The Pursuit Of Happiness

The pursuit of happiness and the striving toward mental health are both good things so long as we recognize that this is an ideal goal not a routine achievement. A realistic atti­tude is summed up in the anecdote of an an­cient king in the Orient who commanded his wise men to write him the briefest possible history of the world. They boiled the immense story down to five volumes, then one volume, then one chapter, then one paragraph. Still the king was not satisfied He demanded a single sentence short enough to be engraved on a ring. This, finally, was it: "Man is born, suffers, dies."

The mentally healthy person has learned to live with the inevitable frustrations of human existence, but they do not disenchant him from continuing the struggle. He accepts the fact that human beings will make mistakes so long as they keep trying. He keeps his toler­ance for frustration, disappointment, and grief at a high level. He also realizes that the ancient Socratic doctrine, "Know thyself," is at the heart of mental health but that it is a hard doctrine to apply.

If one really knows himself, he knows his own weaknesses, shortcomings, and failures. Yet the humility to accept these shortcomings is rare. Dr. Karl Menninger has put it this way "That curious emotional defense which impels some people to believe themselves ex­empt from all failure, from all weakness, from the taboo of 'abnormality,' is perhaps the greatest enemy of healthy-mindedness"

Toward Conscious Control of Unconscious Forces

Human beings certainly do have the power to think and reason and to govern their ac­tions, within limits, by the higher faculties of the mind. There have been "schools" of phi­losophy which have exalted man's reason and have implied that mankind could attain Utopia through the exercise of reason. But it has always been sensed, and twentieth-century research in psychiatry and psychology has clearly demonstrated that human conduct is never completely reasonable. Motives for conduct are always a mixture of conscious thought and unconscious or preconscious impulses in undiscoverable proportions. The unconscious motives in behavior are often described as emotional reactions.

The value of conscious thought and reason­able effort in directing our behavior, in open­ing new horizons, and in illuminating new goals for us should never be discounted or negated. But we must also recognize that deep in the psyche unconscious, emotional forces are constantly at work to modify, in­fluence, and sometimes overwhelm our intel­lectual powers.

To know this in general, and to pinpoint it as far as possible for our own particular psyche, is to take a great step forward in achieving conscious control of our uncon­scious drives. The control will never be com­plete, but it will usually be adequate to get along in the world and sustain reasonable achievement. Truly serious failure of the con­scious mind to control the unconscious forces by which it is besieged and bombarded can result in such life tragedies as mental illness, "purposive accidents," suicide, chronic al­coholism, narcotic addiction, antisocial and even criminal behavior.