- 
mon: they all had sisters younger than themselves by a 
year or so, and the first and third, who were persistent bed- 
wetters, were also the first born in their respective families. 
All these children had been superseded by a younger sister, 
at a time when the boys themselves were still very young, 
and might have expected to continue to receive for some 
time to come all the love and attention from the mother, 
which they found so satisfying. There was an acute jealousy 
against the younger sister, the interloper who had sup- 
planted them (as it seemed to them) in their mother's 
affection. As so often happens in such cases, when for any 
reason the child feels itself isolated from the mother, there 
was a very strong tendency to regress to earlier behaviour, 
in fact to become a baby once again. 

This regression to infancy is not by any means confined 
to older children; it is fouud in normal adults (especially 
when they are ill in bed ! ) and noticeably in some psycho- 
pathological cases when a grown man, as a result of too 
great a shock or strain, may go right back into early infancy, 
crawl about on the floor, lose all power of speech, and 
have to be tended exactly as one nurses a young baby. 

This last type of regression is, of course, extreme and 



36 The Dangers of Being Human 

comparatively rare, but it is merely one end of the con- 
tinuous scale'of behaviour which I have already mentioned; 
and occasional regression of the adult to babyish behaviour, 
and (he return to infancy by the children described here, 
are steps in the same scale, nearer to ' normal ' behaviour. 

The first of these children was brought to me and, for 
special reasons associated with this particular case, was 
handed over to one of my friends who specialises in the 
treatment of children. He now behaves quite ' normally '. 

I was consulted about the second, where there were un- 
usual family conditions, and as a result of adjustments in 
these, a very great improvement was effected, and the 
parents are no longer desperately worried by the boy's be- 
haviour, although in my opinion he requires actual treat- 
ment by a psychotherapist. 

In the third case, I have merely had the facts given to me 
by the worried father, who asked for general guidance 
in the matter; at the time of writing, he has not felt it 
necessary to bring the boy for psychological examination 
and treatment, and whether he will ultimately do so 
depends upon how the boy develops as he grows older. 

There is, as I have stated, considerable resistance on the 
part of many laymen to consulting a psychotherapist. While 
writing this chapter I have had a startling, and in the out- 
come tragic, example of this brought to my notice. This 
concerns a woman whose husband was abroad on business 
for a long period. She took to drink and finally became a 
drug addict. The physicians did what they could for her, 
and finally advised treatment by a psychiatrist. During the 
period of treatment there was a very remarkable improve- 
ment, and, according to my informant, this woman was hap- 
pier and more healthy than she had ever been before. 
Then the husband returned 1 to this country; he was 
violently prejudiced against psychotherapy, and forbade any 
further expenditure on ' such nonsense '. The wife began 
to go back to her former state, and worse, and is now in 
a mental institution, with very little hope of recovery. 

The children whom I have described had an attitude 
in common which links their cases with another large group 



Some Everyday Problems 37 

which produces a considerable proportion of problem or 
delinquent children. I refer to the unwanted f hild. '-' 

There are a number of different ways in which a child' 
may b*e unwanted, and the type of ' unwantedness ' will 
have an effect on the child's development and behe/iour. 
There is the child who is unwanted merely because a child 
in the particular circumstances may be inconvenient. This 
is true of many illegitimate children, but 'in some of these 
instances the unmarried mother may become reconciled to 
the thought of having a child, and may even come to love 
and cherish it when it is born. In these circumstances the 
child is no longer unwanted. 

On the other hand, there are a large number of children 
born in wedlock who are quite definitely unwanted, for a 
variety of reasons. This attitude on the part of the mother 
may be due to a break with the father (even if the parents 
continue to live in the same house) : in these instances the 
emotional link between husband and wife has gone, and 
the mother may well hate any further reminder of the 
original love relationship. 

An interesting study which bears upon this problem 
has been carried on in America; the attitude of mothers 
towards their babies was carefully observed during the 
process of feeding, and cinematograph records werp made 
of the behaviour of the mothers and children; the later 
development of the children was also observed. The film 
records of these cases show very convincingly the different 
emotional relationships existing between the mother and 
the baby while the latter is being fed, and in later 
behaviour. One mother so obviously loves her baby and 
wants it that it is a pleasure to both for her to feed it 
(and, indeed, a pleasure to watch so happy a couple): 
while another mother, though giving the child enough time 
at the breast and sufficient milk, does so begrudgingly, and 
there is obviously very little emotional sympathy between 
the mother and the child, and no pleasure in the process. 

There is an interesting connection between this attitude 
of the mother towards the child and the later personality 
development of the child. It is the emotional relationship 



38 The Dangers of Being Human 

whiqh is here so important, rather than the superficial be- 
haviour; especially important is the real giving-out of love 
from mother to child. If the child is accepted willingly, 
joyfully, and naturally by the mother, then half the child's 
problems are already solved; if the father also takes his part 
in this emotional relationship, then the child has a very 
good chance of growing up with no emotional difficulties of 
its own. 

The emotionally integrated family produces the emotion- 
ally integrated (and therefore normal) child. But acceptance 
of the child is not the same as selfish need of a child 
which can be just as disastrous as rejection for the child's 
development and future well-being. The degree of * wanted- 
ness ' of the child will have profound effects on all aspects 
of its future behaviour, even in some directions which may 
appear to the layman to be quite unexpected. 

For example, as Professor J. C. Fliigel suggests in his 
book The Psychology of Clothes > the extent to which the 
child felt itself ' wanted ' as a baby may influence for the 
remainder of its life its attitude towards clothing, especially 
with regard to its protective aspect. It is highly probable 
that the adult who ' feels the cold ' and so needs several 
more layers of clothing than is normal, is in fact trying, un- 
consciously, to compensate for lack of emotional warmth, 
of love and tenderness, when he or she was a baby. On 
the other hand the person who is abnormally careless about 
clothing, even to the extent of taking readily to nudism, 
may well be making an unconscious protest against too 
much 'coddling' (an envelopment by an over-anxious 
mother) when a child. I have had in my own experience a 
patient who revealed the latter ' rebellion ' against the over- 
solicitous, and in this case too dominant, mother. 

In this connection it is worth noting that Dr. J. D. 
Sutherland has recently suggested that the unborn child 
may even be subject to prenatal influences that the 
mother's emotional attitude towards the child she carries 
may affect the future behaviour of the child; but this is a 
field which is still almost entirely unexplored, and will 
richly reward further investigation. 



Some Everyday Problems 39 

The future welfare of the young child may also be pro- 
foundly influenced according to whether he or she is of 
the ' wrong sex ' : if it is a boy when the parents longed 
for a girl, or vice versa. This particular lack of sympathy 
between parents and the child (which may even lead to the 
parents trying to keep the boy effeminate, or make the girl 
into a tomboy) is the source of many of the difficulties in 
the sexual life of the adult, and may in some instances lead 
to the development of a homosexual pattern of behaviour; 
more usually it leads to unusual difficulties on the part of 
the adolescent in achieving satisfactory emotional relation- 
ships with members of the opposite sex. 

Extreme shyness when in the company of one's fellows, 
whether of the same or of the opposite sex, may be another 
result of this early lack of emotional balance; this may result 
in no more than a temporary embarrassment and loss of 
happiness, which the boy or girl is able to ' grow out of ', or 
it may lead in some cases to the adolescent seeking escape 
from his difficulties by way of excessive smoking, drinking 
or even drug taking, if the opportunity presents itself. 

(One very shy youth told me that going to a mixed club, 
or to a dance, was very painful to him, although he felt 
the need to go : then he found, as though by accident, that 
a couple of drinks made it so much easier for him to mix, 
and even to venture on the dance-floor. This led in 
time to the taking of more alcohol until he soon reached 
the stage of finding it difficult in the evening to pass a 
public house door. At that point he was sent to me for 
advice.) 

The mention of shyness brings to mind excessive blush- 
ing, and general awkwardness, especially with the hands; 
the person 'does not know what to do with his (or her) 
hands '. Both of these types of behaviour can be very un- 
pleasant to the person so afflicted; extreme blushing, which 
may occur whenever the individual goes into the company 
of other people, and may affect not only the cheeks, but 
also the rest of the face, the neck, and even the chest, can 
be so painful that the man or woman (more often the latter) 
who is subject to it may avoid all fresh social contacts, 



40 The Dangers of Being Human 

rathe" than have that unpleasant experience. This afflic- 
tion may therefore change the whole course of an indivi- 
dual's life. 

Blushing, and awkwardness with the hands, both have 
their origins at deep emotional levels, and both are regarded 
by Freudians as having a close connection with Sexual be- 
haviour: but this is a controversial issue into which we 
need not enter here. What does concern us here is that 
both states, like all the others about which I am writing 
in this book, are amenable to psychological treatment. 

Temper tantrums are a problem more often associated 
with children. Indeed, in our society temper tantrums may 
be regarded as a normal stage of development with children 
at a certain age; but, as with most aspects of human be- 
haviour, they become abnormal if they are excessive either 
in duration or degree, or if they persist into later life. 

Another behaviour problem which occurs quite fre- 
quently with children is that of persistent stealing. This 
can cause acute embarrassment, and even misery, to the 
parents, who often do not know that it is a quite common 
type of behaviour in children. (This, incidentally, is true 
of many of these human difficulties; if the sufferers realised 
that there are in fact many others like them, then they 
would not feel quite so worried by their problems, and 
would be all the more willing to consult a practitioner 
qualified to deal with them.) 

All the above problems constitute comparatively small 
sections of one's total behaviour they may occur at com- 
paratively infrequent intervals and, as in the case of blush- 
ing, may be to a very great extent avoided, by avoiding the 
special circumstances in which they are likely to occur (in 
the case of blushing, that is the entry into fresh social 
groups, and the general meeting with strangers). 

They all arise from unconscious emotional conditions 
produced in the individual when he or she was a very young 
child: according to Freud and his followers, in the first 
year of life but, according to other workers in the field, in 
the first few years of life, possibly up to the age of seven or 
o. At any rate they all agree that the emotional experi- 



Some Everyday Problems 41 

ences of the very young child will have profound ' fleets 
on its later development and behaviour. 

This is true not only of the type of behavioural problem 
with which I have been dealing so far in this chapter; that 
is, where the ' abnormal ' behaviour occurs only occasion- 
ally or can even be entirely circumvented; it is also true of 
general character attitudes. These may involve unsatisfac- 
tory attitudes towards one's fellows, and in particular to- 
wards members of the opposite sex. 

For example, deprivation in early childhood of love and 
affection may well lead to an over-anxious possessiveness 
in later life when the individual creates an emotional rela- 
tionship with another adult; this may be the relationship 
between a girl and her lover, or husband and wife, or 
merely between friends. In any case, a very pronounced 
degree of jealousy is always associated with this attitude. 

On the other hand, the extreme devotion and possessive- 
ness of a mother towards her son may well produce a man 
who is quite incapable of forming a satisfactory attachment 
to another woman. 

Another type of unusual attitude in later life is illus- 
trated by a case in my own experience: this young man, 
when a baby, was abandoned by his parents, and adopted 
and rejected by a succession of foster parents, chiefly on 
the initiative of the woman, all before he was a year old. 
By this time he had developed so profound a mistrust of 
women that he refused to have anything to do with them. 
This attitude was gradually overcome by his last foster 
parents who brought him up with as much loving care as 
they would have bestowed on their own child. This removed 
the unusual behaviour at the surface, so to speak, but it 
failed to change the general attitude of the boy towards 
women, with the consequence that for a long time he 
tended to * lead girls on ' in order finally to reject them 
rather cruelly. In this way he was apparently taking his 
revenge for his early treatment at the hands of women; 
yet this was quite unconscious, since he had no recollection 
of the treatment, and indeed was completely unaware of 
his early history or of the fact that he was an adopted child. 



42 The Dangers of Being Human 

Ye*: other general attitudes are concerned with property 
in general and with money in particular. In my opinion 
these may arise either from actual childhood experiences 
with property and money, or from love relationships with 
the parents. (Strict Freudians would, I think, insist upon 
the latter interpretation in every instance.) Thece experi- 
ences may lead either to excessive possessiveness, or mean- 
ness, or to exuberantly prodigal generosity. 

So complex is the human mind that either of these may 
be the real attitude of the individual concerned, or may be 
only a superficial cloak for the real attitude underlying this, 
in which case the real attitude is the reverse of the super- 
ficial one. But the trained observer will be able to distin- 
guish between types of meanness and especially between 
types of generosity, between the man who really gives what 
he has to the poor and the man who casts his bread over- 
cautiously upon the waters, reckoning how many days it 
will be before it returns. 

For all of these attitudes, and for the more occasional 
abnormalities of which I wrote at the beginning of this 
chapter, the followers of Freud would find a source in 
hidden sexual impulse. The present writer would perhaps 
allow some exceptions from the general rule, as I have once 
or twicb already indicated : but, using the term ' sexual 
impulses' in the wide sense in which Freud used it, I 
should feel inclined to agree that there is at least a sexual 
factor involved. 

Another of these mildly abnormal details of behaviour, 
which links this chapter with the next, would also be re- 
garded by Freudians as having its origins in frustrated 
sexual impulses. I refer to the habit of biting the finger 
nails. 

This is a rather more obvious ' symptom ' than the other 
aspects of behaviour about which I have been writing so 
far, and certainly leaves very visible traces behind it, in the 
form of finger nails which to our eyes are unattractive or 
even positively repulsive. 

I cannot, in the present book, go into all the intricacies 
of the theory concerning the impulses underlying this com- 



Some Everyday Problems 43 

paratively common habit, since I am here concerned with 
explaining what psychotherapy can do, and not with the 
therapists' training theory and practice; but, as I have 
mentioned, this habit is held by many to have its origin in 
the sexual impulses, and more recently it has come to be 
regarded as a sign of repressed aggression toward the 
child's father. 

However this may be, the habit remains an undesirable 
one. Some children seem to lose it without any noticeable 
training on the part of parents or guardians (though these 
may exert influences of which perhaps they themselves are 
unconscious); other children can be led out of the habit by 
judicious handling, and in particular by substituting a 
greater motive, not to bite the nails, for the satisfaction 
which the nail-biting affords. (Vanity and the desire to 
please the girls may in some instances afford a sufficient 
counter-impulse to break the habit in a growing boy.) 

With others, however, both boys and girls, the habit may 
persist well into adult life and even throughout adult life. 
In these instances the hands are permanently disfigured, 
and the habit can be very irritating to those associated with 
the individual who has it. In these cases there are certainly 
very strong repressed emotional impulses at work, and the 
habit has become a definite abnormality of behaviour. In 
these cases, also, it is rarely found alone; more often, it is 
associated with some other peculiarities of behaviour. 

In my own experience two cases come to mind, one a 
boy of sixteen and the other a woman of nearly thirty; in 
both instances the nail biting is pronounced, and is asso- 
ciated with persistent bed wetting. The latter is naturally 
regarded by others as being abnormal in a grown-up person 
of either sex, and yet the other symptom, the nail biting, 
on its own, might well be accepted as nothing more than 
mildly objectionable. But the trained psychologist would 
diagnose from this symptom alone the presence of serious 
emotional disturbance, probably dating back to early child- 
hood, and the same can be said, in varying degree, of all the 
other types of behaviour dealt with in the present chapter. 

Yet with the habit of nail-biting we have moved into the 



44 The Dangers of Being Human 

regie i of behaviour where even the layman can detect that 
all is not well, and this leads to worry on the part of .many 
a mother or father; I am often consulted as to a suitable 
course of action to deal with this problem. The presence of 
a noticeable, physical, symptom makes the individuals con- 
cerned take note of the abnormality, and there is a large 
class of mild abnormalities of behaviour which belong to 
this type. 



Four 

Headaches and Habits 

I PROPOSE IN this chapter to deal with those mild abnor- 
malities which are accompanied by physical symptoms. 
These may be very patent, and may appear to have so little 
connection with states of the mind (or one's ' nerves/ to 
use the popular phrase) that it seems natural to regard them 
as symptoms of a purely physical disease an attack by a 
micro-organism. 

These physical manifestations include a wide range of 
symptoms indeed; but we can make one generalisation con- 
cerning the whole class: that is, that the extent to which 
they cause embarrassment, or even pain, to the individual 
who is afflicted, varies with his social surroundings and 
general manner of life; what may remain unnoticed, or may 
be merely a nuisance to one person, may well prove 
disastrous to another, because of very different circum- 
stances. For instance, badly bitten nails may be, on the one 
hand, merely a source of mild displeasure to one's intimates, 
or, on the other hand a serious social disadvantage and even 
a barrier to some types of employment which would other- 
wise be open to one. 

There are a large number of mannerisms which are fairly 
common and as often as not are tolerated by the person 
concerned. Such mannerisms include peculiar gestures with 
the hands, stroking or patting a part of the body (especially 
the head and more particularly the hair), playing with an 
intimate piece of property such as one's spectacles, or 
merely fiddling with one's watch chain or coat button. 

45 



46 The Dangers of Being Human 

Tffis last is very widespread, especially with public 
speakers. (One is reminded of the story of the politician 
who invariably played with a button on his jacket while 
making a speech, whose eloquence was completely dammed 
up when a humorist cut the button off just before he was 
due to speak). 

These habits, yhile unconscious, or almost entirely so, 
can be brought under the control of the conscious part of 
the mind and therefore stopped, at any rate for the time 
being. 

There are other mannerisms however, which seem to 
elude the will altogether : these include the ' tics ' involun- 
tary twitchings of a small group of muscles, often in a part 
of the face. This may lead, for example, to an involuntary 
wink in one eye, repeated at fairly frequent intervals, which 
has, with members of the fair sex, led to embarrassing mis- 
understandings. It is in any case irritating to the sufferer, 
since one is conscious of the muscle movement and also of 
one's inability to control it. 

(It is interesting to note that, in the past, attempts have 
been made to cure these nervous twitchings either by ban- 
daging the affected part, or by severing the nerve to the 
group of muscles involved : in either case the result is likely 
to be the occurrence of another twitch in another part of 
the body). 

The eye wink may be more general and may lead to an 
excessive blinking of both eyes. Instances in which this 
occurred have come to my notice from time to time, and 
it is noteworthy that the affliction is most pronounced when 
the sufferer meets a stranger, or goes into strange company : 
as the newness of the situation wears off, so the symptom 
tends to subside. This is strongly indicative of the mental 
origin of the symptoms, and shows a connection with 
other afflictions like excessive blushing. 

This group also forms a link with the more serious dis- 
orders, the compulsions, obsessions and phobias. 

In a compulsion one is irresistibly driven to carry out a 
rather more complicated action than occurs in the tic. For 
example, Dr. Johnson had a compulsion to touch lamp- 



Headaches and Habits 47 

posts and articles of furniture, while Napoleon had a cc Ant- 
ing compulsion. One of my adult students c&nfessed to a 
counting compulsion: she frequently found herself quite 
needlessly and senselessly counting articles, for instance in 
putting pieces of coal on the fire! Even when the process 
came undpr conscious notice, she still found it difficult 
to resist the temptation to count. Yet another of these com- 
pulsions is that to use obscene language John Bunyan was 
so afflicted. (This is quite different of course, from the 
everyday use of swear words). This last compulsion can be 
very embarrassing, especially to so high-minded a person 
as Bunyan (and it is often this type of individual who is 
most likely to be affected in this way). 

These compulsions may be comparatively simple, as in 
the instances I have previously mentioned, or they may 
be more complicated, and may indeed become so 
elaborate as seriously to interfere with the individual's way 
of life. 

This happened in the case of a young girl who developed 
a compulsion to perform certain actions before retiring to 
bed, and so gradually evolved a long and complicated ritual, 
which had to be gone through before she could get into 
bed, so finally she had to start preparing for bed hours 
before she needed to sleep. 

Another common compulsion which, however, usually 
remains within the bounds of the merely irritating, is the 
compulsion to wash, either a part or the whole of the body. 
This last compulsion is particularly easy to rationalise, since 
all manner of excuses can usually be found for frequent 
washing, especially washing of the hands. When one recalls 
the symbolical meaning of such washing (as instanced by 
the gesture of Pontius Pilate, for example) it is not very 
difficult to guess at the secret springs for this particular 
behavioural abnormality. 

These compulsions link up again with the obsessions and 
phobias: since these are quite definite abnormalities, and 
will normally come to the notice of a clinic or an indivi- 
dual practitioner, I do not propose to deal with them here, 
but should like to point out roughly the difference between 



48 The Dangers of Being Human 

the *wo classes, the obsession, in which vent is continually 
being given to an unconscious urge, and the phobia, in 
which the effects of an unconscious urge are continually, 
and often very elaborately, being avoided. 

But even these abnormalities have their mild varieties, 
which may be more or less tolerated by the person con- 
cerned, although they may lead to considerable unhappi- 
ness. Such a mile! obsession afflicts the person who always 
feels that he or she is being ' put upon/ and being unfairly 
treated, especially by superiors. 

A mild phobia may take the form of complete avoidance 
of certain types of food, where the avoidance is not based 
either on unfamiliarity or on real distaste. (Any distaste for 
food probably arises from unconscious, i.e. repressed, 
emotional associations. There is an interesting examination 
of the problem in Professor Girindrashekhar Bose's book on 
Repression). 

A phobia which is very widespread indeed is the com- 
mon aversion to travelling by certain methods of con- 
veyance; the avoided means of transport range from tube 
trains and buses to aeroplanes. In two cases in my personal 
experience, the dislike of travelling by underground was 
combined with an equal dislike and avoidance of air travel, 
yet in both cases the individual so afflicted was quite happy 
in other means of transport, by sea or land. 

Whether this particular phobia is serious or not depends 
upon the individual concerned. In one of these cases it 
did not matter a great deal, since this woman was always 
able to avoid travel either by air or underground; but in the 
other case the phobia seriously interfered with the woman's 
way of living. Her husband was often abroad on business 
for comparatively long periods; her two sons were at a 
famous public school; and she admitted that she would 
have spent a great deal more time with her husband if she 
had been able to fly back to the country at short notice, 
should her children have needed her. There was therefore 
in this case a very real need for psychological treatment, to 
free her of her phobia and so release her to spend more of 
her time with her husband. She was, quite literally, in a 



Headaches and Habits 49 

psychological prison, the bars of which had been forged in 
her own unconscious mind. 

Stammering and stuttering are fairly common speech 
defects, occurring in all classes of society. It may not be 
realised that in the vast majority of these cases there is no 
sign of any physical deficiency, either in the mouth and 
tongue, in the face, or in the area of the brain which is 
known to be associated with our ability to speak. This is 
shown by the cases in which there is a serious impediment 
in everyday speech which disappears completely when the 
person afflicted begins to sing. The difficulty arises in almost 
every instance from repressed emotional complexes, which 
operate to prevent clear and fluent enunciation of speech. 

One case in my own experience illustrated this point very 
neatly, and concerned a girl whose native tongue was Eng- 
lish, although her mother was German. When speaking 
English the girl had a stutter which made conversation 
with her quite difficult and even painful. For a number of 
years she was a member of a class in Russian. She made 
such good progress with this difficult language that she 
very rapidly became the best student in the class and 
obtained a proficiency equal to university degree standard. 
The interesting point here is that she was able to speak 
Russian quickly and fluently, without a trace of stammer, 
or hesitation of any kind. It is therefore clear that her diffi- 
culties with English had no physical basis, since her speech 
organs were able to cope with another, foreign, and difficult 
language. 

It is rather interesting that speech defects seem to be 
more widespread among the aristocracy of this country than 
in any other social class. I am not aware of any research 
into causes for this unusual state of affairs, but I should be 
inclined to hazard a guess that any such research would 
reveal the seat of the trouble to be emotional conflicts aris- 
ing out of the methods of bringing up children at this 
particular social level; it is well known that the children 
of the aristocracy have, on the whole, a very different up- 
bringing from that of other English children; at the aristo- 
cratic level the young child is left in charge of a ' Nanny ' 
4 



50 The Dangers of Being Human 

almost from the time of birth, is then sent to a prep, school, 
and then, at a fairly early age, to a public school. Some, at 
any rate, of the public schools have their own ideas of the 
correct treatment to be applied to young human beings, 
methods the value of which many psychologists would beg 
leave to doubt. This particular problem is one which would 
well repay research. 

Other disabilities, which may occur either alone or in 
association with some of the disorders which I have dealt 
with in the preceding paragraphs, are themselves often 
associated with one another. 

Such disorders include attacks of dizziness, headaches 
and migraine. Some of these may have physical origins 
attacks of dizziness may arise from too rapid changes in 
altitude, and a headache may occur as the result of an 
accidental blow on the head (although many psychologists 
would suggest a psychological cause for the accident). But 
the majority of these attacks arise from no known cause, 
although, as in other instances I have quoted, it may be 
fairly easy to think of a cause after the event; this is 
another example of that process of rationalisation of which 
we twentieth-century humans are so fond. 

Attacks of dizziness are often associated with unconscious 
fears of ' moral falling ' the literature of psychological 
medicine abounds in such cases, and psychological methods 
alone will clear up such a condition satisfactorily, with a 
reasonable hope that it will not return. 

Headaches arise from a number of emotional sources, in- 
cluding, in particular, emotional conflicts and anger. Karen 
Horney gives a number of interesting examples of the latter 
in one of her books, and I have observed similar occur- 
rences both in my patients and myself. In my own case, 
nowadays, a very rapid analysis clears the headache more 
quickly and effectively than any drugs can do ! 

Karen Horney mentions in particular the instance of John, 
a good-natured business man, apparently happily married 
for five years, who suffered from diffuse inhibitions and in- 
feriority feelings and had developed occasional headaches 
which had no detectable physical basis. On one such occa- 



Headaches and Habits 5 1 

sion he with his wife and two friends had been to see a 
musical comedy. He was quite fit when he went to the 
theatre, but developed a serious headache during the per- 
formance. Rationalising, as we are so prone to do in such 
circumstances, he thought it might be due to being in a 
stuffy atmosphere, but realised that in fact this particular 
theatre was quite well ventilated. Then he thought that it 
was because it was a bad play : but again reflection showed 
that bad plays do not normally give one a headache. Indeed 
the play was not bad, but it was not so good as one by Shaw 
which he would have preferred to have seen. 

This last reflection gave the clue to the real cause of 
the headache, and a short analysis led John to realise that 
he had been overruled in the choice of the play to be 
seen, but had shown no obvious resentment at this. His 
anger at being frustrated had been repressed, and gave rise 
to the headache. As soon as this was recognised the head- 
ache disappeared. 

A few days later John woke up with a splitting headache. 
There had been a staff meeting the night before, and while 
half awake John thought the headache must be the result 
of too much drink. A fly started buzzing around him in 
an irritating manner, and, rather surprisingly, this made 
him furiously angry. Then he recalled the fragment of a 
dream, in which he had squashed two bed bugs with a 
piece of blotting paper which had many holes distributed 
over it in a regular pattern. 

Free association, to which John was accustomed by 
experience of analysis, led to his recalling cutting patterns 
out of tissue paper when he was a child, and in particular 
an occasion when his mother had failed to express appre- 
ciation of a pretty pattern : now the memory of the board 
meeting came in again and the fact that he had drawn cari- 
catures on the blotting paper of the other members of the 
board, of the Chairman and of his opponent in a discus- 
sion. A resolution had been put, to which John had raised 
only very weak objections, which were hardly noticed by 
the other members of the board, and the resolution was 
carried and now involved a great deal of extra work for 



52 The Dangers of Being Human 

JohL The letter now realised that he had repressed his 
anger at being overruled or rather unnoticed, and that the 
two bed bugs were the Chairman and his opponent. With 
this realisation his headache disappeared. 

On several other occasions headaches were analysed away 
by John, and on each occasion the underlying cause was 
anger which had been repressed. This particular cause of 
headaches in his f case links up very neatly with his special 
typd of personality. 

Other types of headache, as, for example, the ' sick head- 
ache/ are equally likely to have their real origins in mental 
conflict of some kind the sick headache quite typically 
denotes a revulsion against some course of action, or against 
association with some particular individual. I have myself 
met instances in which a wife actually experienced nausea 
whenever her husband was due to return home, and this 
in spite of the fact that the wife, as far as she knew, was 
quite fond of her husband. Her conscious and unconscious 
attitudes towards her husband varied greatly from one 
another. (This effect of mental conflict can account for 
many instances in which there is an apparent physical cause 
for sickness, as in eating some particular food.) 

Dr. Charles Berg has written some sentences which form 
an apt commentary upon such headaches. In discussing the 
use of phenobarbitone as a sedative, in treating a wide range 
of functional ills, from migraine to psychogenic disorders 
(excluding the epilepsies), he remarks that the results are so 
inconsistent that, while one may be satisfied with those cases 
in which relief is obtained by the administering of these 
drugs, the whole position is very unsatisfactory from a 
scientific point of view, and he suggests that we may be 
justified in wondering whether mental causes are not at 
least as important as physical causes in this type of illness. 

I myself would suggest that, while the presence of a 
physical cause ' may sometimes be necessary for the pro- 
duction of a particular type of illness, it is the mental state 
of a person which determines whether or not an illness will 
ensue; but I shall discuss this concept more fully in chapter 
nine. 



Headaches and Habits 53 

Dr. Berg illustrates his point by special f reference to 
one of his own patients, who was being treated with 
half a grain of gardenal, night and morning. One day he 
was given a supply of luminal tablets in place of the usual 
gardenal, and the patient complained soon after that his 
condition was getting worse since taking the luminal. He 
was then assured that ' gardenal ' and ' luminal ' were 
different names for the same substance, phenobarbitone, 
but he still protested that he obtained relief from garaenal 
but none from luminal, and his condition bore out his con- 
tention. He was then put back on to gardenal, and regained 
his normal state of health ! This would suggest that in his 
case at least phenobarbitone was no more than a placebo. 

There is another large group of diseases which is being 
recognised to an even greater degree, even by general 
practitioners, as having an origin in our mental conflicts. 
This group includes a wide range of disorders usually 
classified as skin diseases. 

These may show a wide variety of different symptoms, 
and may appear to be quite distinct disease entities, and at 
one time it was thought that each such skin disease had 
as its cause a typical organism or, if one such could not be 
discovered, a typical deficiency in the blood, in particular, 
some form of vitamin deficiency. 

Some of these diseases may indeed have physical causes, 
but there is an ever growing number of cases which fail 
to respond to treatment with drugs or ointments, and are 
then turned over to the psychiatrist for treatment. 

Such cases may exhibit only small localised patches or 
eruption on the skin, whether in the form of rash or pimples 
or other eruption, or the affection may be distributed over 
large areas or even the whole of the body. In these instances 
both the type of eruption and the position on the body 
will often be found to have a close association with the type 
of mental conflict which is the real cause of the trouble; 
the skin disease stands, as it were, as a symbol for the 
conflict. 

Disease of the face it may be a localised affection of the 



54 The Dangers of Being Human 

eyei, or ears, or mouth, or disease of the hands, will be 
seen to have an obvious symbolic meaning. In other in- 
stances the symbolism may be more complex, and it may 
be necessary for the psychotherapist to be especially on his 
guard against accepting the more obvious symbolic mean- 
ing of such an outbreak. 

In one case in my own experience, a man had a very 
marked rash, which was also very irritating, on the skin 
on ihe inside of the upper part of both thighs. In spite of 
the application of all kinds of lotions and ointments, the 
rash continued to spread, and looked very like an infec- 
tion by a micro-organism of some kind. There was in fact 
no clear source of infection, such as one might have sus- 
pected, and it was then considered that the rash had a 
psychological origin. 

Here, however, the more obvious symbolism of guilt 
because of irregular sexual behaviour, could not be enter- 
tained, because of the man's particular personality struc- 
ture. In fact, the cause was anxiety associated with research 
work at a university and the reason for the appearance of 
the rash on the places actually affected was the close 
association for this man between all anxiety and the 
original anxiety arising from the castration complex, of 
which Freud was the first to give us a description. 

I think that Freud was mistaken in holding that we all 
suffer from a castration complex, but there are certainly 
instances, of which the case I have just discussed is one, in 
which this particular complex plays an important role. 

However this may be, a short analysis, and full realisa- 
tion of the origins of the skin complaint in this case, caused 
the rash to disappear c as if by magic/ and now eighteen 
months after the original outbreak there are only very 
occasional recurrences of very small patches of rash, so 
small as to be hardly discernible, and these are always 
found to be associated with some special degree of anxiety, 
and realisation of this causes a rapid disappearance of the 
rash. 

As I have indicated, all these disorders, which have 
more or less obvious symptoms, will be found to be within 



Headaches and Habits 55 

the province of the psychotherapist, and more and more 
of them are, in fact, being sent by the general! practitioner 
for psychiatric treatment by a specialist, whether in a clinic, 
hospital or private practice. 

Mention may also be made here of the general effects 
of mental ^attitude upon physical well-being, in particular 
upon stance and deportment. I have already quoted Pro- 
fessor Burt's description of the typical neurasthenic, and 
would mention Groddeck's view that all our peculiaritijs of 
stance and gait have a psychological explanation, that, in 
fact, our bodies symbolise our minds. 

This view is certainly borne out by my own experience, 
and it follows that the improved mental well-being which 
results from the practice of psychotherapy should produce 
equally striking effects with regard to general physical well- 
being, and this indeed is often found to be the case. I 
intend to deal with this topic more fully in a later chapter. 



Five 

Alcoholism and Drug Addiction 

WE NOW turn to a small group of problems of behaviour 
which are much more serious than those of which I have 
written so far. Indeed, the problems of the person given to 
excessive drinking or to excessive smoking, or to taking 
drugs, are so serious as to merit being placed along with 
the extreme psychological abnormalities with which I dealt 
briefly in Chapter Two. But that would take them outside 
the scope of this book, and I wish to deal briefly with 
them, because those suffering from addiction to alcohol 
or drugs differ in one important respect from individuals 
afflicted with schizophrenia, paranoia, etc. 

The latter, once the affliction has made a certain amount 
of progress, are forced by their condition to take psycho- 
logical treatment, whether in a clinic or mental institution 
or by a private psychotherapist : in fact, the relatives of the 
sufferer may well take steps to force him to undergo treat- 
ment. 

But, with rare exceptions, the alcoholic or drug addict is 
left to his or her own devices, and does not realise that there 
is something seriously wrong, with which the psycho- 
therapist may be able to deal if he is consulted before the 
condition has been allowed to continue for too long. (The 
reader will remember the young * incipient alcoholic ' whom 
I have mentioned earlier, who was sent for treatment and 
has escaped from the dangers of alcohol). 

I am therefore writing this chapter in the hope that some 
of those who have taken refuge in drink or drugs will be 

56 



Alcoholism and Drug Addiction 57 

made to realise that they do need psychological treatment, 
and tljat a psychotherapist may be able to h3lp them. But 
I must emphasise that, at the present stage of development 
of psychological medicine, drink and drug addicts present 
some of the most difficult of all problems to the psycho- 
therapist. t 

There is at least one additional reason which should 
carry a good deal of weight in prompting these addicts 
to seek psychological help, and that is the consideration 
of economy. Most behavioural problems do not involve 
any great dislocation of one's personal economy, but 
excessive drinking, or excessive smoking, or the taking of 
drugs, are all very expensive, and may seriously interfere 
with one's personal budget and so with that of one's family. 

Drink and tobacco are expensive because of high taxa- 
tion, and drugs are expensive because they are prohibited 
and so have to be obtained through illegal channels. In rny 
own personal experience, I know of several people who 
spend 700 or more a year on personal drinking. It is, of 
course, easy to spend a great deal more, on entertaining 
large groups of people; but I am here speaking of the 
' solitary soak/ who spends such sums on his or her personal 
drinking, gains no happiness in the process, and is steadily 
ruining his health. I am not here dealing with the moderate 
drinker or smoker (I myself both drink and smoke a little) 
but with the person who takes alcohol and tobacco in large 
quantities every day, and cannot do without them in any 
circumstances. 

I used the expression ' taking refuge ' in drink or drugs, 
and it is precisely this that the individual so afflicted is 
doing. There is an attempt to escape from one's personal 
problems, and the attempt at escape may be conscious, or 
entirely unconscious. It may sometimes begin by being 
conscious, and then become an irresistible habit. Quite fre- 
quently the addict does not realise that there is any con- 
flict or problem; he merely knows that he feels better 
under the influence of his particular drug (since alcohol 
and nicotine are themselves drugs). 

Drugs vary considerably in their effects on the human 



58 The Dangers of Being Human 

organism: sojne may be taken as a temporary stimulant, 
while others may be taken for specific purposes, as for 
example in the Middle East heroin is frequently taken in 
order to prolong sexual activity by delaying orgasm in the 
male (this leads in the end to impotence). 

But all the drugs under consideration in this chapter have 
in common the effect of putting out of action the highest 
centres in the bra'm, which normally exercise a restraining 
influence on behaviour. The conflict between the effects of 
these centres (which are the physiological counterparts of 
the Freudian Super Ego) and the lower centres (which in 
turn correspond to Id impulses instinctual drives) leads in 
many instances to a state af acute mental tension which is 
felt by the individual as anxiety. 

This anxiety can soon become insupportable, and is felt 
as having a stranglehold on one's life. (Gerhard Adler has 
pointed out that our words anxiety and anguish are both 
derived from the Latin ' angere/ to throttle or choke). 

An obvious and apparently simple way to get rid of this 
feeling of anxiety is to put the higher brain centres out of 
action, and this can be done quickly and effectively by 
alcohol, nicotine and other narcotic drugs. The sufferer 
thus escapes from the anxiety, and does not realise that 
the anxiety is only a symptom, of which he has rid him- 
self, while leaving the original, psychological, conflict un- 
affected. Hence, the drinker or drug addict has always to 
be taking his drug, often in ever increasing quantities. 

It has been pointed out that the drunkard in particular 
is usually more or less remote from reality and is turned 
in upon himself, living in a world of illusion. It is con- 
sequently often very difficult to make contact with him if 
one is oneself living in a * real ' world, and this explains 
why the attempts of well-meaning relatives and friends to 
1 reform ' the drunkard usually meet with complete lack of 
success, and may even make the condition of the sufferer 
worse rather than better. 

With all conditions in which a human being lives in a 
worlH. different from the world of everyday reality, there 
exists this difficulty of establishing mental contact, and this 



Alcoholism and Drug Addiction 59 

makes it essential that anyone who attempts such contact 
should have either special training or personal experience of 
the actual state, or both. This is true in a minor degree 
when we deal with young children who have not yet entered 
the world of adult reality, and much more so in dealing 
with adults who, having at one time been in the real world, 
have turned away from it again for one reason or another. 

This also explains the success of group therapy, and the 
partial success of such organisations as Alcoholics Anony- 
mous, of which every member must in accordance with the 
rules at one time or another have been an alcoholic, and in 
consequence have had experience of the condition with 
which new members are trying to cope : the other members 
can sympathise, in the best sense of the word, with the 
mental state of the new member, and so can make contact 
with him and may in many instances be of real assistance. 

Unfortunately, this fails to effect a complete cure in some 
cases, and then there is a history of complete abstinence 
followed by a relapse and renewed bouts of heavy drinking. 
(It is noteworthy that this alternation also shows alternation 
of personality traits, rather after the pattern of some other 
mental disorders in which there is more or less complete 
dissociation of personality into two or more parts). 

It is such cases that the psychotherapist is called upon 
to treat, and his task would be made much easier if the 
' flight to alcohol ' could be regarded at an early stage as a 
warning sign that things have gone wrong and, if advice 
is not taken, will inevitably become worse and worse. 

The psychotherapist is able to treat such cases because 
he too can sympathise with the mental state of the drinker, 
in this instance because of his training and, what is more 
important, native insight. (Theodor Reik has remarked, 
quite rightly, that without this insight, all technique is 
futile, though training has to be added to native ability). 

Even so, special measures are sometimes necessary to 
achieve any real degree of success in dealing with the 
habitual drinker, for, as I have emphasised several times, 
there is need of co-operation between patient and p*av,d- 
tioner, and it is precisely this lack of desire to co-operate 



60 The Dangers of Being Human 

which makeSf so many drinkers such difficult problems. 
From the point of view of the person affected, drink and 
drugs are a successful solution of their problems, compared 
with the solution via a neurosis, and so in many cases the 
addict at least is quite happy in his or her state, at any 
rate as long as the effect of the particular chosen drug 
lasts. 

It is therefore* necessary in some cases to establish a 
period of co-operation between patient and therapist, a 
period of sobriety, and this can sometimes be achieved by 
drugs such as antabuse. 

To quote from an article printed by The New Republic 
of New York and reproduced by the Manchester Guardian: 
* (Antabuse) has the extraordinary faculty of creating a pro- 
found physiological turmoil if, while antabuse is in the 
system, the patient attempts to drink, the interdiction effect 
begins almost at once and may last for four or five days. 
Antabuse is not a cure; when the effect wears off the 
alcoholic, left to his own devices, will probably relapse. It 
has the advantage, however, of making possible a sober 
interval during which he can be helped both physiologically 
and psychologically. The second of these is more important 
than the first. For a real cure it is highly desirable that 
the individual should find out what is the frustration, 
anxiety, or insecurity (or group of them) that has caused 
him to seek to escape into alcohol-induced unreality. He 
will begin to be well when, voluntarily, he will select a 
way of life physical, emotional and social that precludes 
the compelling need of such an anaesthetic/ 

The article from which this paragraph is taken deals with 
the Compulsive Drinker in America, and is based on the 
work at the Yale Centre of Alcoholic Studies at New Haven, 
but the greater part of the contents of the article can be 
transferred to the drinker in this country. 

The article continues : ' Because of the work of the Yale 

Clinic we now know for the first time something of what 

the typical American alcoholic is like, based on a study of 

~mr\r* than two thousand of them. The common conception 

that the dipsomaniac is a ' Skid Row ' character turns out 



Alcoholism and Drug Addiction 61 

to be quite wrong. More than two-thirds haye jobs which 
they fyave held through a period of years, more than half 
of them are married and living at home; 80 per cent are 
under SO, and 25 per cent are under 35. An amazingly large 
number of really important positions in government, busi- 
ness and the professions are being held at the moment by 
men who, through their own confession, are alcoholics. 

' How is the compulsive drinker to be lestored to health? 
As already suggested, the most important matter is that 
he should recognise the need to do something constructive 
about his drinking problem. It is not enough that he shall, 
at some given moment, want to stop : almost all alcoholics 
at various times and for longer or shorter periods have 
wanted to stop drinking, and most of them have done so. 
This completely negative response is insufficient (except in 
some very early cases, under special conditions). The alco- 
holic will not be safe until he has faced up to the whole 
problem of why he began drinking in an uncontrolled 
way. 

1 What is needed in general is fairly obvious. We need 
much greater research into the physiology and psychology 
of alcoholic addiction. Is it true, for instance, that there is 
little alcoholism in Jewish or Italian groups, and much 
among the Irish and Scandinavians? We need really effec- 
tive public education about the dangers. In particular we 
need wider recognition that this is an illness, not a moral 
obliquity. The few industrial firms that have set about 
reclaiming the problem drinkers among their own em- 
ployees have set a fine example of success and one that 
can with profit be followed by many firms throughout the 
country.' 

The magnitude of the problem in the United States can 
be gauged by some figures given earlier in the same article. 
' About Four million Americans are in the group whose 
drinking habits are beyond their control : half of them are 
in industry. Every working day 170,000 people are off the 
job for this reason alone, representing an annual loss of 
45 million working days and at least one billion Hollars 
in wages. The uncontrolled drinker also loses more time 



62 The Dangers of Being Human 

per year than, the normal individual because of illness only 
indirectly connected with his addiction. And alcoholics have 
two or three times as many accidents as normal individuals; 
although they are only 4 per cent of the industrial working 
force it has been estimated that they cause 10 per cent of 
the accidents, involving a loss to industry of perhaps an 
additional three million working days/ 

There are no published data in connection with the same 
problem in the British Isles,* but my observation leads me 
to think that in this country too the compulsive drinker 
constitutes a serious problem, both in industry and, what is 
perhaps more serious in the long run, at what are now 
called the ' highest levels/ both in industry, and in politics 
and the professions. 

I have devoted the greater part of the present chapter to 
the problem of the compulsive drinker, since alcohol is one 
of the two most widely used drugs, and is of the two the 
more dangerous, for as far as we know the effects of 
tobacco are mainly physical. Indeed, the effects of smoking 
are apparently so gradual that it is doubtful whether many 
people will turn to the psychologist for assistance in cut- 
ting down their consumption of tobacco. 

Nevertheless the excessive smoker does constitute a 
serious social problem, for his addiction to tobacco reveals 
psychological stresses, the painful effects of which the 
smoking of tobacco helps to disguise. Even the untrained 
observer, if he watches carefully, can see abundant evidence 
of mental strain in the heavy smoker, either in his gestures, 
manner of sitting and standing, or in his speech, or in some 
other aspect of his behaviour, and the trained psychologist 
can see much more besides. 

The type of problem from which the smoker is trying to 
escape is probably much the same as those which drive the 
drinker to seek solace in alcohol, and should be tackled in 
much the same way by the psychologist. The problem of 

Dr. G. K. SELBORNE, writing on this subject in THE FAMILY 
DOCTOR for November, 1953, states that in England, in 1951, it 
was estimated that severe chronic alcoholics numbered 100,000, and 
. -~'.- .Linkers 400,000. This is about a third of the incidence in 
the U.S.A., and a fifth of that in France, Chile, and Switzerland. 



Alcoholism and Drug Addiction 63 

treatment is made simpler in the case of the tobacco addict, 
since \}is drug does not help him to turn away from reality 
quite as readily as does alcohol. 

The physical effects of nicotine on the nervous system are 
different from the effect of alcohol, but it is worth noting 
that, when applied direct to a nerve fibre, nicotine paralyses 
the nerve rapidly and effectively, and completely blocks 
the transmission of any nerve impulses. There are prob- 
ably other serious effects of nicotine on the human body, 
such as disease of the respiratory system, of the heart, and 
as a probable cause of cancer of the mouth, throat, and 
lungs. But these are primarily physical effects, although 
they may have quite striking psychological accompaniments, 
as in some cases of heart disease. 

The problem of the way in which nicotine acts in help- 
ing to relieve temporarily mental stress has received even 
less attention than the similar problem with regard to the 
effects of alcohol, and both of these would amply reward 
any psychologist who undertook research in this field. It is 
important to realise that smoking to excess is just as much 
a symptom of some mental trouble as is heavy drinking or 
the various peculiarities of behaviour with which I have 
dealt in earlier chapters. 

I mention this point specifically because, in the case of 
addiction to tobacco more than in any other, there is a 
strong temptation to regard the actual heavy consumption 
of tobacco as being the real problem, which one has to try 
to solve. This is not the case, and, as I have remarked, 
this habit must be tackled in much the same way as others; 
that is, the psychotherapist must regard the smoking as a 
symptom, and try to discover the underlying mental stresses 
and conflicts which are the real problem and which give 
rise to the flight to tobacco. 

This point was illustrated rather dramatically by a case 
which was brought to my notice. A young husband who 
was a very heavy smoker wanted to be cured of this habit, 
for financial reasons; he underwent a course of hypnotic 
treatment, which was aimed at abolishing the p^/a-incr 
habit. This the treatment achieved, but the result was a 



64 The Dangers of Being Human 

marked deter loration in the personality of the patient, who 
became quite impossibly unpleasant to his wife and 
children. 

It is apparent that here there was a personality disorder, 
which would probably have resulted in unpleasant neurotic 
behaviour if it had not been for the effects of tobacco; when 
the latter were removed by superficial treatment, the per- 
sonality disorder asserted itself. 

A correct therapeutic method would have ignored the 
actual smoking habit as such, regarding it as no more than 
a guiding symptom, and would have concentrated on deal- 
ing with the inner mental conflicts. When these had been 
brought to light and so resolved, the symptoms of heavy 
smoking would have disappeared, and no other symptoms 
would have arisen to take its place, as happened in the more 
superficial treatment by hypnosis. 

I have mentioned in Chapter One the fact that many 
psychotherapists are doubtful about the use of hypnosis as 
a method of treatment for psychological disorders, and some 
practitioners are extremely hostile to it. Certainly it is a 
method to be used with great caution, and only by qualified 
psychotherapists, who have a wide knowledge of other 
aspects of psychology and psychological medicine. As Dr. 
W. Russell Brain, President of the Royal College of Physi- 
cians, pointed out recently, in a letter to The Times, much 
still remains to be learned even about the therapeutic possi- 
bilities of hypnosis and research on this problem can only 
be safely carried out by properly qualified practitioners. 

On the other hand, hypnotism can be useful if its practice 
is based on adequate knowledge, and I should not like to 
see it banned altogether. It would be sufficient safeguard 
for the public if its practice, and that of all psychothera- 
peutic methods, was controlled in the same way as is the 
practice of medicine, surgery and dentistry in this country; 
a suitable body for the exercising of such control already 
exists in the British Psychological Society. 

The addiction to other drugs, such as cocaine, opium, 
ai*J Iiaohish presents a problem somewhat different from 
those of alcohol and tobacco. In many ways the drug 



Alcoholism and Drug Addiction 65 

addict's case is more closely allied to that ot }he confirmed 
drunkard, but unfortunately it is rather more difficult to 
catch the drug addict in the early stages of his addiction, 
as he is likely to take considerable care not to be found out 
by his associates, both for the social opprobrium attached 
to drug taking and also because obtaining these drugs 
always involves recourse to illegal methods. 

The real reasons for taking these drugs are the same 
as the reasons for the flight to drink or tobacco, although 
the morphia addict, for example, may have in the early 
stages an apparent excuse in terms of persistent pain, such 
as headache. But, as I have shown in the quotations from 
Karen Horney, the headache itself is no more than a symp- 
tom of mental conflict, and the real but unconscious reason 
for taking the drug is the desire to avoid, at least tempor- 
arily, the discomfort attached to the mental conflict. 

This the drug can help the addict to achieve, but the 
drug does not deal with the real cause of the trouble. This 
can only be attacked by psychological methods, at the hands 
of a qualified practitioner. Others of these drugs are taken 
for the effect of excitement they produce in the addict, 
who may therefore advance the excuse that he or she 
wishes to escape from the boredom of life. 

Such a statement itself betokens a serious lack of mental 
well-being, but a discussion of this problem would enlarge 
this book considerably and would be outside its scope. 
Suffice it to say that resort to all drugs, whether those 
popularly referred to as drugs, or alcohol and tobacco, 
should be regarded as a sure indication that all is not well 
with the mental state of the individual concerned, and that 
the advice of a qualified psychotherapist should be sought 
at the earliest possible moment. 



Si* 

The Dangers of Being Born 

IN THE present chapter I want to deal with the earliest of 
all the dangers which attend the human being, those, in 
fact, which are present at his or her entry into this world. 
If the reader is a woman, she may protest that she is only 
too well aware of the dangers which childbirth involves and 
that these are the province of the gynaecologist and obstetri- 
cian, and no business of the psychologist. 

I have, however, insisted throughout this book that the 
physical and the mental are so interwoven that one cannot 
profitably attempt to separate them in looking at a living 
organism, and especially at a human being; I have also 
held that the attempt to separate these two aspects of our 
existence has led to some of the mistakes into which medi- 
cine has fallen. 

Let us agree, at any rate, that the act of giving birth, 
at least in the civilised Western world, involves dangers 
both to mother and child, although these have been very 
much reduced by recent advances in medicine. Yet the 
situation seems even now to be onet of stress to both the 
participants. In these circumstances, it is not difficult to 
see that the mere fact of this stress may have an emotional 
effect on both mother and child, and that, if the stress is 
very great, the emotional effect of birth may be profound. 

Psychologists who do not belong to any of the analyti- 
cal schools have emphasised these emotional effects of 
childbirth, and the fact that there may be some connection 
between the manner of birth and the later personality of 

66 



The Dangers of Being Bom 67 

the child. That this may be so was borne out *a a statement 
which was made to me not long ago by the matron of a 
large hospital. 

She had had a good deal of experience in maternity work, 
and she told me that she could in fact detect the differences 
in the personality of a child resulting from its manner of 
birth. She said that there was a range of types from the 
quiet, to the noisy and active, child, and tnat, in particular, 
children born by Caesarian section showed marked differ- 
ences of behaviour from other children. 

It is not possible to check the statement which I have 
just quoted, although it would be interesting to carry out 
some research on this point; but it is interesting to note 
that quite early in his writings Freud mentions the psycho- 
logical importance of birth. 

He had been interested in some of the different types 
of neurosis, and in particular had singled out anxiety 
neurosis for special attention. (I shall be dealing with some 
effects of this neurosis, in a later chapter.) He found that 
this type of anxiety was quite common among his patients, 
and then asked himself what was the factor which must be 
common to so many people, to produce so many cases of 
this type. 

Freud replied to this question, in 1910, ' Birth is in fact 
the first of all dangers to life, as well as the prototype of 
all the later ones we fear; and this experience has probably 
left behind it that expression of emotion which we call 
anxiety. Thus it was that Macduff of the Scottish legend, 
who was not born of his mother but " ripp'd from her 
womb ", knew no fear/ 

Freud was so sure of this that he repeated the statement 
in later papers and, writing in 1933, states, * We suggested 
that the event which leaves behind this affective trace was 
the process of birth, in which the modification of the heart's 
action and of respiration, which are characteristic of 
anxiety, served a useful purpose. The first anxiety of all 
would thus have been a toxic one/ 

The suggestion that neurotic anxiety has its c.l^Ir. :- 
the experience of birth is usually met with incredulous 



68 The Dangers of Being Human 

derision, wht^ a person new to psychoanalysis first hears 
it made, and even now many analysts would doubt whether 
there is a connection between birth and later anxiety. On 
the other hand, one leading psychoanalyst, Otto Rank, 
seized upon this idea and made it the cornerstone of his 
own theory and system of analysis, although Freud him- 
self declined to accept this extreme view. 

Without taking any definite attitude as to the relative im- 
portance of this experience, which marks such a dramatic 
change in our environment, we can see that it must have 
some effect on later development; and anyone who has been 
present at a difficult childbirth must have been struck by 
the dangers attendant upon our entry into this world, and 
anyone with imaginative sympathy can place themselves in 
the position of the new being struggling to come to birth, 
and can realise what a tremendous experience it must be. 

It is interesting to note that some support for this view 
of Freud's, concerning the connection between birth and 
anxiety, comes from the information which we have con- 
cerning the growth of the Indo- Germanic group of lan- 
guages, of which ours is one. The parent language of this 
group is Sanskrit, and a single Sanskrit root gave us, 
through classical Greek and Latin, our words ' anxiety ', 
' strangulation ', ' choking ', ' a narrow place ', ' quinsy ', 
and ' vagina '. It seems reasonable to suggest that language, 
as it develops, gives expression to common human experi- 
ence, often in an apparently unconscious manner, and that 
Freud was stating in specific terms, with a wealth of evi- 
dence from clinical observations, what humanity in one line 
of development had always dimly felt. 

But here we may pause to consider a question which is 
often raised by those who object to this particular Freudian 
concept. Why is it, we may ask, that not all peoples at all 
times have suffered from anxiety neurosis, as we appear 
to do? ... since all men, with the exception of the few 
MacdufFs, have bejn born of woman. 

The answer, I chink, is that not all men in all cultures at 
e* ro ry ~:riod of history have suffered the same experiences 
at birth, and that we must restrict this concept of Freud's, 



The Dangers of Being Born 69 

as perhaps we may have to restrict all his co .cepts, to our 
own culture at a particular period of historical development. 

I should like to put forward here the suggestion that our 
attitude of mind towards the fact of birth influences that 
fact, and so influences the experience of the child who is 
being born. The influence may indeed go back further than 
this, to the antenatal period, as Dr. J. D. Sutherland sug- 
gested some time ago in a Presidential Address at the Royal 
Society of Medicine. He was referring to a number of 
reports on this point which had appeared during 1950 and 
1952. 

In our own community our entry into this world is hard 
because we expect it to be hard; it produces anxiety because 
it is attended by anxiety. (This is the vicious circle which 
is typical of all these psycho-physical relationships: you 
will remember my friend the doctor, who was stricken down 
with coronary thrombosis.) In other cultures, in which birth 
is easy and is taken naturally, anxiety neurosis may lack 
this ideal point of departure. 

I am not saying that men in other cultures do not suffer 
from anxiety; they may well do so, but the reason for it 
will be different and it will probably affect only a small 
proportion of the population, whereas with us, as I shall 
show in a later chapter, this type of anxiety is almost uni- 
versal. It may be the case that the position is changing, 
even in our own community, as we alter our attitude to- 
wards birth itself. 

Here we may bear in mind the work of Grantley Dick 
Read in banishing many of the terrors of childbirth, thus 
making childbirth easy and almost painless. It could very 
well be the case that children born in these circumstances 
would have a healthier personality than those who enter 
this world in terror and pain. 

It is now almost twenty years since Read made his sug- 
gestion that the pains of labour are caused through fear. 
He pointed out that the nerve pathways to the neck of the 
womb connect it with the nerve centres which are brought 
into action whenever we experience emotion. These nerve 
centres are more or less outside the control of the conscious 



70 The Da igers of Being Human 

mind, of thi ' will ', and Read suggested that fear acted 
through the main emotional centres, and through the nerves 
from those, to cause the neck of the womb to contract and 
the muscles in the walls of the womb to fail to act as they 
should. 

To prevent this from happening, Read recommended a 
psychological training lasting all the way through the period 
of pregnancy. Daring this period the mother was given 
information as to the mechanism I have outlined above, and 
psychological insight into the facts of childbirth, and was 
taught how to relax completely. By these methods Read 
was able to achieve results which justified his contention 
thai in eight or nine cases out of ten, of normal births, pain 
can be almost entirely avoided. 

Much more recently, an American doctor, using Read's 
methods, has reported on the results of 168 births, in which 
he delivered the women personally, without the assistance 
of a resident. Of these women, 106 had already had a child 
before, and nine out of ten of these women had no pain at 
all in the first stage and only a very brief second stage. 62 
of the 168 women were having their first child, and, of 
these 62, 48 had only very little pain during the first stage. 

These are very remarkable results, even if we assume 
that every one of these women had, so to speak, learnt her 
lesson well during the period of pregnancy. In actual fact, 
it was probably the case that not all of them learnt equally 
well how to relax, and, if we are able in the future to teach 
all expectant mothers to achieve this, we may be well on 
the way to banishing pain from childbirth altogether. 

It is my own experience that women vary very consider- 
ably in their ability to relax (so do men, but I am not con- 
cerned with my own sex here!). As the method takes a 
great deal of the time and attention of the doctor concerned 
with the antenatal training, it is likely that the American 
referred to above was not able to train all the women 
satisfactorily. 

Even so, the re r alts which he achieved are truly remark- 
able, anH promise well for the future. The methods are 
being used more and more extensively, and should become 



The Dangers of Bein^ Born 71 

one part of a major scheme to achieve more oalanced per- 
sonalities in the community in which we live. Incidentally, 
one of my own students tells me of an old Afrikaner doctor 
in South Africa, who has used these methods for a long 
time, with equally startling results. I do not know whether 
he had read of Grantley Dick Read's work, or whether, as 
sometimes happens, he had arrived at the same conclusions 
independently. 

It should perhaps be mentioned that a great deal of non- 
sense has been written about the connection between pain 
in childbirth and the maternal instinct. Some doctors, both 
of medicine and of theology, have stated that if a mother 
does not experience pain during the birth of her child, then 
she will not love the child with all her maternal instinct. 

I am afraid that in this argument the theology governs 
the medicine (and the psychology), and there seems to lurk 
behind this statement the idea of original sin, with some 
additions from St. Paul's views on women; it is, in any 
case, assumed that there is such a thing as maternal instinct 
in all women, which is only awaiting to be aroused, and I 
have pointed out elsewhere* that we cannot assume that 
the instincts are as well defined in men and women aa 
they are in the lower animals; instincts are much more fluid 
in human beings than in other animals, and this may be one 
of the chief differences between us and those creatures. 

However this may be, there is no evidence that the 
mother who experiences most pain during the birth of her 
child is the mother who loves her child most deeply. Read 
himself has replied to these criticisms, that ' Pain has no 
biological value in normal labour, because it is not present. 
Pain in labour is a pathological, not a physiological pheno- 
menon ... It is not pain in labour which " unlocks the door 
of mother love ".' The critics might have done well to have 
looked to anthropology for guidance, and asked themselves 
whether the mothers in primitive tribes, who experience 
little or no pain in childbirth, fail to 1 ove their children. 

It should be noted that the criticisms which I have men- 

' The Death Instinct and Western Man ' : Tht Hibbvrt Journal, 
July, 1953. 



72 The Da* gers of Being Human 

tioned here a. ^ directed just as much against the use of 
analgesia in childbirth as against Read's methods, and are 
just as mistaken in that connection as in this. I should be 
prepared to wager that those who wish to preserve the pain 
in childbirth are themselves the victims of a complex, which 
results in sadistic tendencies towards others. 

From the above remarks it will be realised that the 
mother can affect the mind of the child in four ways, and 
that she therefore has four opportunities to produce anxiety 
(or ' worry ') in the child. The first, and most subtle, and 
most debatable, way, is, by some means unknown, to affect 
directly the mind of the embryo in her womb. 

For some years it has been stated by medical practitioners 
that there is no evidence that the mind of the mother affects 
in this direct manner the mind of the unborn child. This 
attitude was adopted in a praiseworthy effort to get rid of 
the superstitions concerning the effects of everyday events 
on the child's mind or body, such as the production of 
' strawberry ' birthmarks by a desire of the mother for 
strawberries out of season. 

But, as so often happens in scientific controversy, the 
baby was thrown out with the bathwater. There is now 
plenty of evidence that minds of human beings can affect 
one another directly, and it would not be surprising if the 
mind of the mother should have some effect on the mind 
of the child she bears; but this is a matter on which a great 
deal of research will have to be carried out before we can 
arrive at any conclusions. 

Whether or not there is this direct effect, there is 
secondly, the evidence which I have outlined above as to the 
value of a right attitude of mind on the part of the mother 
during the period of pregnancy. This should become more 
and more a matter of routine as time goes on, and as greater 
numbers of practitioners adopt the methods advocated by 
Read. 

In the earlier star js of this transition in methods of prac- 
tice, it may reqj" : .e more practitioners for a given number 
of patient, out techniques will probably be developed for 
economising the time of the doctor, while achieving the 



The Dangers of Bein L Born 73 

same desirable results for the patient. I hav* in mind here 
the simpler methods of analysis which I hope to develop 
for other patients as opportunity offers. 

It follows from what I have said that the third way in 
which the mother can affect the mind of her child arises 
from her attitude while she is carrying it. If she adopts the 
more usual attitude towards childbirth, that it is a time of 
pain and danger, then she will probably have the type of 
birth which she expects, and the child will suffer accord- 
ingly. The child will fight its way into the world, with diffi- 
culty and itself experiencing pain, and will receive the full 
effects of the shock which such a birth can give it. 

If the mother is cared for according to the tenets of Read 
and his associates, then the story will, in nine cases out of 
ten, be quite different; and I suggest with every confidence 
that we shall, in time, discover that the difference between 
these two birth experiences will be found to result in very 
great differences in personality between the children who 
have the experiences. 

Fourthly, the influence of the mind and particularly of 
the unconscious mind, of the mother upon the mind of her 
child does not, of course, cease when the child is born. 
Indeed, most people would still argue that it is at this point 
that it first begins, although I have shown good reasons for 
doubting this view. We would all agree, however, that at 
this stage at least the mother influences the mind of the 
child in a very definite manner. 

If the child is a girl, it will at once be apparent that the 
mother, who associates in her mind the fact of pain with 
the fact of childbirth, will be likely to pass on that attitude 
to her daughter. This will probably be by actual talking, 
even when this does not take the form, as it sometimes 
does, of actual warnings about the terrors of childbirth. 
The mere discussion, within hearing of the child, of her 
own experiences, with, as often as not, dramatic emphasis 
of harrowing details will be more than sufficient to implant 
the undesirable picture in the child's mi A .^ 

Even if care is taken to avoid this kind ot L.fuence, by 
bearing in mind how quickly even the very young child 



74 The Da igers of Being Human 

can pick up ; nformatioa from its elders, there is still the 
possibility that the child will * catch ' the emotional attitude 
of her parent with regard to this as well as other matters. 

I have mentioned elsewhere the observation of Mead 
concerning the passing on of tabus without the use of 
spoken words, and I am sure that this kind of ' teaching ' 
often operates in the community in which we live. In any 
case, the child wi 1 ! most likely pick up her attitude towards 
childbirth from other members of that community, so that 
it behoves every one of us to adopt a sensible attitude 
in this matter. 

It will be seen from what I have said that the psychologist 
plays two roles in our society with regard to this as to other 
aspects of our individual and social behaviour. In the first 
place, he investigates the ways in which his fellow humans 
behave, and sets forth the facts, often in a way which, as 
I have said before, is at variance with ' common sense '. 

In this matter of childbirth, common sense stated that 
pain, often prolonged and exhausting pain, was inexorably 
bound up with the act of giving birth, and this view has 
been generally adopted by writers on all manner of sub- 
jects; in this process we have transferred the idea across 
to other acts which seem to resemble bringing to birth, and 
we speak of the * birth pangs ' which attend the production 
of a book, a play, a piece of sculpture, or a musical com- 
position. If Grantley Dick Read's methods take all, or 
almost all, the labour and pain out of childbirth, then we 
shall have to adopt different figures of speech to describe 
artistic production ! 

In the second place, the psychologist can show, with 
varying degrees of success, how we can deal with the situa- 
tion which he has investigated. In this instance, Read 
examined the evidence and also suggested a remedy; the 
two processes often go together in the more immediately 
' applied ' sciences; and this is the case with psychology and 
sociology, in whic\, indeed, the research project may 
actually arise ff\a a realised need. I have already given 
sufficient - ^ount of Read's ideas concerning the desirability 
of psychological training for the expectant mother. 



The Dangers of Bein L Born 75 

If Read's work bears the fruit which I nticipate, then 
we may expect a marked, if gradual, change in the per- 
sonalities of our children, and of their children, with the 
elimination of some of the psychological ills which beset us 
at present. 

Be that as it may, most of us born into our society during 
the past two centuries, at least, have entered the world 
with difficulty, and I agree with Freud in thinking that 
from this beginning grows much of the anxiety which is so 
prevalent today. Not all of us suffer from the same degree 
of anxiety, and indeed there are notable exceptions, but the 
problem is sufficiently large to warrant a chapter by itself. 
I propose to deal with it, therefore, after I have looked 
at some of the more specific problems which arise from 
our everyday experience. 



Seven 

Children and Grown-ups 

I REMARKED in the second chapter of this book that it is 
particularly dangerous from a psychological point of view 
to be a human being born into a modern civilised commu- 
nity, and the reader will probably have gathered from the 
subsequent discussion that much of the danger arises during 
the earlier period of our lives in early childhood, in fact. 
Freud has asserted that the basis of all later neurosis is 
laid down in the first year of life and, while some psycho- 
analysts would disagree with this, there would be general 
agreement that the ground for all later behaviour, the 
foundation, so to speak, on which the human being will 
build all his later way of life, is laid down in the first few 
years, if not in the first year, of life. 

This has long been recognised by such sayings as ' The 
child is father of the Man ', and later psychological research 
has tended to substantiate this. Whether we regard the 
first year only, or the first few years, as the critical stage 
in the development of the child, it is quite easy to show 
that practically all the experiences of this important period 
seem to be forgotten and would, indeed, be regarded as 
lost, were it not for the indirect way in which these early 
experiences are constantly revealing themselves, and the 
amount of lost material which can be recovered from the 
unconscious mind o r a person during the course of analysis. 

As a result of .his combination of circumstances, it is 
often diffV'.It to recognise in adult behaviour the effects of 
these early experiences, but psychological techniques, and 

76 



Children and Grown- ips 77 

especially the methods of analysis, have proceed a grow- 
ing amount of evidence that they exist. 

Some of these connections appear so frequently in the 
modern western civilised adult that Freud and the other 
early workers came to the conclusion that certain childish 
emotional experiences were common to all children, and 
that in consequence all adults would develop certain charac- 
teristics in common. 

Later research has shown that some of these early 
generalisations were too sweeping, but most workers would 
agree that many of these typical ways of developing from 
child to adult are very common, if not universal, in our 
community. Some of these patterns of behaviour have been 
found to occur so regularly that they have been given 
names by Freud and later workers; some of the best known 
names are the Oedipus Complex, the Polycrates Complex, 
and what we may call the Male Envy Complex, as well as 
the Inferiority Complex, on which A. Adler laid so much 
stress. 

The Oedipus Complex gets its name from the legend of 
Oedipus, upon which the Greek dramatist Sophocles based 
the Theban plays. Very briefly, the legend tells how a son 
was born to Laios and Jocasta, King and Queen of Thebes 
in Boetia, a part of ancient Greece. At the time of the birth 
the oracle of Apollo foretold that the child would kill his 
father and marry his mother. The parents were so horrified 
at this prediction that they gave the child to a shepherd who 
should expose him on the hillside (a not uncommon method 
at that time of disposing of unwanted children). The child's 
foot was pierced with an iron pin in order to prevent its 
crawling away. (To the consequent swelling of the foot the 
child owed its name Oedipus swollen foot.) The shepherd 
relented in his cruel task and the child went to Corinth, 
where he was adopted by the king and queen and brought 
up as their own son. 

When he became a young man, Oedipus came to hear of 
the prophecy which had been made at the ^e of his birth, 
and, believing that he was the true son of the king and 
queen of Corinth, he fled that city in order to avoid his 



78 The Da gers of Being Human 

fate, and afte~ some wanderings he approached Thebes. 
Here there was civil strife, and during the course of a 
fight in which he intervened Oedipus killed an elderly man. 
He was hailed as the saviour of the city and married the 
widowed queen, who was in fact his mother : the man whom 
he had killed in the fight was his true father. There were 
children of the incestuous marriage, and when he discovered 
the truth, Oedipu^ fled, putting out his eyes in remorse. The 
tragedy still continues to unfold, but I have given sufficient 
of the story for our present purposes. 

It was in fact Freud's contention that it was the normal 
pattern of child development for the young child to come 
to regard the father as a rival in the affections of the 
mother, and to want to remove the father and possess the 
mother. (The girl child necessarily had a different emotional 
development, and this difference and the difficulties which 
it involved for the girl were the basis for the psychological 
inferiority of women, as Freud regarded the matter.) 

Now the suggestion that a boy child should want to kill 
his father and possess his mother seems quite fantastic to 
most laymen, and yet it is astonishing how often this pre- 
cise picture is revealed during the course of analysis as 
existing in the unconscious mind. 

Freud thought that the normal person worked through 
this complex during the course of development, so that the 
adult was no longer controlled by the complex. The com- 
plex can, however, be found in children and in abnormal 
adults, and can have a quite important effect on the choice 
of a mate by the normal adult. 

With this concept of the Oedipus complex there was 
bound up the idea of the so-called ' castration complex ', 
which the young boy developed either as a result of threats 
to him by ill-advised parents or nurses (when they observed 
the quite common phenomenon of childish sex-play), or 
from the boy's own visual experience of the female genital, 
from which, it WJM supposed, he assumed a loss in the 
female of an ~--gan which the boy assumed all should 
possess. (Later writers have suggested that this particular 
complex would be better known as the ' genital-deprivation 



Children and Grown-\ ps 79 

complex ', since castration has another and quite specific 
meaning.) 

Once again, this idea may appear both fantastic and 
repulsive to my readers, and yet it is found quite often as 
an unconscious factor in neurotic patients. 

There is also the reverse factor, the masculine envy of 
the woman's ability to create children; this is not referred 
to so often in the literature of the subject, but it can be 
quite a real factor in mental development, and its import- 
ance, at any rate in certain circumstances, is nicely illus- 
trated by the ceremonies of some primitive peoples, where 
the men of the tribe perform a painful operation in imita- 
tion of women's sexual functions. 

Young children may reveal evidence of the presence of 
these complexes, in their spontaneous drawings, and some 
of these, which I have seen made by young boys, are un- 
mistakably pictures of themselves battling with their 
fathers. 

It will, I hope, be appreciated that these early experiences 
are so important to the child precisely because they seemed 
important, emotionally, at the time. E. Pickworth- Farrow, 
in an interesting book, lays a great deal of emphasis on the 
effect which unwise punishment can have on the child 
mind a too rough denial of the mother's breast, for 
example, is revealed as an important factor in Farrow's 
own analysis and what may appear to the adult as, per- 
haps, merely an unimportant gesture, may be regarded by 
the very young child as in the nature of a tragedy, and 
may influence the whole course of his later development. 

Denial of food, or of certain kinds of food, to the very 
young child, especially if accompanied by gestures or facial 
expressions or words which show that the grown-up thinks 
that the child is greedy and that greediness is morally 
wrong, may well remain buried in the child's mind and 
bring about quite profound changes in the personality of 
that child when it grows up. 

I have observed many instances of this ^sult myself. It 
may lead to the adult ' playing ' with food instead ^ attack- 
ing a dish with relish, and one can see that the person so 



80 The Da igers of Being Human 

playing is, so to speak, afraid to devour food with gusto. 
This type of deprivation is the basis of an odd complex, 
which has received the name of the Polycrates complex. 

This name is also derived from Greek mythology, and 
comes from the legend of Polycrates, who was Tyrant of 
Samos. He had enjoyed forty years of good fortune, and 
as the Greeks were always suspicious of too much favour 
from the gods (with which attitude is connected their con- 
cept of * hubris '), Polycrates came to feel that, in order to 
compensate for all his good fortune, a great calamity would 
overwhelm him. 

Consequently, on an occasion when he was entertaining 
a visiting prince, he threw a priceless ring into the sea, as 
a kind of votive offering to the gods. At the evening meal 
that same day fish was served as one of the dishes, and, on 
opening, it was found to contain the ring; the gods had thus 
refused the offering and insisted on continuing the apparent 
good fortune of Polycrates; all those present were so filled 
with fear at this portent that they fled. In fact, the fears 
were justified, for very shortly afterwards Polycrates was 
defeated by an enemy and was crucified. 

It may seem odd, but it is certainly true, that this atti- 
tude is quite frequently found in the unconscious minds of 
our contemporaries. This unconscious complex reveals it- 
self by causing misfortune, usually in the form of an illness, 
to the individual affected. 

I shall deal with the general significance of illness in a 
later chapter, but perhaps I should mention here one case 
as an illustration. A friend of mine complained that he had 
an attack of influenza, which prevented him from going 
on a holiday, and he wanted to know how we psychothera- 
pists could account for that, adding that he was frequently 
ill just when he was going to enjoy himself, going to a 
party, or to a dance, or on holiday. I pointed out that he 
had probably been influenced when he was very young into 
thinking that ' nic j ' things were ' wrong ', and so had 
developed this complex, which acted through mild illness or 
accident *o interfere with his enjoyment. 

The rather puritan attitude of mind which was so in- 



Children and Grown- tps 81 

fluential in this country during the latter hlf of last cen- 
tury and the beginning of this probably gave rise to a good 
many complexes of this kind in the children of that period; 
this is especially true of sexual pleasure, but is not confined 
to sex. 

The net result of such an influence is to make the child, 
when it grows up, incapable of enjoying the full expression 
of its personality, and even of taking pleasure in quite harm- 
less pursuits. 

This adult in turn influences the minds of his or her 
own children, and so the process goes on. Only gradually 
can wiser counsels prevail, and the self-propagation of such 
complexes be modified. Such is the sensitive receptive 
nature of the child mind that many emotional moral atti- 
tudes do not have to be taught: they are caught uncon- 
sciously by the child from the atmosphere in which it 
grows up. 

Even when language is used in instructing the child as 
to how it should behave it is, as often as not, the emotional 
attitude of the adult, the gestures, the tone of voice, which 
are of greatest moment to the child, rather than any actual 
words that are used. (This has been demonstrated experi- 
mentally). This is particularly true of the attitude displayed 
during toilet training. 

It is, of course, necessary to train the child in cleanly 
habits, in order to make it fit into the social group to 
which it belongs; but it is important for the parent, or other 
adult engaged in training the child, to remember that toilet 
training is no more than a social convenience; there is no 
moral stigma attached to dirtiness in these matters, and 
some primitive tribes get along quite happily with the 
minimum of training, which their outdoor life and simple 
ways make possible. 

This may even apply to what the advertisements refer to 
as * personal hygiene '; during menstruation the Hondo 
girls, for example, take no special precautions at all, and 
clearly attach no sense of shame to the process or to its 
results. Yet many instances have come to my notice of 
girls who had such a feeling of shame inculcated into them 
6 



82 The Da \gers of Being Human 

on the occasicn of their first menstrual period that they 
developed a profound sense of guilt in connection with all 
sexual activity. 

Imagine the effect on the mind of a sensitive young girl, 
of the admonition of a stern parent, that now she had com- 
menced menstruating she must not let any boyjdss her! 

Toilet training itself can have very important effects on 
the development of the personality of the child and so, later 
on, of the adult. Such effects may be revealed in traits of 
extreme generosity or excessive meanness. 

This is a very complex problem, and I shall not go into 
the subtleties of this now, since this would introduce diffi- 
cult technicalities into a non-technical account. Groddeck 
has made some interesting comments on the relationship 
between diarrhoea, constipation, and haemorrhoids, and 
personality structure, and I once heard a professor of psy- 
chiatry give an interesting analysis of the personality of a 
famous Chancellor of the Exchequer, with special refer- 
ence to his probable training in early childhood relating to 
toilet matters; thus, the early toilet-training of this child, 
who became a leading statesman, had an important and 
probably decisive effect on the economic and financial policy 
of this country ! 

A matter in which early training has a most important 
effect is in the realm of religion. Once again, the effect 
which any religious teaching or example may have on the 
mind of the child depends more upon the surrounding 
emotional circumstances than on the actual content of the 
teaching. The same apparent teaching may produce either 
a youth to whom religion is important or one who is con- 
stantly in rebellion against all forms of religion. 

I have, I hope, already made it clear that I do not agree 
with Freud in regarding all religious experience as an 
illusion; I think that religious experience may be just as 
' real ' as our other everyday experience maybe more so. 
Here I am dealing solely with the facts of religious teaching 
and its probate effects. 

I know of one youth, for example, whose father com- 
bined a reckless addiction to alcohol with a strict insistence 



Children and Grown- ips 83 

upon religious observance. The result was tc produce a boy 
who was not only not interested in religion, but was actively 
and violently opposed to it. On the other hand, there is the 
tragic case of the Roman Catholic youth who developed so 
stern a religious sense and so deep a sense of guilt that he 
attempted *o cut off one of his arms, and had as a result 
to have it amputated. 

These then are some of the startling effects which our 
well intentioned training may have on the mind of the 
child. We can only begin to train the child intelligently 
when we understand how the child's mind works, and the 
nature of our own minds. This knowledge, which involves 
knowledge of the unconscious processes, can only be gained 
by the use of psychological analysis. 



Eight 

The Child: Some Problems 

FROM THE very brief and necessarily very sketchy account 
which I have given in the previous chapter of the ways in 
which the attitude of the adult can affect the mind of the 
child, of the manner in which a parent's emotions may 
find their final manifestation in the behaviour of the child 
when it in turn grows up, it will be readily appreciated that 
our children are bound to present us with problems, more 
or less baffling, from time to time. 

Some of these problems may be merely puzzling to the 
parent, while others may appear more serious and consti- 
tute a source of worry to the bewildered father or mother. 
I have already mentioned some of the problems with which 
a child may confront its parents, but in this chapter I want 
to collect a few more examples which have come within 
my own experience, as further illustrations of what parents 
can expect, with some suggestions as to the best method of 
meeting the situation. 

For the way in which the adult handles the situation may 
make all the difference between on the one hand per- 
petuating the ' problem ' behaviour in the child (or even 
giving rise to more serious disturbances and perhaps, later 
in life, to delinquency or neurosis), and, on the other, 
causing the emotion attached to the particular aspect of the 
child's behaviour to 'evaporate/ so to speak, leaving the 
child unaffected and in a position to proceed with its 
development in the normal way. 

Because of our attitude in this country towards sexual 

84 



The Child: Some Problems 85 

activity, and particularly on account of the views which 
were current on this aspect of behaviour during the latter 
half of last century (which views continue, in spite of the 
interruption of two world wars, to affect our everyday 
behaviour), a large number of the problems presented by 
children are directly connected with sex. 

It may oe added, in parenthesis, that strict Freudians 
would regard all childish problems as connected, directly 
or indirectly, with sex; but they use the word in a wider 
sense than that given in everyday speech, and many psy- 
chotherapists demur at so sweeping a generalisation. 

I refer here therefore to those problems in which the 
behaviour is clearly of a sexual nature. I am constantly 
being consulted by anxious parents concerning this type of 
difficulty, and any particular aspect of the problem may be 
repeated in a number of different cases. 

One father asked me about the behaviour of his little 
daughter; she came home from school one day, and pro- 
ceeded to fold a handkerchief in a careful and methodical 
manner, until she had produced a tiny brassiere which she 
then wore with considerable signs of glee. This might have 
been sufficiently disturbing, but matters were made worse 
when it was found that the maid had in fact shown her 
naked breasts to the child. (This would seem on the part 
of the maid to be an instance of mild exhibitionism). 

Father was worried in case the child might be coming 
under bad influences at school, or might even be precocious 
or over-sexed. Now, a very great deal of harm could have 
been caused if this episode had been treated too seriously, 
and especially if the parents had tried to show the child 
that such behaviour was immoral. Fortunately, the parents 
decided to treat the incident lightly, and came to me by 
way of confirmation of their attitude. 

It is often difficult for parents to adopt just the right 
degree of easy acceptance, precisely because they themselves 
have in most instances been ill- advisedly trained in such 
matters when they were young. Such training produces a 
fundamental change in the unconscious mind of the child, 
a change which, being in the nature of a mental tension, is 



86 Th* Dangers of Being Human 

a constant source of energy affecting uehaviour in later life 
to an astonishing degree. 

Such an unconscious tension, or complex, in the mind 
makes it quite impossible for the unanalysed adult to react 
naturally towards sexual behaviour in children; there is 
either the ' hush, hush ' and ' don't be dirty ' attitude, or 
the overcompensating ' frank ' attitude, which embarrasses 
the child. 

These remarks apply equally to the parents' attitude, 
which is highly emotional in origin, towards most childish 
behaviour, but it is more obvious with regard to sex activity 
on the part of the child, as this touches some of the deepest 
springs of human conduct. 

Exhibitionism is quite common in little girls, but most 
often when sufficient numbers are present to make such 
conduct appear safe; another form of sex activity, which 
gives rise to anxiety in many parents, and which appears 
to be commoner among boys than among girls, is the prac- 
tice of masturbation; little girls do practice this, but often 
manage to disguise it so well that it can be mistaken for 
quite ' innocent ' play. 

Boys can do this, but usually with less success, and boyish 
masturbation can generally be recognised for what it is. I 
must point out here what it is not : it is not ' self- abuse/ 
which is a quite ridiculous term. (Over-indulgence in ice 
cream is much more ' abusive ' of the ' self.') 

Masturbation, concealed to a varying degree, is almost 
universal among boys, and our mistaken attitude towards 
it in the past, which led to such strong moral condemnation, 
has led to a very great deal of misery in countless children 
(with a consequent guilt complex in the adult). 

The practice is of great antiquity. Although the Biblical 
instance has been misread, one can cite the poet of the 
Greek anthology: poeta hymen palma cant ab at. It is also 
widespread geographically, being openly practised by some 
peoples. 

Fortunately, our attitude towards the practice is already 
undergoing a change, and it is now possible, as one of my 
colleagues humorously puts it, for boys to realise that if 



The Child: Some Problems 87 

they masturbate it doeg not follow that their art will 
drop off. 

Closely bound up with masturbation, which strictly 
speaking is a solitary practice, is the phenomenon of youth- 
ful homosexuality. I have not a great deal of information 
as to the extent to which very young girls are given to 
homosexual practices, although there is a good deal of 
evidence as to its prevalence in institutions in which large 
numbers of girls are continuously in each other's company, 
especially if there is provision for sleeping, as in girls' 
boarding schools and the nurses' homes attached to 
hospitals. 

Among girls this homosexuality may amount to no more 
than a ' crush ' on another girl, and an excessive amount of 
caressing. Among boys it may be limited to mutual mastur- 
bation. In any case, it is a phase of behaviour out of which 
the great majority of children pass in the normal course of 
development, going on to develop a relationship with a 
member of the opposite sex. 

The attitude of a society or group towards the segrega- 
tion of the sexes has an important influence on the develop- 
ment of homosexual practices. With some primitive peoples, 
where complete sexual freedom is allowed between the small 
children of both sexes, homosexuality never develops; on 
the other hand, some of the peoples of the middle East, who 
segregate their women more or less strictly, accept homo- 
sexual relationships between men as being quite natural. 
T. E. Lawrence mentions two of his Arab servants, who 
had such a relationship and lived to all intents and pur- 
poses as man and wife, and we may consider David and 
Jonathan as a Biblical instance. 

I have rather laboured this point, in order to show how 
little foundation there is for the very strong moral con- 
demnation of homosexuality, and of masturbation, which 
was expressed by many people in this country until com- 
paratively recent times and still is so expressed by many 
people who have themselves been strictly brought up in 
this regard. 

Another quite common problem with young children, 



88 The Dangers of Being Human 

one Which causes a great deal of worry to many parents, is 
that of the occurrence of periods when the child is given 
to petty stealing. This occurs with children who have in 
fact plenty of pocket money and are not kept short of any 
of the childish pleasures. This latter fact indicates that 
this stealing is not in the same class, psychologically speak- 
ing, as the organised and deliberate theft by the adult, with 
which many parents and police courts were at one time 
ready to class it. This problem behaviour on the part of the 
child is much more closely akin to the kleptomania of the, 
more or less, neurotic adult. I mentioned one example of 
this in Chapter Two, the example on which the play ' Black 
Chiffon ' is based. 

In the play, you will remember, a well-to-do woman 
stole a black chiffon nightdress from a store and was dis- 
covered; the problem in this case was why the woman stole 
the nightdress, which she could quite easily have afforded 
to buy. This is precisely the sort of comment which the 
harassed parent makes when he discovers the child stealing, 
often stealing from one of the parents themselves. 

The point about this type of case, both of adult klepto- 
mania and of childish theft, is that the act must not be 
looked at as a thing in itself, to be judged in isolation from 
the surrounding circumstances. The theft is a symptom of 
some psychological disturbance; in the case of the child 
the picture is complicated by other factors, such as the 
possible retardation in the child of the development of a 
sense of property. 

In dealing with this problem in their children it is, once 
again, important for parents not to attach too strong a sense 
of sin to the child's act; and if other members of the social 
group have not been involved, and the stealing is confined 
to the child's home, then the incident may be passed over 
with the minimum of comment. 

It may well be that the stealing will be found to be but 
a passing phase in the development of the child's character, 
and there is not necessarily any connection between child- 
ish theft and similar behaviour in later life. If the complex 
which causes the child to steal persists into adult life, it 



The Child: Some Problems 89 

may quite easily bring about symptomatic behaviour 7 of a 
different kind, behaviour which is socially less reprehen- 
sible. 

If however, the child persists in stealing, over a long 
period, or if it carries its behaviour in this respect into 
the outside world, then the parents should seek psycho- 
logical advice; the trained therapist will be able to dis- 
cover the real cause of the behaviour, and so prevent its 
recurrence. 

It is very important in connection with childish mis- 
demeanours to remember that the difference between a 
* problem ' child and a young delinquent is the difference 
between being taken by the parent for treatment by a 
psychotherapist and being taken by the police before a 
magistrate. 

The same is true of adult cases, as a prison psycholo- 
gist has recently pointed out, and as the experience of 
those in the home at Brentwood has shown; this home 
takes charge of mothers convicted of neglecting their chil- 
dren and, within the limits imposed by its size and income, 
it has been astonishingly successful in moulding these 
women into good mothers and good citizens. In this con- 
nection it has been said that the fortunate mother appears 
before a magistrate who knows of Brentwood, whereas the 
less fortunate are given a prison sentence, and more often 
than not come out worse than they went in. 

Professor Sir Cyril Burt, whom I have quoted in an 
earlier chapter, is an acknowledged authority on delin- 
quency in children. (His book, The Young Delinquent, is a 
classic on the subject). 

Professor Burt wrote recently, ' Already, by dint of care- 
fully planned surveys and systematic enquiries, psycho- 
logists have found out a good deal about the causes of 
crime and about the relative efficiency of different ways of 
treating it. We know too, in principle at least, that the 
vast majority of juvenile cases are perfectly curable, if 
taken in hand at an early stage. We no longer look for 
a single all-explaining cause; and we no longer believe in 
a single sovereign remedy. What may be the cause in any 



90 The Dangers of Being Human 

one case can only be discovered if we carry out a thorough 
scientific investigation. Then we nearly always find that not 
one, but half a dozen different factors are at work, above 
or below the surface." 

I have mentioned two types of behaviour through which 
the child may cause anxiety to its parents. In one case 
the parents regard the child as precocious and over-sexed, 
and in the other possibly as a born criminal, and in either 
case as destined to come to no good end. In both instances 
this last assumption has no justification, at least if the child 
is taken for treatment when the problem arises. 

With rare exceptions, all children may be trained by 
suitable methods into normal and useful citizens; the excep- 
tions are those suffering from severe mental deficiency, and 
even for these there is more hope nowadays of a useful, 
if restricted, adult life, than was once thought to be the 
case. 

I mentioned in my earlier discussion of some of my own 
cases, other types of behaviour which may be regarded by 
the child's parents as abnormal. Some of these may be 
' problem ' behaviour in the sense of producing awkward 
social situations as in the case of stealing, with which I 
have dealt; others may be merely a source of worry to the 
parents. 

Examples of the former are extreme aggressiveness to- 
wards others, either in a general form or against particular 
people or objects, or excessively developed destructive ten- 
dencies. Examples of the second type are an extreme 
tendency for the child to prefer its own company to that 
of others, or an unusually pronounced fear of the dark. An 
example intermediate between the two types is afforded by 
temper tantrums, which may be merely a nuisance in the 
child's own home, but may be socially embarrassing out- 
side it. The same applies to truancy. 

Although these various problems may be classified in this 
manner, there is no good psychological foundation for such 
a classification. They all arise from maladjustment and con- 
flict in the unconscious mind of the child; and just as one 
example of problem behaviour may have several ( causes ' 



The Child: Same Problems 91 

all acting at once, (as Professor Hurt pointed out), so also 
any given conflict, or complex, may produce a variety of 
different types of problem behaviour. It is this multiplicity 
of interacting factors which makes each case unique, and 
the practice of psychotherapy so difficult. 

Some of this problem behaviour may, like an onset of 
petty theft, prove transitory in nature. It may arise from a 
particularly difficult, but temporary psychological situation 
in which the child finds itself, and will probably pass when 
the situation again changes. Even comparatively long-stand- 
ing problem behaviour may disappear if the external cir- 
cumstances are changed; an example of this effect was given 
by the case which I quoted of the boy who tried to gas his 
little sister and who, when he was sent to different and (to 
him) more favourable surroundings, ceased to have this 
abnormal attitude. 

This therapeutic effect of change of environment alone 
has long been recognised by some psychotherapists, 
although a famous psychologist has recently conducted a 
laborious research to prove just this point (in an effort to 
discredit all other forms of psychotherapy!) It may be, as 
I say, that change of environment is sufficient in some 
instances to effect considerable improvement, but whether 
this is likely to be the case, and the type of change which is 
desirable, can only be decided by a practitioner who is 
aware of the processes which are constantly at work in the 
unconscious mind, and of the interaction between the un- 
conscious and conscious aspects of our minds. 

Other instances of problem behaviour may be more or 
lees normal at a certain stage of development, and these in 
turn will pass with the process of growing up. It seems 
likely that temper tantrums, in some degree, can be regarded 
as normal at the age of about two and a half to three. This 
is true, at any rate, in the type of civilised community in 
which we live. There is no evidence, ^s far as I am aware, 
that temper tantrums at this age are universal among human 
children at all epochs and in all places and it would seem 
that, with us, they are most likely the result, or one of the 
results, of forcing the child to grow up in the (to him) 



92 The Dangers of Being Human 

rather frustrating life of the Western civilised world. 

Whether this be the case or not, (and the most elemen- 
tary of toilet training is frustrating to the young child), it 
is a fact that temper tantrums are very common among our 
young children, and I am constantly being asked by 
mothers for advice on how to deal with them. Usually I 
suggest that it is better to let the tantrums won* themselves 
out on each occasion; chastisement only makes matters 
worse. It will be found that they become less frequent and 
less violent, and finally disappear altogether, apart from the 
occasional outburst, (which even some adults indulge in!) 
If the attacks are very violent, however, with perhaps some 
banging of the head on the floor, for example, or if they 
persist into the child's later years, then advice should be 
sought from a qualified psychotherapist. 

This is true of all the types of problem behaviour dealt 
with in this chapter if it seems abnormal to the parents, or 
if it causes unhappiness to the child or to the parents, or to 
both. It may be that the behaviour is, in fact, quite normal 
in the circumstances, and the anxiety on the part of the 
parents may arise from their ignorance of the structure and 
development of the child mind. If so one visit to the psycho- 
logist will clear the matter up and set the parents' fear at 
rest. 

That the development of the child mind is not so simple 
as some adults think is nicely illustrated by the experience 
of a famous professor of psychology. At one time he read 
Piaget's famous book on The Language and Thought of the 
Child; he disagreed with many of Piagefs conclusions, 
and decided to devote a few weeks of research to show 
that Piaget was wrong. As it turned out, he spent five years 
on research which demonstrated that most of Piaget's con- 
clusions, strange as they seemed, were true ! 

It is thus not always the case that psychology is * just 
common sense '; at t'mes it is very uncommon sense, as in 
this instance, and as in the case of Freud's discoveries. It is 
now rather difficult to realise how revolutionary the latter 
were, and to appreciate the violence of the opposition to 
Freud's work on the Dart of most Eurooean thinkers. 



The Child: Some Problems 93 

We have by this time accepted so many of his ideas into 
our own thought, that teenagers talk cheerfully of libido 
and the inferiority complex, and the uncommon sense of 
Freud from 1882 to 1912 has become the common sense 
of 1953. (It should also be noted that the common sense of 
earlier times, as applied to dealing with our emotional prob- 
lems, has in many instances come to be recognised as 
wrong thinking at the present time: thf same applies to 
physical medicine leeches are now out of fashion!) This 
is the way in which science develops, and psychology is 
no exception. 



Nine 

Dreams, Nightmares, and Insomnia 

QUITE OFTEN I am asked by someone to give my interpreta- 
tion of a dream, which the individual has just related to 
me, quite outside the context of an analysis. I have always 
to decline this request, as it is quite impossible to interpret 
the isolated dream of a person who is completely unknown 
to one. I mention these occurrences because the mere re- 
quest for an interpretation of a dream reveals a complete 
misunderstanding of the analytical interpretation of dreams. 

Yet dreams play so large a part in the lives of many of 
us, and the iaea has been taken up so often by the man in 
the street that dreams do in fact mean something, that I 
have decided to devote a separate chapter to dreams and 
allied topics. 

Until Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams in 
1912, the dream was a meaningless piece of mental imagery, 
or the waste by-product of physiological processes in the 
brain, and in our society comparatively little serious import- 
ance was attached to its occurrence, although there were 
always the more superstitious who looked for signs and 
portents in dreams, and were ready to interpret them or 
have them interpreted for them* Under this system of inter- 
pretation, dreams had, with rare exceptions, regular and 
definite meanings asr'gned to them, and many of these can 
still be seen in the ' dream books ' sold by newsagents. 

There are, of course, many recorded instances of serious 
attempts to interpret dreams; one of the most famous of 
these was Joseph's celebrated interpretation of the dream of 



Dreams, Nightmares, and Insomnia 95 

the Pharaoh. I personally am of the opinion that such inter- 
pretations of some di earns cannot be dismissed as lightly 
as some writers would have us believe, but a detailed discus- 
sion of this problem would take us into the difficult realm of 
Jungian psychology, and I cannot embark upon that now. 

I am, therefore, confining myself mainly to a Freudian 
commentary on the dream, while allowing myself to draw 
occasionally upon the discoveries of Jung and others in this 
field. Freud did in fact assert that all dreams are caused, 
and that all dreams have a purpose. 

The cause of dreams lies in the unconscious mind, which 
contains both primitive instinctive drives, and all the 
material which has been repressed in deference to the 
Super Ego; in other words, all the wishes, ideas, desires 
which we have to put out of our minds for conscience 
sake. These unconscious impulses are constantly trying to 
work up into the conscious field, but are as constantly kept 
unconcious by the forces of repression. 

One such force comes from the outside world and its 
existence led Freud to formulate the Reality Principle 
the principle which governs our relationship with the outer 
physical world. Now, when we are asleep, this force is shut 
off from us and, in addition, we are, so to speak, paralysed, 
so that we cannot if we would put into effect any ideas or 
desires which may try to influence action. (I am excluding 
such phenomena as sleepwalking, which can, however, be 
brought under the general heading). 

As a result of this double effect of sleep, it is possible 
for the forces of repression to relax somewhat, since it is 
no longer so dangerous, from the point of view of the self, 
to give effect in the sleeping mind to some of the repressed 
wishes and desires. (The Censor, so to speak, relaxes his 
vigilance to some extent when we are asleep, and can afford 
to, since we are incapable of getting into much mischief.) 

Even so, Freud thought, it is clear that the risk cannot 
be taken of allowing the instinctive or repressed desires free 
and undisguised expression, since the presence of such 
primitive desires would give rise to anxiety, even to the 
sleeping self. So the ' latent dream material ' undergoes a 



9$ The Dangers of Being Human 

series of transformations, by the op, ration of the ' dream 
work/ and is remembered, if and whun we awake, as some- 
thing quite different, the ' manifest dream.' 

Freud enumerated a number of dream mechanisms, by 
which the raw material is, as it were, transformed into 
more palatable form, but we need not go into these techni- 
calities here. Suffice it to say that the dream is made accept- 
able to the sleeping self, which is therefore left emotionally 
undisturbed by trie occurrence of the dream and the partial 
expression of primitive mental forces. 

The purpose of the dream is thus, according to Freud, 
to protect sleep to avoid the need for the dreamer to 
awaken in order to deal with the unwelcome material. 

Jung differed radically from Freud in his views as to 
the function of the dream, and took what is perhaps a 
more positive view of its purpose, holding as he did that 
dreams help to give expression to the real self and, if rightly 
interpreted, can act as a valuable guide to the most desirable 
line of development for one's life and personality. However 
that may be, Freud and Jung agree in asserting that our 
dreams have both meaning and purpose. 

If a dream has been successful, then we shall be undis- 
turbed and go on sleeping, and most likely shall not remem- 
ber the dream at all when we wake up. Even if we are 
awakened by some outside cause (for example, if someone 
wakes us), the dream, if remembered, will have no un- 
pleasant feeling attached to it and may, indeed, have quite 
the contrary emotional content for us, and we may even 
be sorry to awaken and lose the pleasant experience 1 In 
that case the dream will be dismissed from the mind as an 
amusing bit of nonsense, at the most. 

There are, however, a large number of dreams from 
which we awaken feeling very unpleasant mental or phy- 
sical symptoms. These feelings may be so extremely un- 
pleasant as to make jis seek interpretation from an expert. 

For example, a friend of mine recently dreamt that she 
was going down a coalmine. This was very hot and full 
of fire and fumes, and she descended, not in a cage, but in 
something resembling a bobsleigh, slithering downwards 



Dreams, Nightmares, and Insomnia 97 

in an alarming manm r. She was so distressed at whac she 
saw that the man wb acted as guide said, What do you 
think it is like lower down, if you think it is so bad here?' 
Then she returned to the surface, to find all the rest of the 
party sitting in a tramcar-like conveyance. At first there 
seemed to be no room for my friend, but at last she noticed 
a seat at the end, and remarking that this would do went 
along the length of the car and occupied it. 

With this she woke up, but with the taste of sulphur 
fumes so strong in her mouth that she was still trying to 
wash it away when I spoke to her, two hours later! She 
had also wakened from the dream in a state of extreme 
emotional disturbance. This sort of dream indicates a state 
of tension or conflict in the mind of the dreamer, and sug- 
gests that recourse to analysis would be beneficial. 

Not long ago a daily paper published some comments on 
' sleep paralysis/ which seizes the individual while he sleeps 
and causes him to awaken in terror, with a feeling of in- 
ability to move in bed and a sense of horror at this paralysis. 

This account encouraged a very large number of the 
readers of this paper to write of their experiences of this 
kind, and of the first thousand who wrote in, six hundred 
expressed relief at being enabled to discuss their affliction 
with others, and to discover that they were not isolated cases 
but that very many others suffered in a similar way. 

These terrors vary a great deal, but all are accompanied 
by a feeling of being unable to move, or of being strangled, 
combined in many instances with hallucinations of figures 
present in the room; and all give rise to a feeling of horror 
in the dreamer so much so that, as one writer put it, he 
was ' too scared to sleep/ 

These cases all involve an inability to move in bed. At 
the other extreme is the case, recently brought to my notice, 
of a woman who, as soon as she was asleep, moved so 
violently that she immediately threw herself out of bed. 
This would happen several times each night. 

Both of the above types of experience could be regarded 
as ' intermittent insomnia/ in which the sufferer sleeps in 
fits and starts. It will be seen that .in all these instance* 



98 The Dangers of Being Human 

the dream has failed to fulfil its functi n of protecting sleep; 
the forces from the unconscious miri of the sleepei have 
been so powerful that they have surged up into the con- 
scious mind and have there given rise to so great a degree 
of anxiety that the sleeper wakes up, with the feeling of 
anxiety, or horror, vividly present. 

Often, too, the awakening would be accompanied by 
some physical experience of an unpleasant nature, such as 
increased pulse, profuse perspiration, sensations of choking 
or suffocating, or the feelings which I have already men- 
tioned in connection with the sleep paralysis, or even experi- 
ences such as that of the woman who threw herself out of 
bed so frequently, an act which in itself will cause con- 
siderable distress to the individual so afflicted. 

Such instances as these, if they are reported to the 
person's physician, may well be dismissed as a piece of 
nonsense. As one of the readers, to whom I have referred 
above, remarked, the doctor shrugged his shoulders and 
said it was ' all imagination.' This attitude is in line with 
the attitude of many doctors, which I have described in the 
first chapter, towards ( imaginary illness.' 

Now, the horrors of a dream, or of a nightmare, or of 
' sleep paralysis,' or of the unfortunate woman are just as 
real to the sleeper as a horrible experience in everyday 
waking life would be; in fact, in many instances the experi- 
ence seems much more vivid and much more real than many 
' real life ' experiences appear to be. (One is reminded of 
Chuang Tzu's famous parable concerning the butterfly.*) 

In addition to these instances, where sleep is disturbed 
by bad dreams or nightmares, there is the more continuous 
type of insomnia, when individuals lie awake for long 
periods and are quite incapable of sleeping, although they 
are aware that they require sleep and will be very much 
the worse the following morning for lack of sleep; indeed, 
this realisation often adds to the anxiety and makes sleep 
even more difficult to catch. 

This type of insomnia, while differing from the other 
types superficially, yet has a great deal in common with 
See note at end of chapter. 



Dreams, Nightmares, and Insomnia 99 

those types, and the , eneral cause of an aisiuroea sieep, or 
failure to sleep, is the .same. It arises from a tension, a con- 
flict, in the individual's unconscious mind, a conflict so 
serious, and involving such powerful forces, that it inter- 
feres with normal mental life. 

It is for this reason that the dream is so valuable, or 
can be so valuable, to the analyst, and it is for this reason 
that all analysts make use of the patient's dream material, 
and many analysts even go so far as to insist upon using a 
dream as the starting point of the analytical session. 

The content of the dream has, indeed, a ' meaning/ and 
many images in the dream are recognised by the analyst 
as being symbolic of some other idea which has been 
repressed into the unconscious. The Freudians have 
developed a sharply defined system of dream symbols, in 
which a multitude of symbols represent a comparatively 
small number of primitive desires and concepts. 

Other analysts, including the writer, however, regard the 
symbolisation process as being much more involved, and as 
requiring reference to the individual patient and his mental 
life; I have already mentioned the Jungian view that the 
dream is a pointer to a ' line of life.' 

Whichever view is adopted, the dream image certainly 
cannot be made to bear the simple interpretation of the 
'dream book/ in which, for example, to dream of water 
means a long journey for the dreamer. 

The occurrence of dreams which are accompanied on 
waking by an unpleasant emotion, or worse, is an indication 
that the dreamer should undertake analysis, if this is at all 
possible. The analyst will not, of course, be concerned with 
the dream itself, though he will generally utilise the material 
presented by the dream. He will, instead, concentrate on 
bringing to consciousness the unconscious forces which have 
given rise to the dream and to the accompanying anxiety. 

The number of occasions on which I myself have been 
asked about dreams, sometimes by almost complete stran- 
gers, and the general attitude which accompanies the re- 
quest for an interpretation, indicates that the dreamer him- 
self recognises intuitively that something is amiss. 



100 The Dangers of Being Human 

This recognition comes much m >re readily from the 
experience of dreaming than it does, 4 say, from the experi- 
ence of slips of the tongue, or accidental movements of the 
limbs, or the forgetting of names, all of which are, neverthe- 
less, just as clear an indication to the observant psychologist 
as is the occurrence of disturbing dreams. 

But to the layman the dream is the more disturbing, is 
even regarded as abnormal, while the everyday mistakes 
are accepted as just mistakes. This is probably due to the 
far greater energy of the unconscious forces which are 
able to operate during sleep. 

Analysis of our dreams, like all analysis, brings us face 
to face with our unconscious minds, and we have to be 
prepared for unpleasant surprises as a result of this experi- 
ence. But there is no cause for alarm for, once the forces of 
the unconscious have been recognised for what they are, 
they cease to trouble us. 

At first, the interpretation of dreams is very difficult 
indeed, and requires all the skill of the practised analyst, 
but as analysis proceeds the interpretation becomes pro- 
gressively easier, so that, when a full analysis has been 
accomplished, the dream, when it occurs, almost interprets 
itself. 

A person who has faced his unconscious squarely and 
who as the result of analysis is psychically well-integrated, 
will have that feeling of ' well-being ' upon which the 
ancient Greeks laid so much stress, and he will dream very 
little or, if he dreams, the process will not be accompanied 
by the unpleasant, and even distressing, emotion which I 
have described earlier in this chapter. 

It will be found that, once one has attained this state 
of mental integration, dreams tend, if they occur at all, to 
be pleasant; and recounting them later on, or writing them 
down one finds oneself writing down both the dream and 
interpretation at the same time with comparatively little 
effort. 

One may still be surprised at what the interpretation 
reveals, but it will be a surprise accompanied by no strong 
emotional shock; rather an almost detached surprise that 



Dreams, Nightmares, and Insomnia 101 

such-and-such a desi *e still lay hid ih one's unconscious 
mind, maybe a long-l uried memory, which A s now revealed 
with very little emotional content, although earlier the 
emotion attached to it may have been very strong indeed. 

You may be wondering whether it should not be possible 
to eliminate all dreams as the result of a ' complete analysis/ 
My own reply is that there is no such thing as a complete 
analysis, and it will be noted that I have preferred to use 
the term ' full analysis/ to indicate a stage of analysis as 
complete as one can expect, or as is necessary, at any 
particular time. 

The human mind cannot be regarded as a mass of physi- 
cal and chemical entities, whatever the electrobiologists 
may say. 

It is possible to carry the analysis of a physical mixture, 
or of a simple chemical compound to completion and, at 
the end of the analysis, it is possible to place the various 
components in separate heaps or bottles and then leave 
them there; and on returning next day, or next week, or 
even next year, we shall find things much as we left them. 
(Even this is true only of very simple analyses). 

But the mind is subject to experience, and to the effect 
of both the outer world and other components of the same 
mind, every instant of the day, whether we are asleep or 
awake, both during the analytical session and between 
sessions, and this continuous experience changes the mind 
experiencing. At the best, at any given analytical hour, 
analysis can only be complete as far as we have gone, and 
immediately afterwards there is new experience, a further 
interaction, and a richer mental content. 

What analysis will achieve, if it has been successful, will 
be to enable the individual to deal with the new experience 
in a much more competent manner than heretofore, making 
the experience a desirable part of one's mental life, instead 
of being at the mercy of the experience. (Such a one could 
claim, with Ulysses, ' quorum pars magna fui.') 

For example, a man may be subject to so much conflict 
as the result of a ' mother-fixation ' that he is unable to 
form a satisfactory emotional relationship with another 



102 The Dangers of Being Human 

womi.n; a particularly unsatisfactory r ^lationship may cause 
so great a disturbance and so much distress that he may 
seek the help of an analyst. 

Such a man will almost invariably bring disturbing 
dreams as one of his symptoms. (In such a case, one can 
almost ' construct ' the type of dream he will have, from 
the knowledge which we possess of such cases). Analysis 
will resolve the fixation, remove the conflict and the dis- 
tress resulting from it, and banish the anxious dreams. 

But analysis will not (fortunately!) prevent the man 
from falling in love again; this time, however, he will be 
in a position to meet the experience: he will not be help- 
lessly caught up by his emotions, and he will not make 
the unsuitable alliance which was typical of his former 
state. 

The point is that one cannot live in a vacuum, one can- 
not avoid new experience, and new experience is bound to 
affect one's mental life in the future. It is quite possible 
that the new experience will in itself be unpleasant; but the 
analysed person will be able to deal with such experiences 
in a more balanced manner. 

At the opposite extreme, the neurotic can be subjected 
to a profound and distressing emotional disturbance by a 
quite trivial happening in everyday life, an event so trivial 
that it may go completely unnoticed by more balanced 
individuals. 

It will be seen that one can almost regard dreams as 
a kind of mental thermometer; the occurrence of frequent 
and distressing dreams indicates that all is not well with 
the dreamer, and suggests that to seek expert advice is 
desirable. 

People are sometimes tempted to look for the causes for 
bad dreams in some immediate experiences : something un- 
pleasant which happened that day, or perhaps a supper 
of boiled lobster ! It i true that many dreams do contain a 
fairly obvious reference to an event of the preceding day, 
md Freud even went so far as to suggest that all dreams 
incorporate such an element. I personally do not think that 
this is invariably the case, although it is possible in many 



Dreams, Nightmares, and Insomnia 103 

instances to discov r the reference to such a iccent 
expeiience. 

Analysis cannot stop here, however, for even the most 
unpleasant experience is unable to account for the extremity 
of anxiety often experienced on waking from the dream; 
and analysis will, in fact, reveal that the experience of the 
preceding day was significant precisely because it formed an 
associational link with some element already present in the 
unconscious mind of the dreamer, and these elements will 
be found to be linked to others, in a chain in which in 
many instances we shall be taken back to the emotional 
experiences of early childhood. 

To discover these forgotten experiences, and to remove 
the excessive emotion which is attached to them, (which is 
excessive just because they happened in childhood, as the 
reader will readily comprehend from what I have said in 
Chapter Six), and so to remove the source of the mental 
conflict, is the task of the psychotherapist. 



NOTE. Two of my friends who read the manuscript of this 
book suggested that perhaps Chuang Tzu's Lutterfly might 
not be as well known to well-read readers as I had assumed, 
and they asked me to recall the story. Here is the version 
from Lin Yutang's The Importance of Living. 

' Man began to be philosophical only when he saw the 
vanity of this earthly existence. Chuangtse said that he once 
dreamed of being a butterfly, and while he was in the 
dream, he felt he could flutter his wings and everything 
was real, but that on waking up, he realised that he was 
Chuangtse and Chuangtse was real. Then he thought and 
wondered which was really real, whether he was really 
Chuangtse dreaming of being a butterfly, or really a butter- 
fly dreaming of being Chuangtse. Life, then, is really a 
dream . . . ' 

(The philosopher's name is variously spelt ' Chuangtse, 
Chuang Tzu, and Chuang Chou and probably in othe- 
ways : they all refer to the same man). 



Ten 

Why We Worry 

IN EARLIER chapters I have been dealing with some of the 
more specific problems which arise in our everyday life. 
It might appear from what I have said that there are, in 
fact, definite abnormalities of behaviour, each of which has 
a separate existence and a definite ' cause/; this is not the 
case, although it is convenient to split behaviour up for 
purposes of discussion. 

If we do separate out one or other aspect of human 
behaviour for discussion, then we must keep in mind the 
total personality of the individual whose problems we have 
in hand, for, in the end, it is the total personality which 
produces any particular piece of behaviour. 

There are, indeed, certain experiences which clearly affect 
the whole personality and so the whole life of the individual 
who has the experience. It is about one of these general 
experiences that I want to say something in this chapter. 

First, as to the general effect which is produced in our 
behaviour. This effect seems to be fundamental to our 
way of life, and, indeed, to be a necessary part of our 
administrative system. It can best be described as ' sub- 
servience/ and is found throughout our community, in 
different degrees and in many situations, but perhaps it is 
most noticeable amoi>3 those who wear the white collar. 

I am not suggesting that it is peculiar to this class of 
individual, but its operation is most striking here for 
reasons which will, I hope, become apparent as our dis- 
cussion proceeds. 

104 



Why We Worry JOS 

In the typical situation that I ha\ ; in mind, whrt one 
sees s the submission of the will arid personality of one 
person to that of another, to such an extent that the sub- 
missive person completely submerges part of his personality 
and in time seems to lose that part entirely, thus acquiring 
a different personality. 

You may say that this is the normal employer- employee 
relationship. Well, maybe! But I propose to show that it 
is pathological, both as to its origin anu its operation. (If 
our community is one in which this situation is normal, 
then it is indeed a sick community.) 

Where an employer and an employee are concerned in the 
situation, one might expect that the latter would subordin- 
ate part at any rate of his personality to the employer, 
especially if the risks attached to unemployment are of any 
magnitude; and it would perhaps be difficult to put up a 
convincing case for the contrary view, if we were restricted 
to such comparatively simple situations. 

However, when we see the same sort of relationship 
developed where the employee is no longer under the direct 
personal pressure, so to speak, of the employer, then we 
begin to suspect that there is more in the relationship than 
we at first thought. 

This may lead us to ask whether there is a group in our 
community in which we still find this subservient relation- 
ship, without the excuse suggested above. And there is such 
a group, one which will have had its impact on all members 
of our community. The situation which brings our problem 
into focus with alarming clarity is the relationship between 
the Civil Servant and his superiors, both immediate and 
more remote. 

You may remember St. John Ervine's definition of the 
Civil Servant as ' a monk with the right to marry/ and it is 
true that he is hedged about with many restrictions which 
do not apply to other members of the community; on the 
other hand, he enjoys a security of tenure, which in pre- 
war days was unique, compared with employees in oth^ 
occupations. 

He could be punished for offences, whether of commis- 



106 The Dangers of Being Human 

sion or of omission, in a number of ways, but these were 
all comparatively mild, and the offence had to be serious 
indeed for him to be dismissed. In particular, it was not at 
all necessary for him to be energetic or zealous, since, if he 
were not, very little could be done about it. 

In such circumstances one might expect to find our Civil 
Servant carefree, lazy, easy-going if not insubordinate to his 
superiors, ready on very little provocation to tell him where 
to go. Yet in fact we find the picture of our typical Civil 
Servant very far removed from this. 

Much nearer to type is the willing, obedient, hardworking 
little man, worried both by his work and by his superiors, 
a man, in short, to whom the old phrase ' Your humble 
and obedient servant ' applies only too well. He is not 
merely obedient; he is anxiously obedient. 

It is necessary to emphasise the difference between or- 
dinary obedience and the anxious subservience with which I 
am dealing here. The two are psychologically quite different. 

We may be cheerfully obedient while indicating by our 
manner that we obey because it pleases us to do so; this is 
the type of obedience that a lover gives to his beloved. We 
may be angrpy obedient, thereby demonstrating that we 
obey only because we must; this is the obedience exacted 
by a harsh master from his unwilling slave. 

But in subservience, obedience has undergone a trans- 
formation, and the individual is all too anxious to obey. In- 
deed, he feels unhappy if he fails to obey. His anxiety is 
such that he frequently develops ulcers, or a ' nervous 
breakdown ', or both. (The incidence of these complaints 
in the Civil Service is surprisingly high.) 

Here then we have two situations in which most of the 
circumstances are different, and yet the end result is the 
same. 

On the one hand, we have the employer who is in the 
position to deprive hi? employee of his means of livelihood 
(pace the Unions ! ) and may even, by means of bad refer- 
ences, jeopardise his whole future and that of his depen- 
dants, driving them in times of depression to actual star- 
vation. 



Why We Worry 107 

On the other hand, we have a man 'who is far removed 
from his employer, who is the State or, at? the nearest, a 
Board or Group of Commissioners; he is apparently as safe 
and snug as a hibernating insect, and yet in reality he dis- 
plays even more anxiety than his fellow worker who is so 
precariously placed. 

This contrast was much more striking before the Second 
World War than it is now, since it is now slightly easier to 
dismiss a Civil Servant, and the average worker who is not 
a Civil Servant enjoys much more security than previously. 

The Civil Servant worries if he makes a minor mistake 
for which there is no punishment, if he forgets something 
trivial, if he receives a reference from his immediate 
superior, even if he is incorrectly dressed, or is late at the 
office. We may well ask, Whence this anxiety? My reply in 
the present chapter is that this anxiety is of the generalised 
type of anxiety neurosis. 

Very early in his researches Freud had had brought to 
his notice, in an inescapable manner, evidence of generalised 
anxiety states. In the early 1890s he analysed the picture 
as far as he knew it at the time, and wrote : ' The clinical 
picture of anxiety neurosis comprises the following symp- 
toms: 

1 General irritability, especially auditory hyperaesthesia, 
which is frequently the cause of sleeplessness. 

2 Anxious expectation, which is the nuclear symptom 
of this neurosis; it clearly reveals, too, something of 
the theory of it. We may perhaps say that there is 
here a quantum of anxiety in a free floating condition, 
which in any state of expectation controls the selec- 
tion of ideas, and is ever ready to attach itself to any 
suitable ideational content. 

3 Anxiety attacks. 

4 Equivalents of anxiety attacks. 

5 Awakening in fright 

6 Vertigo. 

7 Certain phobias. 

8 Nauseas, biliousness, ravenous hunger, diarrhoea. 

9 Paraesthesias . . . .' 



108 The Dangers of Being Human 

Quite early, too, Treud stated what he regarded as the 
cause for this type of anxiety; he regarded it as being due 
to the injurious heightening of sexual tension due to inter- 
ference with the full sexual act by such practices as coitus 
interruptus or fondling of the loved one without perform- 
ing the full sexual act. 

The latter is the situation in the ' petting party ' which 
is apparently regarded as normal in the United States; I 
have elsewhere* given reasons for thinking that these prac- 
tices are injurious to those who indulge in them, but I would 
not be prepared to follow Freud in his detailed working 
out of his theory. 

He was, like most medical men, influenced by his 
materialistic training, and so he saw a direct connection 
between dammed up Libido and anxiety. In my view he 
was mistaken in this, but, on the other hand, frustrated 
sexual activity does enter into many psychological states. 
It would however, take me too far from the present problem 
to make what I would consider the necessary psychological 
distinction between sex frustration due to moral sanctions, 
and sex frustration due to the mere physical expediency of 
the moment (in which case the individual feels free, what- 
ever the actual state of aflairs at the time). 

Freud stuck to his ideas about the origin and nature of 
this anxiety, and in 1933 he wrote, ' We then turned our 
attention to neurotic anxiety, and pointed out that it could 
be observed in three forms. 

6 Firstly, we have free-floating general apprehensiveness, 
ready to attach itself for the time being to any new possi- 
bility that may arise in the form of what we call expectant 
dread, as happens, for instance, in the typical anxiety 
neurosis. 

1 Secondly, we find it firmly attached to certain ideas, in 
what are known as phobias, in which we can still recognise 
a connection with external danger, but cannot help regard- 
ing the anxiety felt towards it as enormously exaggerated. 

' Thirdly, and finally, we have anxiety as it occurs in 
hysteria and in other severe neuroses; this anxiety either 

* Appendix to a Thesis in the University of London Library. 



Why We Worry 109 

accompanies symptoms or manifests itself independently, 
whether as an attack o. as a condition which persists for 
some time, but always without having any visible justifica- 
tion in an external danger. 

' We then asked ourselves two questions : " What are 
people afraid of when they have neurotic anxiety " and 
" How can one bring this kind of anxiety into line with 
objective anxiety felt towards an external danger/' ' 

Freud here stated his opinion that this anxiety arose in 
the first place from the experience of birth; I have dealt 
with this aspect of the problem in an earlier chapter; it 
may merely be noted here that it is not necessary to agree 
with the view that anxiety of a general type arises from 
birth anxiety : the two problems can be treated separately, 
as I have chosen to treat them in this book. 

You will have noticed some of the symptoms in the list 
given by Freud are the same as those which I have dealt 
with as different afflictions, in other chapters. This under- 
lines the view which I have put forward at the beginning of 
the present chapter, that, while it is convenient to treat ill- 
nesses as separate entities, for some purposes, it is necessary 
to take into consideration the whole situation of the patient 
if we are to get a true picture of what is happening. The 
discussion in this chapter serves to bring together some of 
the varied aspects of human behaviour which I have already 
discussed. 

Not all of us suffer from the same degree of anxiety, 
nor are we all equally subservient. Indeed, there are notable 
exceptions, and even in the Civil Service I know individuals 
who seem to be free from this kind of behaviour; I have 
not had the opportunity of analysing such a person, to find 
out wherein the difference lies. 

In a recent lecture at London University, Field Marshal 
Slim implied that it is in fact possible to be free of anxiety; 
he was reviewing the qualities necessary to make a good 
military leader in time of war, and included in the list the 
necessity that ' he should not be afraid of losing his job ' 

I have referred in other chapters to the usefulness of 
comparisons between the way we ourselves behave, and the 



116, The Dangers of Being Human 

way in which other [people behave. Here we may pause to 
make such a Comparison, for the*ly*ht it throws oil our 
problem. 

In The Southern Gates of Arabia, Miss Freya Stark 
writes : ' In this clear altitude, where the basic forces of 
the earth are building, it seems absurd to reckon time in 
human years. The scrubby plants are scarce ftiore mompn- 
tary than men who pass in transitory generations, leaving 
no more trace th'an does a fly on the steady hand of a 
craftsman at his labour. Our origins and histories become 
almost invisible against the slow lifting of the Jol. Only the 
Bedouin, who have little to lose or fear, walk over it with 
an unburdened spirit, naked and careless, " butterflies 
under the arch of Titus ", and know its scanty pastures, 
and love its inhuman freedom.' 

In suggesting that the Bedouin have little to lose or fear 
the writer would seem to be wrong, for they have life to 
lose, since this is so precariously held in the Jol, and there 
is much to fear, both from Man and from Nature. 

Yet, with the intuition of a woman and an artist, the 
writer may have realised that we do not fear these real 
objects of feai', as much as or in the same way as we fear 
the nameless objectless fear. The Bedouin may experience 
fear when he meets an enemy, or the torrents unleashed by 
the occasional rains, but he does not experience anxiety, 
as we do; and consequently he is free, and able to come to 
terms with his environment, and with life itself. 

It is not my purpose here to stigmatise the Civil Servant 
as an individual more liable than most people to attacks of 
anxiety neurosis. I hope that I have made it clear that I 
have used the Civil Servant for reference because his is a 
job with which are associated so few 'real causes of 
anxiety ', as we may call them. 

Other positions in our community tend to have real 
causes of anxiety attached to them in varying degrees, so 
that, if an individual who holds such a position does in 
f o/ *t show anxiety, even to an abnormal degree, we are 
tempted to think that there is a real cause for it: either 
a very difficult job, or an exacting employer, dangerous or 



Why We Worry 211 

difficult conditions of working, physica or mental defect in 
the employee, or something similar. 

I maintain, however, that in spite of our apparent? ability 
to find a real explanation for anxiety in such instances in 
commerce or industry, all anxiety attacks and all anxious 
behaviour, whether on the part of a civil servant or of 
another, arise* out of the original anxiety situation. 

The employee in commerce or industry seizes upon his 
' real ' cause, as the Civil Servant seizes upon the pretext of 
the gravity of a decision or the urgency of a minute as his 
real cause, and builds anxiety about that upon his early 
anxiety, which is his only anxiety. In the next chapter I 
shall point out how we seize upon illness or accident in a 
similar manner. In that discussion I shall allow some excep- 
tions to the general rule, although, in my opinion, these are 
very rare. Similarly, there are situations in which anxiety 
appears to be justified, but again these are comparatively 
few. 

Here we must bear in mind the distinction, which is 
brought out in the passages from Freud which I have 
quoted, between fear and anxiety. Fear is fear of something 
definite, whether this is real or only imagined; whereas 
anxiety is vague and indeterminate, and refers to we know 
not what unknown menace to our security. In anxious 
states we always anticipate something: we are always 
anxious about what is about to happen, and not about what 
is happening at the moment. 

The anxious individual may have every reason to sup- 
pose that there is nothing fearful around the corner, yet in 
spite of all the evidence he anticipates that something 
menacing his security is around the corner. He crosses his 
bridges before he comes to them, and even does so when 
there is clearly no bridge to be crossed, and no river to be 
negotiated. 

He sees a menace in every situaticn, however unlikely, 
however trivial. Every telephone call can mean trouble for 
him, and every telegram is a harbinger of disaster. A SUP" 
mons to the office of a superior inevitably means an error 
committed, something dreadful to be explained, if explana- 



/ 12 The Dangers of Being Human 

tion is indeed possible. Every official reminder, whether 
from the Electricity" Authority or frqpi the Tax Inspector, 
however mild in tone, is a signal for panic. Every sound in 
the night is an armed intruder, and every small event is 
similarly magnified. 

The condition will be recognised as all too common. In- 
deed, it has been suggested to me that one can compare 
anxiety (or ' worry ', as most people will prefer to call it), 
in many respects with the common cold. The latter is only 
too ' common ', and has a generally debilitating effect on 
the sufferer. 

The symptoms are not usually very dramatic: one may 
have a headache, a sore throat, or a streaming nose, but not 
much more; and yet one feels very miserable, and life loses 
all its savour. Both the major and the minor pleasures of 
life, including eating, go sour on one. 

In spite of all this, we receive precious little sympathy 
from our friends. We have, in fact, nothing wrong with us 
. . . now if we had appendicitis, or a broken leg ! ... 

Similarly with this generalised anxiety, or worry. So 
many people suffer from it, the symptoms are usually so 
comparatively unexciting, that the most we get is advice 
to stop worrying. Whereas, if we had a nice interesting 
' split-mind ' . . . ! 

I have said that the condition is widespread in our com- 
munity. By the same token, it has many and varied, and in 
the accumulation very serious, effects. You can see, by look- 
ing at the list of symptoms given by Freud, that the in- 
dividual affected by anxiety will behave in a way quite 
different from that in which we should expect a ' normal ' 
person to behave. 

In particular, the anxious person will be very ' jumpy ', 
and very sensitive, especially to criticism, or what he 
imagines to be criticism. There is an unhealthy tension 
present in this personfe mind, and tensions always produce 
other tensions. 

M,! was reminded of this, at the physical level, while on 
my way to give a lecture recently. The train was running 
past a small wood, and suddenly I noticed a slender silver 



Why We Worry U3 

birch, bent like a bow towards the nearly trees. The sudden 
sight of this tree, which was apparently ajpout to spring 
into its normal upright position at any moment, produced 
a momentary sensation of ' tension ' in myself. You will 
probably have had the same kind of feeling if you have seen 
someone working with a strong spring, and fitting it to a 
motor or other piece of mechanism. 

In a similar way, the tension in an anxious person can 
produce tensions in his associates. He may remain in the 
anxious (and subservient) state himself, but his presence 
may easily, for example, start a strike in industry. The psy- 
chological ' jumpiness ' of those who become the centres 
of industrial disturbances is very noticeable. 

What can we do about this state of affairs? Do we, in- 
deed, wish to do anything about it? 

The second question arises, because those in authority 
may wish to keep this anxiety in their subordinates, recog- 
nising its value in securing subservience and the behaviour 
which passes for conscientious, and failing to see its dis- 
advantages, its paralysing effect on the human mind, its 
sapping of mental energy, and the huge sum total of in- 
efficiency and loss to which it leads in the long run. 

If one's subordinates are expendable, then it may be 
worth while to preserve anxiety in them. Dictators have 
realised this, and have used it for their own ends, and I have 
dealt in a separate paper with the use to which it may be put 
even in a society which is apparently democratic in form. 

It may be interesting to note, in passing, the difference 
between the relationship between most Western rulers, in 
the modern world, and their subjects, on the one hand, and 
that existing between, say, some of the rulers of ancient 
Rome and their subjects, on the other. 

The Roman despot often had powers of life and death 
over their subjects, and yet the latter often enjoyed a more 
human relationship with his ruler th^n exists between the 
ruler and subject even in a country enjoying a constitutional 
monarchy. Of course, the reasons for this difference are 
probably many and varied, but anxiety enters into it. 

However that may be, it has been shown in a recent 

8 



The Dangers of Being Human 
study of crowd behaviour that one individual can, in many 
situations, control Uie behaviour, ind so the fate, oi large 
numbers of his fellow beings. Sucn a one may see the 
value of subservience, and therefore of anxiety, in others, 
and put it to his own uses. 

Most of us will recognise the need to do something about 
so great a problem. What can be done ? Three courses seem 
possible: one preventive, one curative, and one something 
of both. 

The prevention of this general type of anxiety would 
seem to take us back to the methods of Grantley Dick 
Read, which I have outlined in Chapter Six. This means 
making our entry into this world as easy as possible, and, 
if necessary, sacrificing to this end some of the trappings of 
civilisation which surround pregnancy and birth. 

Even if you do not accept the view that there is the con- 
nection between birth experience and anxiety, it is still 
possible to alleviate this anxiety in the earliest stages of 
growth by having sufficient psychological insight into the 
development of the child mind, and, when necessary, having 
recourse to the advice of the expert in this field, and even 
to psychotherapy, in some instances. 

This once again underlines my contention that analysis 
is not only for the manifestly sick in mind : it is also for 
those of us who pride ourselves on our normality. 

The third method of dealing with the anxiety-ridden 
individual entails tolerance and understanding on the part 
of his fellows, and especially by his superiors, and avoid- 
ance as far as is practicable of situations which we think 
are likely to provoke an onset of the more serious attacks 
of panic. 

In some ways this is no more than a plea for greater 
humanity in dealing with one's fellow men; but it also 
calls for insight into the workings of the mind, and parti- 
cularly of the unconscious mind, of the person with whom 
one is dealing. 

The best will in the world, if it is combined with ignor- 
ance of unconscious factors, is likely to do more harm than 
that of one who sets out to dominate his fellows. In the 



Why We Worry 

latter.instance, the victim at least has sfvme chance of luiow- 

ing where he stands. 

I am convinced that a society from which anxilty had 
been banished would be a far healthier and happier society. 
It would, naturally, be a different society. Our subordinates 
would no longer ' jump to it/ unless ' it ' were worth jump- 
ing to for its own sake. It would be in a truer sense demo- 
cratic, as our present society is not. 

We think that we enjoy the freedom of democracy, 
because the structure of our political system is democratic. 
But democratic institutions are no guarantee of democracy. 
If we do not think democratically, if we do not feel demo- 
cratically, then ' democracy ' is a menace to civilisation. 

It was the realisation of this fact which led to Plato's 
condemnation of democracy in the Republic. In his state, 
under democracy, men were not mentally free, whereas his 
philosopher-kings were. 

Failure to realise the importance of democratic thinking, 
which means freedom of choice by well-informed men, 
who are not at the mercy of the forces of the Uncon- 
scious, may quickly lead to the disappearance of demo- 
cracy, in everything but form, and perhaps* even in that. 

That democracy of form is not enough, even in the small 
community of the factory, was brought out clearly in Leslie 
Halward's play, ' Men at Work.' The strike in this play 
broke out not only in spite of, but perhaps because of, 
the existence of that most democratic of institutions, the 
joint consultation council. The need for democratic think- 
ing and feeling was stressed by both the works doctor and 
the trade union leader. There, in this play, one could also 
see some good examples of anxiety cases. 

Some quite well informed political commentators have 
expressed surprise at the ease with which the democratic 
pattern of government in Eastern Germany has been con- 
verted to the normal pattern of Soviet totalitarianism. Com- 
paratively few structural alterations were required in the 
governmental machinery to achieve this apparent transfor- 
mation. (Some commentators * explain ' the phenomenon by 
reference to the recency of the change from 



116 The Dangers of Being Human 

We need not, however, be surprised. Democratic thought 
has been unac 'eptaole to the Gei/mn for many decades, 
and it was futile to expect to impart freedom of thought 
by mere demonstration that it was a Good Thing: one 
might as well try to cure a paranoiac of his delusions by 
demonstrating that they are Bad Things. 

If we think freely, then we act without compulsion, and 
the actual form of government is a secondary consideration; 
in spirit at least it will be democratic. If we are not free in 
mind, if we suffer from worry and anxiety of the general 
type with which I have been dealing in this chapter, then 
we are slaves, however democratic in form our government 
may be. 



Eleven 

Why We Fall 111 

THE READER will by this time be well aware of my view 
that even the most ' physical * of afflictions has a psycho- 
logical factor, and that, in many instances, this factor is an 
extremely important one and must be taken into account 
in any serious attempt to cure the patient of his or her 
trouble. 

But in spite of all that I have written, and in spite of my 
numerous references to curing many illnesses by psycho- 
logical methods, you may still have the idea that the psycho- 
logical factor is, so to speak, merely incidental, an appen- 
dage added to the ' real ' illness, which latter is caused by 
the onslaught of bacteria, or a virus, or physical damage 
as in an accident. Those holding this view would suggest 
even that we are depressed because, say, we have indiges- 
tion. 

Freud, however, suggested a view which is exactly the 
opposite of this; he would insist that we have indigestion 
because we are depressed, and that in general we fall ill 
because we are mentally ill at ease. In some instances this 
argument may seem to resemble the famous dispute as to 
which came first, the hen or the egg, but the psychologist 
would insist that in every instance the psychological factor 
is the primary factor. 

To give expression to this view Freud coined the phrase, 
' the flight into illness/ suggesting quite vividly by this 
expression the concept of the patient taking refuge in a state 
of being ill. Even those psychologists, who do not assent to 



118 The Dangers of Being Human 

the main concepts of Freud, would agree that there is an 
element of flight, of escape, in many illnesses. 

One eminent professor of psychology confessed that when 
he had to take to his bed with a cold, he enjoyed the ex- 
perience of being waited upon, and in particular he enjoyed 
the feeling that now he need no longer do any work 1 

Those psychologists who accept the analytical view would 
go very much further than this, and would assert that in all 
illness the patient is seeking to escape from some mental 
conflict, from some impossible emotional situation, that he 
is using the illness, one might say, to dodge emptional 
trouble. Many laymen would dissent from this view, and so 
would many physicians, and yet, as medical knowledge pro- 
gresses and widens its scope, so the list of illnesses which 
are regarded as having a psychological origin increases. 

So much progress in this direction has been made in the 
past few years that in that period there has evolved the con- 
cept of psychosomatic disorders and psychosomatic medi- 
cine, and there is an ever increasing literature on this new 
branch of medicine. More and more illnesses are being 
recognised as ' psychogenic,' that is, as being caused by 
some psychological conflict. 

I have mentioned earlier a number of these psychosomatic 
disorders; one of the earliest to be recognised was duodenal 
ulcers and related states; to this has been added coronary 
thrombosis, asthma, various skin diseases, defects in the 
circulation of the blood and so on, and to all this has been 
added the concept of ' accident proneness/ the idea, amply 
borne out by research, that some people have far more 
than their share of accidents. 

The physical mechanism by which mental factors affect 
our physical bodies and produce ' real ' illnesses is now 
fairly well recognised, but the actual process remains a 
mystery. The emotional factors concerned set the autonomic 
section of the central nervous system into motion, often 
with some activity of the endocrine organs (our * glands '), 
and these in turn have a direct physical effect on other 
parts of our bodies. 

This is so well recognised that recourse is sometimes had 



Why We Fall III 119 

to surgical operation to * cure ' a psychogenic disorder; 
thus, if part of the bloxl circulatory jystena is not func- 
tioning properly because of the action of the sympathetic 
nervous system, then partial sympathectomy (that is, cut- 
ting some of the nerve fibres to the affected part) will cause 
the symptom to disappear, and circulation in the affected 
part will appioach nearer to normal. 

Such an operation, however, does not deal with the psy- 
chological cause of the incorrect functioning of the sym- 
pathetic nervous system, does not remove the mental con- 
flict which is at the bottom of all the trouble, so that the 
patient's conflict is liable to find expression in some new 
symptom, some new physical disorder, in due course. 

Some years ago Mr. Attlee had eczema of the feet, and 
had to retire temporarily from political life. It was 
announced at the time that this was psychogenic in orgin, 
and the strained circumstances of Mr. Attlee at that time 
were such that it would cause no surprise to a psycho- 
therapist that he had produced this symptom. He had, in 
fact, fled into illness from the extreme difficulty of the cur- 
rent political situation. 

We might earlier have seized upon the clue given to us 
by some popular expressions (which often have an uncanny 
knack of revealing the working of the Unconscious. Thus 
we have expressions such as ' this person makes me sick/ 
' getting cold feet/ or, of one who gets into financial diffi- 
culties, ' catching a cold/ 

I have mentioned before the case of the wife who was 
physically sick whenever her (apparently loved) husband 
approached; and I know of several cases in my own experi- 
ence of people who have developed afflictions of the feet, 
such as mild forms of eczema, or circulatory troubles, as a 
result of anxiety over situations facing them which appeared 
impossible to meet. 

From my own observation too, I a-n quite convinced that 
most, perhaps all, cases of common cold have a psycho- 
logical origin. This may seem fantastic to some, especially 
if you have learnt to regard a cold as being caused by a 
virus. 



120 , The Dangers of Being Human 

Yet I know of many instances in which people have 
developed a cold without any knowledge of contact with 
another person with a cold and, contrariwise, of others who 
have been in intimate contact with a person with a cold and 
have not developed one themselves. 

I have examined the problem experimentally to a small 
extent, by deliberately putting myself in the way of infec- 
tion while at the same time feeling certain that I would not, 
in fact, catch the disease. On the other hand, when I have 
developed a serious cold (which nowadays is rarely), then I 
have always been able to discover, by a short analysis, 
that I was psychologically prepared for it. 

I have put this concept into the rather flippant statement 
that you catch a cold when you are in the mood for one. 
That this idea is not as bizarre as it seems is borne out by 
the results of the research carried out recently at the Com- 
mon Cold Research Unit at Salisbury. 

This unit was started in 1946, and is run by the Ministry 
of Health and the Medical Research Council. Volunteers, 
who must be suitable for the research, are isolated and 
subjected to experiment, in an endeavour to find out how 
colds are passed from one person to another and, if possible, 
to discover a means of preventing such infection. 

In the course of this research a number of popular ideas 
as to how or why we catch cold were investigated. One of 
these was the notion that if you sit around in damp cloth- 
ing you will catch a cold. Volunteers were sent out in the 
pouring rain for several hours; while they were out, the 
heating in their rooms was turned off, and when they 
returned they were made to sit in their cold rooms in their 
wet clothes for an hour, and even when allowed <ro change 
had to keep on their wet socks. 

In spite of all this and of feeling thoroughly miserable 
they did not catch a cold ! Other volunteers were infected 
with a strong solution of the cold virus. Some of these 
developed colds, but about half failed to do so, although 
the degree of infection to which they had been exposed was 
far higher than that which is supposed in normal contact 
to lead to our catching a cold. The same is true of volun- 



Why We Fall III 121 

teers^who associate with children who are suffering, from 
colds. i \ 

In addition to all this, it was found that isolated volun- 
teers could not be infected by people suffering from artifi- 
cially induced colds, and yet could be infected by a person 
with a natural cold. It will be seen that the picture of how 
and why we* catch the common cold is much more com- 
plicated than the advertisements, and even some doctors, 
would lead one to suspect. (There is, incidentally, no cure 
known as yet for the common cold). There are obviously 
many t factors which decide whether or not we catch a cold 
on being exposed to the virus, and I suggest that one of 
the most important of these factors is the mental state of the 
individual at the time of such exposure. 

An individual with a well integrated personality, not sub- 
jected to any undue emotional strain, is much less likely 
to catch a cold than one who is the subject of mental strain 
and conflict. If our mental state is such that we ' need ' an 
illness, in order to escape the conflict, then we shall seize 
upon the first disease entity which presents itself, which is 
suitable for our, unconscious, purpose. This may be merely 
a common cold, or may be something muchtmore serious. 

Groddeck has suggested that the illnesses which we have 
are symbols of our inner conflicts, and this certainly seems 
to be true of many of our complaints, such as the common 
cold, asthma, sickness and vomiting, afflictions of the hands 
and feet, and many skin diseases. 

The physician attacks these with medicaments, but the 
psychotherapist, regarding the illness merely as a symbol of 
something more important and more deep-seated, attacks 
the unconscious conflicts. When these are resolved and 
when, in consequence, the need for illness is removed, then 
the physical symptoms, the illness as ordinarily understood, 
will also disappear. 

Closely linked with this flight into illness is the question 
of accident proneness. As I have already mentioned, some 
people have far more accidents, whether at home or at 
work, at play or in the streets, than would be their share, if 
all the accidents which happen were evenly distributed 



122 The Dangers of Being Human 

throughout the population; and the number of accidents 
which these people have is so much above the normal that 
the term ' accident prone ' has been ujed to describe them. 

It is my own experience that many of these people do in 
fact have just those accidents which symbolise most aptly 
their inner unconscious wishes. One person whom I know 
would, consciously, like a family of children, yet when- 
ever she is pregnant she manages to become involved in an 
accident which precipitates a miscarriage. These accidents 
appear to be quite genuine, and yet are so ingeniously 
devised that it looks very much as though the unconscious 
mind of this lady has had a hand in producing the accident. 
(Freud noted the peculiar delicacy with which unconsciously 
motivated incorrect acts were carried out, so that the ' acci- 
dental ' movement is often far more adroitly performed 
than are the individual's normal acts.) 

In my opinion, and from my own observation, it is clear 
that in the case of this lady there is an overwhelming, but 
unconscious, dislike of having a child, which leads to the 
unconscious destruction of every child at an early stage of 
pregnancy. 

With some people this dislike of childbirth may be due 
to an unconscious hatred of the potential father of the 
child, but in others it may arise from the early childhood 
experiences of the mother, which have given rise to an un- 
conscious hatred of all other children. 

A research project has just been started at London 
University into the causes of the premature birth of chil- 
dren. The research team will be concerned mainly with 
physical conditions, either in the physical state of the 
mother, or the conditions in which she lives or u^h. 

But I have already suggested that it is probable that there 
is an important psychological factor involved in most, if 
not in all, cases of premature birth, and I have suggested 
that a study of such a factor would be well worth while, 
although I recognise the difficulties which would be encoun- 
tered. (It is far easier to assess the physical state of an in- 
dividual, than to examine the emotional forces operating at 
his unconscious levels.) 



Wny We Fall III 123 

All other types of accident, too, have a mental aspect, 
and 1 think that we car take as literally true the statement 
which figured in the Safety First posters Which Appeared 
in the streets some time ago, ' Accidents do not happen, 
they are caused/ 

I am inclined to say that the only true accidents are those 
resulting from the ' blind ' operation of natural forces as 
when one is struck by lightning or by a falling tree; the 
type of accident, in fact, which is described rather whim- 
sically by insurance companies as ( Acts of God'; even 
here there may be psychological factors involved, but a dis- 
cussion of these would take us too far from our present 
theme. 

Be that as it may, all other accidents are undoubtedly in 
my opinion the result of the operation of forces in the un- 
conscious minds of the people involved. 

Some of these accidents may be comparatively trivial 
and may lead to no more than slight loss and inconvenience, 
as in the instance in which a husband, by what in other 
circumstances might have been regarded as a clever piece 
of juggling, managed to drop one of a group of breakfast 
cups; he was able to identify the cup, from the broken 
pieces, as the one used by his wife, and then he realised that 
his wife had in fact provoked him that morning, but that 
he had suppressed the urge to be angry. This anger, re- 
pressed into the unconscious, (where it no doubt found 
suitable material waiting to be allied to it), returned to 
consciousness as a mistaken act, in which the husband, so to 
speak, broke his wife's cup instead of breaking her head. 

Such an accident is trivial, even when it happens, as this 
one did, *c a time during the war when pottery was very 
scarce and difficult to come by; other accidents may be 
much more serious and may lead to severe loss of property, 
injury to the person, or even death. 

A wider realisation of this fact, ai.d a greater attention to 
the forces which operate at unconscious levels to produce 
accidents, would be more likely to reduce the risk of 
accident than all the safety first precautions that the wit of 
man can devise. 



124 The Dangers of Being Human 

I have recently been given an interesting corroboration 
of this concept of bcth illness and accident as being a flight 
from emotional difficulty. A friend with a wide experience 
as a member of amateur dramatic societies tells me that the 
membership of these societies, of which there are a very 
large number throughout the country, generally precludes 
the possibility of having understudies for the principals in 
the societies' productions. This means that if any of the 
principals were tc fall ill, the current production would 
have to be postponed. 

In fact, this very rarely happens, and the members of 
the many casts remain remarkably fit for the two or three 
performances which are the normal amateur c run/ This is 
in spite of the fact that most of the productions are during 
the period from January to March, when illness in this 
country, and particularly the common cold, and influenza, 
reaches its peak. The members of the cast may frequently 
fall ill after the production. 

There are, of course, exceptions, and my friend men- 
tioned one girl who played leading parts, who almost in- 
variably had a small accident just before the first night. 
This resulted in an almost routine announcement before 
the curtain rose that Miss So-and-So was playing under 
difficulties. This announcement naturally secured for this 
girl the sympathy of the audience. 

That she probably needed this was suggested by the 
general recognition of the fact that she was not up to the 
usual rather high standard of this particular society. The 
minor accidents could then be regarded as an insurance on 
the part of the girl's unconscious mind. 

This closely resembles the experience of one ul my own 
patients. This young man told me that when he used to 
take part in sporting events he almost invariably pulled a 
muscle on the great day, thus either putting himself out 
of action or making the going very difficult for himself. 
This did not happen during the preceding training period; 
yet during training he went through just the same exercises, 
and put out just as much muscular effort, as on the day 
itself. This indicates that the pulling of the muscle on the 



WHyWeFdllll 125 

actual day was closely connected with the actual competi- 
tion 'in a sporting event 

This patient stated that he was not particularly tanxious 
to shine at sports, at which he knew he was not very 
accomplished. This was his conscious attitude, aind would 
seem to discount any suggestion that he had any need to 
escape from the stress of competition in sport by means of 
snT&ll accidents such as I have mentioned. 

Yet during analysis he produced a dieam which clearly 
indicated a desire to excel in sports, especially in running 
events. This desire was quite strong, but was not recog- 
nised by this young man, and remained operating at un- 
conscious levels. 

These instances illustrate very neatly the flight into either 
illness or accident; and I am always interested to note how 
often a member of the public, when I put this idea across 
to him, will at first react strongly against it, and consider 
the idea to be far-fetched, and then on reconsideration 
will admit that ' there may be something in what you say/ 
and will end by producing further evidence in favour of 
the concept, as did my friend who is an amateur actor. 

If, as I have suggested, both illness and accident are the 
result of the operation of emotional factors in our uncon- 
scious minds then it would obviously pay us very hand- 
somely to find out as much as possible about how these 
factors become unconscious, the form of illness or accident 
which they are likely to produce, and the best means of 
bringing the emotional conflicts to light and so, in the usual 
way, dissipating their energy, so that they lose their power, 
and are no longer able to make us fall a victim either to 
infection or error. 



Twelve 

The Meaning of Illness and Accident 

I HAVE made several references in other chapters to the fact 
that the illnesses with which we are afflicted from time to 
time, and the accidents to which we are prone have a mean- 
ing within the total pattern of our lives. In the last chapter 
I mentioned a number of instances, and especially those in 
which our everyday expressions reveal the unconscious 
forces that are at work to produce our many afflictions: 
expressions such as * getting cold feet ', ' catching a cold ', 
and so on. 

I also mentioned an instance of an accident, a very minor 
one, which showed quite clearly the emotional forces which 
were at work at the unconscious level in the mind of the 
person who performed the accidental act. Whether or not 
we accept the individual interpretations which analysts 
put upon an instance of illness, or an accident, it seems in- 
disputable that there is a close connection between our 
mental life and the events which affect our bodies. 

This view has been accepted by some workers and has 
been made the basis of an attempt to estimate personality, 
which is the sum total of our mental characteristics, on the 
basis of physical measurements, which are so much more 
easily made than are direct measurements of personality 
traits. 

Two of the best known of these attempts are those of 
Kretschmer, who developed the idea earlier in this cen- 
tury, and, more recently, Sheldon. Both of these workers 

seemed to think that the body was the primary factor, 

126 



The Cleaning of Illness and Accident 127 

which influenced mental traits, and that, therefore a3 one 
had 'to do was to find out which bodily characteristics 
affected which mental states and then, by measu?ing the 
body, one could state what type of mind the individual 
concerned must possess. 

Neither of these attempts has proved successful, and I 
think that very good reasons could be advanced for sug- 
ge&cing that such attempts can never be more than partially 
successful; however, this is not the place to enter into that 
particular controversy. 

I mention the point of view in order to contrast it with 
that ot others, including myself, who look at the body-mind 
relationship from the opposite standpoint. I mentioned in 
Chapter One the description of the typical neurasthenic 
which Sir Cyril Burt has given, and his view that ' drooping 
spirits and a drooping body go together'. Many psycho- 
logists would go much further than this, and would assert 
that drooping spirits are the cause of a drooping body. 

In particular Georg Groddeck, whom I mentioned in 
Chapter Seven, regarded the body as being so much the 
servant of the mind that he stated that the body is a symbol 
of one's mental state. The title of his book Ler Mensch als 
Symbol, reveals his attitude towards this matter quite 
clearly. 

Any one of us, in fact, is a symbol, as far as our outward 
appearance is concerned, of our inward mental life and 
particularly of our unconscious mental life. In addition, 
Groddeck maintains the point of view put forward in the 
present book, that we cannot profitably separate the body 
from the mind for examination and treatment. 

Indeed,* ne goes much further, and suggests that the 
whole to be kept in mind is the body-mind of man in rela- 
tion to the cosmos. He writes : ' The mention of air brings 
me to yet another division of the human being which is of 
high importance not merely to medical science but also to 
our civilisation, viz. the differentiation of body and mind, 
to which, under the pressure of the notion of trinity, a 
third member has been added, the soul or spirit. 

' As I have tried to show in my book, Der Mensch als 



c 



728 The Dangers of Being Huiian 

Symbol, the earlier stages of culture are charged wijh the 
idea that wind, air, Jireath and soul^ are identical, represent- 
ing one^ and this same cosmic, extra j liuman power. At the 
present time we are trying to recover the earlier conception 
of a unit, the body-mind, and make it the foundation of our 
theory ancl action. 

' My own opinion is that this assumption ds one we all 
naturally make and never entirely abandon, and, further- 
more, that by our iheritage of thought we Europeans are all 
led to trace a relationship between the individual and the 
cosmos. By following up this line of thought we gain a 
growing insight into the symbolic relation between man and 
his world, a man as a part existing in the whole, and at the 
same time, a whole made up of parts. 

' We understand man better when we see the whole in 
each of his parts, and we get nearer to a conception of the 
universe when we look upon him as part of the whole." 
This view, then, emphasises that, when we look at our 
fellow men, we are being presented with a symbol of their 
unconscious minds, and, if we are in a position to interpret 
the symbol correctly, then we can understand what manner 
of man he is.*; 

Incidentally, it would be fascinating to attempt to relate 
Groddeck's idea with concepts such as that set out in ' The 
Myth of Er ' in Plato's Republic, in which those about to 
be born again are given the task of choosing a new body; 
but this must wait for another time. 

An attempt to work out the many ways in which bodily 
functions represent mental traits would take us into the 
complex field of depth analysis, and would be out of place 
in the present book, but the general idea may 1^ -illustrated 
by reference to some of the instances which I have men- 
tioned in this book, and to others within my experience 
and that of my colleagues. 

It is important to rvoid the impression that any given 
symbol has one and only one meaning. I have given a 
warning against this view, in connection with the symbols 
in 'dreams; in that connection the warning is particularly 
necessary, since the popular view associates one element in 



The Meaning of Illness and Accident 129 

a dream with some specific event in the life of* the 
dreamer. 

A similar warning is necessary with regard to tRe sym- 
bolic nature of illness and accident. The instances which I 
give are illustrations only, and one can never say that the 
same physical state in two different people represents the 
same aspect of the mind in both cases; we must regard each 
case as unique, but can at the same time be guided in our 
interpretations by our knowledge of other instances. 

With this reservation in mind, we can look at some of 
the interesting ways in which individual illnesses and acci- 
dents represent mental attitudes. Some illness is seen fairly 
easily to represent some mental aspect in the patient. 

This is true of many cases of sickness, when the sick 
person is nearly always 'sick of something'; I mentioned 
the wife who was sick whenever her husband approached 
her, and with small children in particular we can often dis- 
cover the emotional factor which is at the back of cases of 
sickness. 

This is especially noticeable when the children are attend- 
ing school, and many a mother must have had a feeling that 
the sickness, or headache, of which her child complains, 
which she has no reason to regard as a case of shamming, 
really represents some trouble at school, some unusual diffi- 
culty with a new subject, or a clash of personalities with a 
new teacher. 

It may be noted in passing that the latter is responsible 
for a great deal of retardation of schoolchildren, and results 
in emotional disturbance in the child, which interferes with 
its progress & school, and may even produce minor illnesses 
which keep the child from school. 

This is especially important if such a clash of personali- 
ties occurs during the year or so preceding the Common 
Entrance Examination, taken at the age of eleven. I have 
myse 1 ^ been consulted concerning several cases of children, 
who have been making good progress at school, and have 
suddenly struck a bad patch in their work. 

In one instance at least, the difference between the child's 
work in the intelligence tests and her showing in the tests 
9 



130 The Dangers of Being H 

of scholastic attainment was so pronounced,, especially in 
view of her good work at school in other years, that it was 
quite clear that the trouble lay in the bad relationship 
existing between the child and her new teacher. This is a 
point which should be kept in mind by those who are res- 
ponsible for allocating children to their new schools at this 
critical stage of their life. 

I mentioned, too, the symbolic value of headache", in 
my reference to Karen Horney's patient. Here, the head- 
ache was a representative for, or substitute for, anger (re- 
pressed) against either members of his family, or of his 
social circle, or of his firm. Perhaps, once again, we may 
invoke popular expression, at the slang level, as an indica- 
tion that this unconscious substitution does, in fact take 
place. How often one hears the expression, ' Oh, he gives 
me a headache!' 

Groddeck would suggest that the part of the body which 
is, so to speak, chosen for the symptom, indicates the state 
of affairs in the never-ending strife between the traditional 
three parts of the body the head, the breast and the belly, 
and their mental equivalents. Whether or not we accept his 
more general theory, it is often apparent in the course of 
analysis that the appropriate symptom, or illness, is chosen, 
in any particular psychological situation. 

The same would seem to be true of those instances in 
which recourse is not had to analysis. The analyst has the 
opportunity, of course, of observing some of the latter, in 
everyday life, and can, with perhaps less assurance, inter- 
pret them accordingly. This is what Freud did to some 
extent, in his Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and it is 
always interesting to observe these instanccb, rt nd so to 
gain insight into the motives, the true motives, of one's 
associates. 

This is particularly true of those minor accidents, which 
may be classified as mistaken acts. These are true acci- 
dents, but the results of the act are so trivial, that they are 
not usually regarded as accidents in the ordinary sense. 

It is surprising how often one's associates will reveal 
the unconscious forces at work in their minds, and this is 



Th& Meaning of Illness and Accident 131 

true^&ven o* those laymen who Jiave a knowledge of 
Freudian symbolism. Sl ; ps of the tongu 2, lapses of memory, 
dropping things, leaving things behind, or picking up 
articles which do not belong to one, all tell their story to 
the trained observer. 

The symbolic nature of some stealing has also 6een men- 
tioned in other chapters, both with regard to the petty 
theit in which most children indulge at one time or another, 
and also in connection with kleptomania in adults. I 
referred to the mother in the play, ' Black Chiffon ', who 
stole a, nightdress of that material, when she was quite well 
able to buy as many as she could wish for. The point of the 
play was that there existed between the mother and her son 
an unusually strong emotional tie. This was threatened by 
the forthcoming marriage of the son. 

The mother happened to go into the bedroom of the 
future daughter-in-law, who was staying at the house, and 
found her in bed, wearing a nightdress of black chiffon. 
It now becomes clear that the subsequent theft of such a 
garment was symbolic, and that, at an unconscious level, 
the mother wished to be in the girl's place. 

The general symbolic nature of clothes h^s been admir- 
ably treated in Professor J. C. Flugel's book on the psy- 
chology of clothes. The author points out both the value of 
clothing in a general way, which is much more than either 
to keep us warm or to cover our nakedness, and also dis- 
cusses the way in which certain articles of clothing, and 
certain methods of wearing clothes, can reveal the pro- 
cesses at work in the mind of the wearer. 

Even the turning to nudism, in our community, may in 
most cases, if not in all, have an underlying connection 
with our emotional relationships with others, and particu- 
larly with our parents. 

This was certainly the case with two young girls who 
were at one time at one of Anna Freud's Nursery Schools; 
these youngsters absolutely refused to wear clothes, and 
removed them destructively when attempts were made to 
clothe them. They were known to have had an unfortunate 
history, as the result of the war, and when the helpers at 



The Dangers of Being Huiflan 
the fyome asked for guidance, Anna Freud very wisely said 
that the girls were to be allowed to go without clothe^ but 
should be kept *n a warm room. 

I do not know whether it was necessary in this instance 
to resort to actual therapy, but in time the girls recovered 
from this* unusual attitude towards clothing, and then con- 
sented to be dressed in the normal manner. Thus, an un- 
usual attitude towards clothing, on the part of member of 
one family, or of the larger social group, will be found to 
represent some emotional attitude of an unusual character. 

Actions and gestures, whether or not they lead to actual 
accidents, again can be seen to represent emotional atti- 
tudes on the part of the person concerned. I referred in 
Chapter Three to the significance of awkwardness with the 
limbs, and especially with the hands. This also is true of 
afflictions of the hands, or accidents brought about by 
means of the hands. 

I have recently been consulted about a young girl who 
has red, almost purple hands, with very little heat in them, 
and affected continually by chilblains. This has been re- 
garded until now as a purely physical matter, and, as her 
mother has herself rather large and red hands (although 
without the cold and the chilblains), it has also been re- 
garded as an inherited condition. 

The physicians have tried to do something about it, with 
treatment with calcium and Vitamin D, but to no avail. 
The girl seems to be quite well in all other respects, and is 
good looking, and has undergone training as a mannequin, 
and in beauty culture. Her hands, however, prevent her 
from taking up either of these professions. 

Now, I have not had the opportunity of finding c'lt much 
about this particular girl, nor of even commencing an 
analysis, but I should not be at all surprised, if analysis 
were undertaken, to learn that there is an unusual 
emotional attitude underlying the condition of this young 
girl's hands. If that were the case, then analysis should 
rectify the matter, and would open to her the careers which 
I have mentioned. 

We need not be surprised that the hands, their actions 



Tke Meaning of Illness and Accident 13 J 

and t "heir conditions are so often symbols of our ; inner 
emotional life. Our hards do so much for us, that they also 
come to mean a great deal to us. This is notably true in 
sexual behaviour; this is illustrated rather dramatically by 
the action of the Roman Catholic youth mentioned in 
Chapter Seven who developed such a severe guilt complex 
that he attempted to cut off his arm, with the result that it 
hau to be amputated. 

The symbolism at work here will be quite clear to any 
trained observer, and the layman will have more than an 
inkling of it, if he bears in mind the biblical quotation 
which is so apposite. I have said that I do not propose to 
deal with sexual aberrations, in this book, and for the same 
reason it would not be the place to expand upon the sexual 
significance of many of our everyday acts. 

In Chapter Three I mentioned regressive behaviour, both 
in older children and in adults. I said there that this was a 
tendency to go back to forms of behaviour appropriate to 
an earlier age in our life. It is not at all unusual in children, 
especially with the older child when a new baby arrives in 
the family, and often includes a spell of bed-wetting. The 
behaviour here represents the unconscious wish to be a 
baby again, and to receive all the love and attention which 
the mother formerly lavished on the child. 

There is this element of childishness in most of us, and 
it is shown up very strongly in moments of stress in our 
lives. How often does a grown man cry out for his mother, 
when he is in extremity ! 

Great stress of this kind, particularly the conditions of 
battle in wartime, can lead to more or less permanent re- 
gression of behaviour in a man, so that the patient regresses 
right back to early childhood, and behaves exactly like a 
young baby. He loses all power of speech, making only the 
unintelligible noises which are appropriate to this early 
age; he crawls about on all fours, and requires attention 
for all his needs. 

Most illness has some element of this regression to child- 
hood, and it will probably prove to be a complicating fac- 
tor, even where it is not the major cause. The illness, to 
9* 



1 34 The Dangers of Being 

this extent, represents our flight from the difficulties (f the 

world, to the safety of our mother's arms. * 

This flight to the mother receives symbolic representation 
in many other fields, of course, and particularly in art and 
religion; but this is not the place to discuss these aspects 
of our life which receive expression through the arts, reli- 
gion, customs and conventions, which are similarly influ- 
enced, although often by the emotional experience of the 
group rather than that of the individual. The underlying 
emotional causes, and the processes by which they are 
represented by symbols, are the same in both instances. 

Accidents, whether major or only minor ones, can be 
shown to have a special significance for the person involved. 
The accident, if it is not serious, may, as Freud has sug- 
gested, act as a substitute for a suicide. It is in fact a symbol 
showing that the individual wishes to commit suicide, or 
to let you know that he so wishes. 

This may be true of even quite trivial accidents, such 
as the small cuts a man inflicts upon himself while shaving. 
In this connection we may bear in mind once again popular 
sayings which indicate the mechanisms which are involved, 
such sayings as ' He has cut his own throat ' and ' Cutting 
off one's nose to spite one's face J . 

In other instances, a minor accident may be part of a 
process of identifying oneself with someone else. I noticed 
this in the case of a small boy, the grandson of a great man, 
whose parents were separated. The small boy spent a great 
deal of his time with his, obviously much admired, grand- 
father. 

One day the latter had an accident and cut his finger. 
Very shortly afterwards the small boy caught his finger in 
the chain of his cycle, and hurt it, although not very 
seriously. I noticed that the wound was on the same joint 
of the same finger as that of the grandfather ! Here seems 
to be a very literal acting out of ' Where thou goest, I 
will go '. 

I have dealt in Chapter Nine with the symbolism which is 
so important in dreams and nightmares, and it is not neces- 
sary for me to discuss this further at the moment. It is, of 



The* Meaning of Illness and Accident I3L, 

course, a subject of inexhaustible interest, and sever ai good 
boofts on the subject have appeared since Freud's own 
Interpretation of Drtams. t 

I hope that I have shown that our lives are symbols of 
our minds, or, if you prefer, spirits, and that the illnesses 
and accidents which befall us in the course of our lives are 
symbols of factors of the mind, and, because the illness or 
accident is against our own interests then the factors at 
work must similarly be at war with other jparts of our minds. 

The illness or accident is a typical product of the com- 
plexes which I have mentioned, and represent the activity 
of those complexes. If we are able to understand the sym- 
bols, if we can learn the language of the unconscious, then 
we are so much the more in charge of our destinies. 

It is my view that mind, or spirit, is the ultimate, primary 
' stuff ' of our experience, of the universe, and that our 
individual minds are the primary aspect of our total being. 
Our minds, then, use our bodies as tools, or as a means of 
expression, as an artist uses his medium of expression. 

If accident or illness affects the body, then manifestly 
something has gone wrong : the mind is misusing the body. 
The type of illness or accident, as I have suggested, can 
reveal to us, if we possess psychological insight, the manner 
in which the mind is misusing the body, and this know- 
ledge, if applied correctly, will enable us to correct the dis- 
integrating tendency of the mind in any particular instance, 
and so save the body from the effects of that disintegration. 

How successful we have been in this, how well we have 
lived our lives, will inevitably be shown in our bodies, 
which are themselves symbols of the inner life. 



Thirteen 

Some Asides and a Summing Up 

I SUGGESTED in the last chapter that illness and accident 
could both be regarded as symbols. It is not impossible to 
accept the view, advanced by Groddeck, that our whole life 
is symbolic: that Man is in fact a Symbol. Be that as it 
may, it is certainly not difficult to regard both illness and 
accidents as symbols of our inner conflicts, perhaps in a 
way rather less limited than that suggested by Freud in 
his concept of the ' flight into illness '. 

If this is so, the question at once arises as to what, if 
anything, can bj done about it. It is clear, of course, that 
we can continue to combat disease with medicine and sur- 
gery, and with research designed to increase the scope of 
these methods, and I should certainly not decry the efforts 
of doctors in these directions, nor attempt to belittle the 
magnificent work which is performed in these fields. Nor 
would I wish to abate in any way the efforts which are con- 
tinually being made to reduce the risk of accident, whether 
in the factory, in the home, or on the roads. 

Yet when all that is possible has been done ir these 
directions, it seems to me that much more could be achieved 
by making ourselves more complete and satisfactory human 
beings. Here psychotherapy can be of enormous assistance, 
and I look forward to the day when the physician, the sur- 
geon, and the psychotherapist work together, all of them 
regarding the sick patient as a mental-physical entity, and 
the problem of curing him as a mental-physical problem. 

At present it is only too often the case that the psycho- 

136 



Seme Asides and a Summing Up 137 

therms! isithS last resorU When all other methods fail, 
theh* it may happen tljat the patient *s referred to a psy- 
chiatrist. (Even this ifiay not invariably be che case,, and the 
patient ma^ instead be given up as * hopeless '.) 

This attitude of mind may be shown even by very broad- 
minded practitioners, as, for example, by a recent writer, 
dealing in a -medical journal with the psychological aspects 
of cancer, and especially of incurable cases of cancer. He 
concludes by remarking that, while every effort should be 
made to protect the patient from exploitation, he or she 
should not necessarily be discouraged from seeking help 
even from the spiritual healer. 

This * last resort ' attitude on the part of the medical 
profession is, in my view, deplorable. The case of the girl 
v: lV h a serious skin disease, who went from one specialist 
to another, from one unsuccessful treatment to another, 
and only at long last to a psychiatrist, who effected a cure, 
is only too typical. 

Another case comes to mind, of a woman patient of a 
friend of mine who, although he has taken medical degrees, 
relies entirely upon very unorthodox psychological methods. 
This patient was afflicted with deep-seated ulcers on her 
arms and shoulders. Many methods had been tried, even 
to X-ray therapy, all to no avail. Then, fortunately for this 
woman, one of the hospital staff had the idea that there 
might be an important psychological factor involved, and sent 
her to my friend, with the result the ulcers yielded to treat- 
ment with astonishing rapidity and cleared up completely. 

Now surely in both these instances it would have been 
preferable to have realised at an early stage that the trouble 
was ps~ chogenic in origin, and to have treated them accord- 
ingly; and this is true of many cases, some of which never 
have the opportunity of treatment by a psychotherapist. 

I suggest that the ideal to be aimed at is preventive psy- 
chotherapy. At present this remains*an ideal, but meanwhile 
some steps can be, and are being, taken in this direction. 
One such step was indicated by Dr. Denis Leigh ip an 
article earlier this year in The Lancet. 

Dr. Leigh is physician on the staff of the department 



i3Q J he Dangers of Being Human 

of psychiatry in Bethlem Roynl and Maudsloy Hospitals. 
Instead of remaining at the hospital, and being conterfc to 
treat patients a they are brought td him, Dr. Leigh has 
made it a practice to visit them in their own homes. 

This ' home psychiatry ' has had a number of valuable 
results; it has afforded the psychiatrist a great deal of in- 
formation .about the patient which would not otherwise 
have been available to him, and in addition it has proved 
possible in many instances to suggest improvements in the 
home surroundings which have led to considerable allevia- 
tion of the patient's troubles. It has also helped to break 
down the resistance of many to the idea of accepting 1 treat- 
ment at the hands of the psychiatrist. (I shall refer to this 
point again a little later.) 

It is clear that if psychotherapy is eventually to bec^rg^, 
as I think it should become, an important branch of pre- 
ventive medicine, then early diagnosis is imperative. This is 
one of the major difficulties involved in my suggestion, for 
the line between slight deviations from normality, and the 
first real steps in the direction of abnormality, is very 
fine indeed, and, in fact, could often be better described 
as an ' area ' rather than as a * line '. 

Even the practitioner with considerable experience may 
find it all too difficult to decide which type of minor abnor- 
mality can safely be ignored and which indicates the need 
for early reference to a psychotherapist; and the layman 
would find it quite impossible to make such a decision. This 
may seem to make the advent of preventive psychiatry very 
remote indeed, but if we think of another dread disease 
where the same difficulty of early diagnosis occurs, that is, 
tuberculosis, then the solution which has been accepted in 
connection with that disease may suggest a solution of our 
present problem. 

It is becoming more and more the practice to ask every- 
one to go for examination to a mass-radiography unit. The 
individual is placed between a source of X-rays and a 
fluorescent screen and the shadow image on the screen is 
photographed on a narrow film, a miniature radiograph of 
the person's chest being thus obtained. 



S<**ne Asides and a Summing Up 

Examination* of these rriniature films by a > radiologist 
shows that the vast majority of those who have been 
examined are free f: am tubercular infection. The ' doubt- 
ful ' cases are asked to return and a full-scale radiograph 
is taken in these instances. Examination of these large 
radiographs will show that some of the ' doubtful ' cases 
are free from disease, while others have been infected and 
require treatment. 

The great value of this work lies in the fact that early 
diagnosis means early treatment, with a very much greater 
chance of effecting a cure. It is noteworthy that some of the 
most unlikely people are found to be infected 

I would suggest that, similarly, it would be of immense 
benefit to the health of the community if it could become 
"nrmal routine to go for psychiatric examination from time 
to time, as well as when the individual actually felt the 
need for treatment. 

This would at first involve a great deal of expense, for it 
would require the setting up of psychiatric units, with large 
numbers of trained psychotherapists in charge, with psy- 
chiatric diagnosticians, psychiatric social workers, and so 
on, with the possibility of reference to specialists in other 
branches. 

But I am convinced that in the long run the method 
would pay, not only in better health and greater happiness, 
but also in terms of actual money saved. 

The loss to the community, in terms of money, due to 
mental ill-health is enormous you may remember the 
figures which I quoted in connection with the compulsive 
drinker. It is also agreed that about one-third of all recog 
nised nhysLal illness is determined by emotional and social 
factors (this is the view of those who would be unwilling 
to accept my further contention that there is a psychologi- 
cal factor in all illness). Add to this the cost to the com- 
munity occasioned by accidents and it will readily be 
realised that, if mass psychotherapeutic examination could 
reduce the tendency to flight into illness or accident, the 
ultimate saving would be immense. 

I am well aware that we have not to hand a diagnostic 



140 Tlie Dangers of Being 

tool a ea^ to use as is the miniature radiograph in the 
case of tuberculosis, but there are a number of diagn&stic 
methods which ^re being developed 1 which are remarkably 
successful in the hands of the expert (and, after all, only 
a trained radiologist can 'read' a radiograph correctly); 
and in anytevent the need for such a tool would intensify 
research and would, I am sure, in due time produce one. 

Apart from the question of initial expense, and the feck 
of sufficiently fine diagnostic methods, the greatest obstacle 
to such a scheme is* the attitude of the general public. Dr. 
Leigh, in the article to which I have referred, specifically 
mentions this attitude as a major difficulty in psychiatry in 
this country; his ' domiciliary psychiatry ' is designed to 
overcome this. 

Commenting in similar terms on a recent article inj*&> 
American magazine, Dr. R. H. Felix, Director of the 
National Institute of Mental Health in Iowa, wrote, ' The 
real Snake Pit today is indeed the public attitude towards 
mental illness. That is the greatest obstacle to those caring 
for and rehabilitating the mentally sick. 

' We owe applause and praise to these men and women 
of Iowa who cgurageously made known their experience 
and thus helped lift the curtain of ignorance and prejudice 
... It cannot be said too strongly that the majority of the 
mentally ill recover and with such co-operation on their 
own part and of others as described in Howard Whitman's 
article, most of them stay well. Often, in fact, they become 
stronger persons than before their mental illness overtook 
them.' 

. , And the writer of the article says, ' The real snake pit 
. . . Don't you recognise it in your own commu/lity? Aren't 
there people who whisper about mental illness as though 
it were a scandal? Aren't there others who hide mental ill- 
ness among their relatives as though it were something to 
be ashamed of? Aren't th^re some who, in ignorance, blather 
old superstitions that 'these things run in the family 1 ? 
And aren't there a few miserably intolerant people who 
castigate the mental sufferer as though he had committed 
a crime?' 



Same Asides and a Summin > Up 1ft 

The writer goes on to de scribe a society, formed by ex- 
inmates of the institution, who are helping others by their 
frank description of their own experience^, and by advice 
and encouragement. The members of this society ' want 
to exorcise the twin goblins of mental illness; the feeling 
of aloneness (I'm the only person to whom tlfts has ever 
happened) ^nd the feeling of hopelessness (I'nj losing my 
mind, I'll never be the same again).' Judged by results, they 
are being wonderfully successful. I hope that the present 
book will achieve a little towards the same end in this 
country. 

There are, I know, a great many omissions in this book, 
and one or two yawning gaps. For example, I have not 
dealt with the very serious problems of departures from 
normal sexual behaviour, apart from my mention of mas- 
turbation and youthful (and transient) homosexuality, in 
Chapter Eight. Many of these sexual abnormalities are the 
more serious because they are classed as criminal in this 
country. 

But the problem is so vast that to deal at all adequately 
with it would require a book on its own, and would involve 
delving deep into the psychology of the unconscious mind. 
To deal with it here, would have altered the intended 
balance of the book and might well have taken it outside the 
classification into which it is hoped it will be placed, and so 
might have prevented many from reading it who will, I 
hope, read and obtain benefit from it in its present form. 

There are a number of specialist books on sexual abnor- 
malities, which can be consulted by those especially in 
terested. TLis does not mean that I attribute too little im- 
portance to the role of sex in our daily life, or its power 
as a factor in producing mental illness no practitioner 
could do this, for his patients only too often produce evi- 
dence of the compelling power of the sexual force. It merely 
means that I do not consider the present book the proper 
place in which to discuss in detail all the problems involved. 

Another important aspect of human behaviour waich I 
have barely touched upon is religion. I was reminded of 



J42 1 ie Dangers of Being Human 

this, while i was in the process >f composing this last chap- 
ter, by an old lady of great personality, with an extrfeinely 
lively mind; on being introduced to rre, she remarked that 
so many psychiatrists were ' evil men who take away 
people's faith.' She added, of course, that there was no 
personal reference intended! 

Now it ip true, I suppose, that those psychotherapists 
who adhere strictly to the teachings of Freud, the rr.ore 
orthodox psychoanalysts, would agree with Freud that 'all 
religion is an illusion, and such an attitude inevitably results 
in the loss of faith on the part of the patients they treat 
not necessarily because such analysts intentionally destroy 
that faith, but because, if the patient accepts the analyst's 
interpretation, then such acceptance must lead to a change 
of attitude towards religion and religious beliefs, and most 
likely to a readjustment of values, and a loss of faith in 
spiritual reality. 

That this is a very real danger and is recognised as such 
by organised religion is shown by the publication recently 
of an article in the Roman Catholic journal Clergy Bulletin, 
published in Rome. In this article the writer says, ' It is 
difficult to excuse from mortal sin anyone who uses or sub- 
mits to psychoanalysis. The psychoanalytic method easily 
becomes an instrument of corruption/ 

It should be added that a spokesman for Cardinal Griffin, 
commenting on the article, said that ' The statement may 
indicate future pronouncements binding the whole Church, 
but it has no authority beyond Rome'; while Dr. E. B. 
Strauss, a Roman Catholic who is Physician for Psycho- 
'ogical Medicine at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, London, 
said that until there is an official pronouncement h^ does 
not consider himself bound by opinions of that kind. The 
article may have been intended as an attack on orthodox 
psychoanalysis (with its rejection of religion) and would in 
that case have a reasonable basis. 

But a large number of therapists would dissent from the 
strict Freudian view. I should certainly dissociate myself 
from such a view, both because I think that Freud's 
mechanistic, deterministic concept of the mind is a false 



Sqme Andes and a Summit * Up 143 

concept, and because of m general philosophical outlook. 
Other therapists would divide in their dissent from Freud's 
own teaching. 

Of these, some may share Freud's scepticism about the 
reality of religious experience, and yet would agree that 
religious experience can be of value to a patient, and they 
would prefer to leave a patient's religious f#ith undis- 
turbed. Other practitioners, and I think that these are the 
majority, would dissent entirely from Freud's negation of 
religion, even while they accept some of his ideas as to the 
evolution of certain religious concepts; these members of 
the profession themselves possess a very real religious faith. 
This is certainly true of the follower of Jung, to whom the 
therapeutic process has become an almost analytical method 
** promoting for and in the patient a new line of life, more 
in keeping with his own and the Collective unconscious, 
having the concept of divine ends as the ultimate test of 
success. 

Such practitioners, who do not accept the Freudian atti- 
tude towards religion, are very far from being evil, and I 
have heard the work of one such described as being ' not 
medicine, but practical Christianity '. 

This particular therapist was not in fact an active mem- 
ber of the Christian Church, being more attracted by the 
thinking of the Buddhist philosophy; but very many prac- 
titioners find no difficulty at all in combining such active 
membership with their therapeutic methods, and they 
realise the worth which spiritual values may have in helping 
their patients towards recovery and a happier life. 



Finally I must add that I realise that, as well as the many 
omissions, there are many points of dispute in this book. 
Some of these are intentional; others have crept in with- 
out my noticing them. I should be very pleased to receive 
comments and criticisms, either on the book as a whole or 
on individual points, and suggestions for improvement. 

These will be welcome even if they take the forru men- 
tioned on one occasion by Professor Woodworth, of one 



144' T le Dangers of Being. 

of whose books a critic said tl at a certain chapter ' could 

not be worse ' ! 

Bearing in mind Francis Bacon's famous description of 
the scientific attitude, I try always to remain open to 
correction and, should the issue of a second edition afford 
the opportunity, I shall be glad to revise the book in the 
light of tl\e criticisms and suggestions which I receive. 
Meanwhile, with all its imoerfections. I commend it to vou. 



INDEX 



Accidents, 50, 62, 111, 118, 
121-6, 129, 130, 132, 134-6, 
139 

Adler, A., 15, 17, 77 

Adler,iG., 58 

Alcoholism, 36, 39, 56-62, 65 

Alcoholics, anonymous, 59 

Analysis, 15-18, 21, 29, 54, 83, 

,..99-103, 114, 132 

Anger, 51, 52, 123, 130 

Angina, 11 

Antabuse, 60 

Anxiety, 30, 54, 58, 60, 67-9, 
72, 75, 95, 103, 106-116 

Asthma, 118, 121 

Attlee, C., 119 

Bed-wetting, 34, 35, 42, 133 

Berg, Dr. Charles, 52, 53 

Blushing, 39, 40 

Bose, Professor G., 48 

Br-east-feeding, 37, 79 

Burt, Professor Sir Cyril, 7, 19, 

89 

Cancer, 137 

Castration complex, 54, 78-9 
Chilblains, 132 

Childbirth, 66-75, 109, 114, 122 
Civil Servants, 105-7, 109-11 
Clothing, 38, 131 
Commo" Cold, 12, 112, 118-21 
Common Cold Research Unit, 

120-1 

Compulsions, 46-7 
Coronary Thrombosis, 11, 26, 

118 

Democracy, 113, 115-6 
Depression, 25, 117 
Dizziness, 50 

Dreams, 51, 94-103, 125, 128-9, 
134-5 



145 



Drug taking, 36, 39, 56-8, 60, 

Elwin, Verrier, 32 
Enuresis, see Bed-wetting 
Environment, 91 

Fear, 110, 111 

Felix, Dr. R. H., 7, 140, 141 

Fisher, Dr. V. E., 16 

Flugel, Professor J. C., 29, 38, 

131 

Freud, Anna, 131 
Freud, S., 15-17, 21, 26, 40, 42, 

54, 67-8, 75-8, 82, 85, 92-6, 

99, 102, 107-9, 117, 122, 130, 

131, 134-6, 142-3 

Greediness, 73 

Groddeck, Georg, 55, 82, 121, 
127-8, 130, 136 

Headache, 50-2, 65, 129, 130 
Homosexuality, 39, 87, 141 
Homey, Karen, 50, 130 
Hypnotism, 17, 63-4 

Illegitimacy, 37 

Illness, 10-12, 14, 15, 35, 5k, 
80, 109, 111, 117-121, 124-6, 
129, 130, 133, 135-7, 139 

Indigestion, 117 

Inferiority complex, 27, 32 

Insomnia, 98 

Jealousy, 35, 41 

Jung, C. G., 15, 17, 95-6, 99, 
143 

Kleptomania, 26, 88, 13 J 
Leigh, Dr. Denis, 7, 137-8, 140. 



146 

Mannerisms, 45-6 
Masturbation, 86-7, 141 
Mead, Margaret, 32 
Meanness, 42 

Mental breakdown, 13, 28 
Mental deficiency, 33, 90 
Migraine, 50, 52 
Mother-fixation, 101 

Nail biting, 42-3, 45 
National Health Service, 13 
'Nerves', ,!9 

Nervous breakdown, 27, 106 
Nightmare, 97-8, 134 

Oedipus complex, 77 

Paranoia, 25, 56 
Phenobarbitone, 52, 53 
Phobia, 48 

Pickworth-Farrow, E., 79 
Placebos, 13, 14, 53 
Plato, 115, 128 
Polycrates complex, 80, 81 
Possessiveness, 41-2 
Pre-natal influence, 38 

Rash, see Skin disease 

Read, Dr. Grantley Dick, 69, 

70-4, 114 
Religion, 82-3, 141-3 



Index 



Royal Air Foice, 28 
Russell Brain, Dr. W., 



Schizopnrenia, 25, 56 
School, 50, 129, 130 
Sexual behaviour, 20, 25, 32, 

39, 41, 81-2, 84-7. 108. 133. 

141 

Shock therapy, 15 
Shyness, 39 
Skin disease, 53-4, 118-<9, 121, 

137 

Slim, Field-Marshall, 109 
Smoking, 39, 56-8, 62-5 
Stammer, 28, 49 
Stark, Freya, 110 
Stealing, 40, 88-9, 131 
Stomach pains, 1 1 
Suicide, 26, 134 
Sullcnn'ess, 35 
Sutherland, Dr. J. D., 38, 69 

Temper tantrums, 40, 90, 91-2 
Toilet training, 81-2, 92 
Tuberculosis, 138-140 

Ulcers, 26, 30, 106, 118, 137 
U.S.A., 30, 37, 60, 61, 70, 108, 
140 

Worry, see Anxiety 



Thf l Art of 
Happily Married 



ANDRE MAUROIS 

In a series of graceful sketches Andre Maurois shows a couple 
behaving in the light and wrong ways at many junctions of 
mairiecl life" following Philippe and Marise from Courtship and 
Conquest to the Silver Wedding. 

" Never have love stories been more brightly written, and yet 
wj*k oolid basis underneath the frills." 

JOHN O'LONDON'S WEEKLY 



The Art of Being 
A Parent 

AMABEL WILLIAMS-ELLIS 

A. lively and intelligent book . . . Mrs. Williams-Ellis 'writes 
with common sense and sympathy." 

;; , * TIME AND TIDE 

". . . .^"Ho -.t f-^ m the ruck of its rivals . . . parents whether 
of one day's or twenty years' standing will find in her book 
more practically profitable reading f than a whole specialist 
library could afford." 

ECONOMIST 



Tfk Art of Sdng 
A Woman 



AMABEL WILLIAMS-ELLIS 

" A sane, realistic and humorous analysis ... a wile and well 
infonned little book full of widely based knowledge -** human 
nature and appreciation of human problems practical ttd 
psychological." 



How to Make a 
Success of Tour Marriage 

EUSTACE CHESSER 



f la this book Dr. Chtsser HM to point out sc-ne of the 
dangers which can ngteet marriage, ana i*. nake some practical 
suggotions at to bow to avoid them, " 

"Excellent advice , . . There u much good material in this 

book)' ' '"" . ' '. 

Ift&ftftUOB OtJIDAJiCB