the consequence for people thrown back upon their own
resources? I have no doubt that even in this short time thousands
of nervous breakdowns would occur, and many more thousands
of people would be thrown into a state of acute anxiety, not
different from the picture which is diagnosed clinically as
neurosis.' If the opiate against the socially patterned
defect were withdrawn, the manifest illness would make its
appearance.
For a minority, the pattern provided by the culture does not
work. They are often those whose individual defect is more
severe than that of the average person, so that the culturally
offered remedies are not sufficient to prevent the outbreak of
manifest illness. (A case in point is the person whose aim in life
is to attain power and fame. While this aim is, in itself, a patho-
logical one, there is nevertheless a difference between the person
who uses his powers to attain this aim realistically, and the more
severely sick one who has so little emerged from his infantile
grandiosity that he does not do anything toward the attainment
of his goal but waits for a miracle to happen and, thus feeling
more and more powerless, ends up in a feeling of futility and
bitterness.) But there are also those whose character structure,
and hence whose conflicts, differ from those of the majority, so
that the remedies which are effective for most of their fellow
men are of no help to them. Among this group we sometimes
3 I have made the following experiment with various classes of undergraduate
college students: they were told to imagine that they were to stay for three days
alone in their rooms, without a radio, or escapist literature, although provided
with "good" literature, normal food and all other physical comforts. They were
asked to imagine what their reaction to this experience would be. The response
of about 90 per cent in each group ranged from a feeling of acute panic, to that
of an exceedingly trying experience, which they might overcome by sleeping
long, doing all kinds of little chores, awaiting the end of this period. Only a
small minority felt that they would be at ease and enjoy the time when they