RKI.IEF of ANXIETY

The legitimate question remains: How oth­erwise than by sublimation can we reduce or minimize the burdens of anxiety inevitably generated by conflicts in the unconscious mind?

The first step is to understand that anxiety wears many disguises We have tried to strip a number of these disguises away by de­scribing the behavior patterns that result from overworking of the mental mechanisms. The perfectionist, the hypochondriac, the man who continually projects his own failings on others, the woman who always rationalizes her mistakes, and all the rest are motivated by an inner anxiety. This emotion may pa­rade as fatigue, over activity, homesickness, physical illness, a sense of inferiority, depression, and in scores of other guises. By recognizing that anxiety is the basic motiva­tion for personal conduct which displeases himself and attracts unfavorable reactions from others the individual is in a better posi­tion to seek and get help with his problem.

How else do you get rid of anxiety? Essen­tially by talking it out' University of Califor­nia Medical School psychiatrists J. Ruesch and A. R. Prestwood* made a special study of the problem of relieving anxiety and came to this well-accepted conclusion

The successful management of anxiety generated in daily life seems possible only through a process of sharing and communication.

The process of communication is essential for healthy functioning. Thus are people able to combine their efforts, to complement and increase their ability to cope with their sur­roundings The ability to communicate and hence to share anxiety seems to constitute the process responsible for feelings of personal security on the part of the individual. Allevi­ation of anxiety comes through personal con­tacts. This process is basic to all interpersonal relationships from babyhood to old age.

In addition to this crucial means of reliev­ing anxiety, we now have drugs to aid in the task   This  is the class of drugs, known as tranquilizers, introduced into medical prac­tice in the 1950's. Tranquilizers are chemical compounds specifically useful for the relief of anxiety. However, you cannot depend on tranquilizers alone, or any other drug, to dis­pel all the hosts of anxieties.

Rationalization

We can readily give what seem to us "good" reasons for being a Catholic or a Mason, a Republican or a Democrat, an adherent or opponent of the United Nations. But the "real" reasons are usually on quite a different plane. Of course the importance of this dis­tinction is popularly, if somewhat obscurely, recognized. The Baptist missionary is ready enough to see that the Buddhist is not such because his doctrines would bear careful in­spection, but because he happened to be born in a Buddhist family in Tokyo. But it would be treason to his faith to acknowledge that his own partiality for certain doctrines is due the fact that his faith to acknowledge that his own partiality for certain doctrines is due to the fact that his mother was a member of the first Baptist church of oak ridge.

The "real" reasons for our beliefs are con­cealed from ourselves as well as from others. As we grow up we simply adopt the ideas presented to us in regard to such matters as religion, family relations, property, business, our country, and the state. We unconsciously absorb them from our environment. They are persistently whispered in our ear by the group in which we happen to live.

The little word my is the most important one in  all  human  affairs, and properly to reckon with it is the beginning of wisdom. It has the same force whether it is my dinner, my dog, and my house, or my faith, my coun­try, and my God. We not only resent the im­putation that our watch is wrong, or our car is shabby, but that our conception of the ca­nals of Mars, of the pronunciation of "Epicte-tus," of the medicinal value of salicine, or the date of Sargon I, are subject to revision.

Fantasy and Daydreaming

Unconscious fantasy, often translated into fancy daydreaming, is one of the most subtly dangerous mental mechanisms because al­though up to a certain point it is useful and constructive, beyond that difficult-to-determine point it can be destructive of the personality. Everyone engages in fantasy and daydreaming; the world properly respects the faculty of constructive imagination, as illu­minated by artists in every media. We escape from the pressures of reality through the pleasures of fantasy. We sustain ourselves through hopeful dreams of a "better future." We relax by entering into the world of illu­sion provided by fiction and drama in books and magazines, on stage and screen.

Fantasy becomes dangerous, however, when we no longer distinguish between what is fantasy and what is reality. In the uncon­scious mind fantasy is the property of the id, which indulges in wishful thinking just as much as it can without restraint from the ego.

Normal fantasizing has been carried too far when it has become a facile substitute for work and the effort needed to bring a vi­sion to reality when wishful thinking about success supersedes all struggle to attain it. People who live entirely in a dream world are mentally ill.

Rationalization

Rationalization is perhaps the most widely and frequently used of the unconscious ego defenses. It reflects a built-in bias, of which we are unaware, in favor of ourselves, our feelings, our own opinions, ideas, and prejudices

Rationalization   is the practice of finding and giving plausible and apparently "reason­able" explanations for thought and conduct that stems from quite different motivations than those we openly express. Rationalization is unconscious self-deception. It usually comes as a great shock to find that others do not see us or our points of view as we see them our­selves. We often rationalize our conduct to cover up our less worthy motives often our jealousies toward other people. Thus a teacher or mother chastises children "for their own good"unaware that she is enjoy­ing her own sense of power.

Rationalization is "emotional thinking" as opposed to valid reasoning. To a certain ex-tint, the unconscious mind being what it is rationalization is inevitable. There is no com­pletely rational man Since all our strongest personal beliefs and prejudices are rooted in emotions, it is not surprising that we de­fend them by rationalization rather than by critical, logical thought

Some of the most penetrating observations on rationalization were written more than a generation ago by the late Jame Harvey Rob inson in his brilliant book, The Mind in the Making, thus:

We are incredibly heedless in the formation of our beliefs, but find ourselves filled with an illicit passion for them when anyone proposes to rob us of their companionship. It is ob­viously not the ideas themselves that are dear to us. but our self-esteem, which is threatened.

We are by nature stubbornly pledged In defend our own from attack, whether it be our person, our family, our property, or our opin­ion. A United States Senator once remarked to a friend of mine that Clod Almighty could not make him change his mind on our Latin-America policy. We may surrender, but rarely confess ourselves vanquished. In the intellec­tual world at least peace is without victory.

Few of us take the pains to study he origin of our cherished convictions: indeed, we have a natural repugnance to so doing. We like to continue to believe what we have been accus­tomed to accept as true, and the resentment aroused when doubt is cast upon any of our assumptions leads us to seek every manner of excuse for clinging to them. The result is that most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already do.

I remember years ago attending a public dinner to which the Governor of the state was bidden. The chairman explained that His Ex­cellency could not be present for certain "good" reasons; what the "real" reasons were the presiding officer said he would leave us to conjecture. This distinction between "good" and "real" reasons is one of the most clarify­ing and essential in the whole realm of thought.

Idealization

Identification of the young child with his parents gradually turns into idealization of them. The child's own ego ideals, the secret inner picture of himself as he feels he would like to be, are permanently established in his superego by this process of idealization.

Idealization, as a mental mechanism, is a device the ego adopts to escape the recrimi­nations of the superego. When it substitutes other ideals for the original parent ideals, it always includes at the core of the new ideals some fraction of the original pattern. "Ideal­istic love," as we have noted, is shaped in the inner image of one's parents.

Like identification, idealization is usually uncritical. This often leads to overestimation of the people toward whom it is directed. We see idealization blissfully at work in young lovers, who refuse to see the least blemish in their beloveds.

Idealization is also employed at the very highest cultural levels in religious worship and love of God, commonly idealized as Father, all-powerful and all-loving. We attribute  to God  all  that is best in  man.

Regression

Regression means reverting to immature and often childish behavior in the presence of current difficulties and frustrations. In terms of overt behavior it is one of the easiest of the mental mechanisms to observe and identify in other people. We all know the boy who won't play if he can't be captain of the team; the girl who sulks or goes into a temper tantrum if she misses a much-desired date; the tennis player who smashes his racket when he loses a match; the "perpetual undergraduate" col­lege alumnus, yelling himself hoarse at a football game; the child who throws himself on the floor and screams at the top of his lungs when he is denied candy. Not all re­gressive behavior is as obvious as the exam­ples given, but they should give the general idea.

Regression is a retreat from the complexi­ties of the present to the fancied security of the past. The ego feels more comfortable  for the moment in seeking an old solution for a present problem. Tears and tantrums, how­ever, rarely if ever get a person what he really wants.

Projection

Nobody likes to fail. We frequently seek to excuse our own failings by blaming them on someone or something else. The student who is failing a college course may sincerely but erroneously believe that the instructor is down on him the poor workman blames his tools Auto accidents are always "the other fellow's fault." When the ego rejects respon­sibility for failure and projects the blame elsewhere, it is employing the mental mecha­nism of projection.

But the process of projection may be much broader than merely excusing. We may, for example, project our own feelings on other people or the world at large. When we feel "blue," we may see the whole world as black. This is a false picture. We often attri­bute our own most undesirable traits to other people. If we are "bad." they are worse. We are most prone to project on others those feelings which trouble us most. Thus, if we feel secretly hostile toward somebody else, we may imagine that he is equally hostile toward us which may or may not be the case. Seeing others in a distorted image of our­selves may make us unduly critical, sarcasiic, cynical, and pessimistic.

Substitution

Substitution and displacement are mental mechanisms akin to projection. We sometimes substitute one love object for another as does the childless woman who lavishes ma­ternal affection upon a dog or cat. We may also displace our feelings, sometimes because we are afraid to express them toward the person who aroused them. Thus a man may be angry at his boss but displace his anger on his wife for some trivial reason. A girl who is angry at her parents may take it out in a quarrel  with  her boy friend, or vice versa.

Conversion

The conversion of conflicts in the uncon­scious mind into physical symptoms of illness is one of the most commonly employed of all mental mechanisms. Physicians estimate that at least half the patients they see are suffer­ing from complaints in which psychic or emotional factors are the prime if not the sole complaint.

The student who always gets a headache when faced with an examination is displaying a conversion symptom- So, too, is the soldier who suffers from hysterical blindness when he sees his buddy blown up a few feet away from him. Conversion reactions are in fact more common in wartime than peacetime, and they are the explanation of such condi­tions as hysterical paralysis, convulsions, loss of voice, deafness, ''shellshock," "soldier's heart," and "battle fatigue."

Illness becomes a way out of an intolerable situation. Physical pain is substituted for in­ner anxiety. The patient is unaware of the source of his pain. It is just as real to him as if it had a definite basis in a recognizable bodily defect. For example, a patient with a severe backache of purely psychogenic orign feels just as bad as if X-ray evidence actually showed a fracture in his spine.

Conversion symptoms are often difficult to relieve for the added reason that they offer some secondary gains or benefits to the pa­tient. He gets sympathy because he is "sick"; he may be relieved from the pressure of ordi­nary duties and responsibilities; he may even collect unearned money because of his "afflic­tion." For example, some people who have been involved in accidents do not recover from their symptoms until they receive a substantial cash settlement from an insur­ance company.

The "chronic invalid," the hypochondriac always worried about his health, and the neurotic who "enjoys" poor health offer fur­ther examples of conversion reactions. There is no accounting for their long lists of vague aches, pains, and other complaints except on a psychological basis. Fatigue is one of the commonest complaints.

Nevertheless actual impairment of bodily functions may result from prolonged un­conscious conflicts. Practically any organ or system of the body can be affected by "psycho­physiological disorders." Many emotional reactions, for example, are visibly ex­pressed in skin troubles. Other diseases which may be initiated or aggravated by uncon­scious anxiety include bronchial asthma, peptic ulcer, chronic colitis, and heart dis­ease (especially disease of the coronary arteries). Bodily illnesses wholly or partly of psychic origin are often described as "psychosomatic" —from pysche, for mind, and soma, for body.

CHRONIC (PATHOLOGICAL) FATIGUE

Closely akin to anxiety, and perhaps an­other form of it, is the condition often de­scribed as chronic, or pathological, fatigue. Chronic fatigue may also be called "emotional fatigue"; it is something different from sheer muscular or physiological fatigue that follows after strenuous work or exercise, as we have seen in Chapter 2. Since the factors that help to produce chronic fatigue and those which tend to relieve it are somewhat different from those involved in the generation of anxiety, we shall discuss this subject in its own terms.

Chronic, or pathological, fatigue is a symp­tom that something is wrong with the person who suffers from it. Many people are chroni­cally fatigued without realizing it. This fa­tigue may be expressed in changed moods, attitudes, and behavior, for example, excep­tional irritability, loss of a sense of humor or even loss of weight, poor appetite, and rest­less sleep. A constant state of muscular ten­sion considerably beyond normal muscle tone commonly accompanies chronic fatigue. This abnormal tension, or hypertonus, arises because the muscles are being constantly stimulated by unconscious motivations to make first this move and then that. However, the stimulus to complete the move is inhib­ited and countermanded before the muscles can fully obey. These alternating commands keep the muscles constantly on stretch. Fa­tigue products are never completely enough dispelled, so the feeling of fatigue persists.

External pressures and environmental cir­cumstances are factors in bringing on chronic fatigue. This has been studied particularly in the field of industrial hygiene- Workers be­come fatigued and less productive when they must work under conditions of poor light and glare, poor ventilation, too much noise and heat, uncomfortable seating, and exposure to dusts and fumes.

Other factors that induce fatigue are ex­cessive hours of work, lack of properly spaced rest pauses, awkward working positions, "speed-up" of work beyond capacity to perform, and the monotony of simple, repeated opera­tions. Workers are less productive also when they are afraid of and hostile toward their jobs and bosses.

Some of the facts discovered in the study of industrial hygiene can be profitably applied by the wise student in eliminating fatigue factors from his own life. He can arrange to do his studying under the best possible con­ditions of physical comfort and efficiency; it will be rare, however, that perfect or ideal conditions exist. Equally important is a rhythm of work balanced with relaxation. A rest pause of five minutes during each study hour is advisable. There should be some regu­larity in the student's schedule of study, play, eating, and sleeping. Too much extracur­ricular pressure should be avoided. On the other hand some interests beyond study and some fruitful methods of relaxation should be encouraged. Procrastination, delay, and over-crowding of hours bring on fatigue and reduce efficiency. Careless students work the hardest.

Why to Stay away from Stimulants

CHRONIC (PATHOLOGICAL) FATIGUE

The wrong way to fight fatigue is by indul­gence in chemical stimulants. The reason? Too often, when taken in sufficient dosage to have any genuine effect, they create a "re­bound reaction" and, after a short while, you end up feeling more fatigued than before you took the drug.

Probably the best known and most widely used stimulant drug is caffeine, which is the active   ingredient   in   coffee,   tea,   chocolate drinks, some cola drinks, and many non-pre­scription "stay awake" drugs.

There are, of course, many other drugs known to stimulate the central nervous sys­tem, including amphetamines (such as Ben­zedrine) and whole new series of psychic stim­ulants that have been developed in the 1960's. When prescribed by a physician upon proper indications, these are valuable medications.

Many college students, however, have the mistaken idea that they can take these so-called pep pills indiscriminately and without harm. Pep pills are often used by students to cram for exams or to drive all night to get home or back to college after an exciting weekend. This is a dangerous practice, be­cause all potent stimulant drugs may have side effects (in addition to rebound reactions) and untoward reactions that were not antici­pated by the indiscriminate self-medicator. There are better ways than chemicals to deal with fatigue; notably by better organization of one's time, by recreation, relaxation, good sleeping habits, and the control of factors and problems which induce needless psychic stress and muscular tension.

In summary: This chapter has covered the sequence of normal personality development, from infancy onward. It has presented the concept and the construct of the unconscious mind, divided conventionally into id, ego, and superego. It has discussed the conflicts in the unconscious mind and described a number of the "ego-defenses," also called mental mecha­nisms and mental dynamisms, by which the ego protects itself for example, repression, regression, rationalization, etc. The impor­tant subject of anxiety and several ways to relieve it have been discussed; notably through sharing and communication and by means of tranquilizers. The topic of chronic or pathological fatigue, akin to anxiety, has also been presented. In conclusion, the uncon­scious mind is a powerful force in deter­mining human personality and behavior.