People In Quandaries

People in Quandaries: The Semantics of Personal Adjustment (Personal Development)

General Semantics book by Wendell Johnson

http://www.uiowa.edu/~cyberlaw/wj/wjpinq.html

It is neither an index to human nature nor an accident of chance that most, if not all, so-called maladjusted persons in our society may be viewed as frustrated and distraught idealists. Distraught because they are frustrated, and frustrated because they are idealists, they are a living testimony of the price we pay for the traditions we cherish, and for the aspirations which those traditions encourage, together with the restrictions which they tend to enforce. It is not that this idealism is always immediately apparent - on the contrary, it is rather likely, as a rule, to elude the superficial observer. It is our unstudied tendency, indeed, to assume that what maladjusted persons need most is something that we call a Sense Of Direction, of purpose, of noble aspiration. In this we are not altogether mistaken - but a partial understanding serves usually as an effective barrier to more penetrating wisdom.,, The ideals of the maladjusted are high in three chief respects. In the first place, they are high in the sense that they are vague. Being vague, they are difficult to recognize; being difficult to recognize, they appear to be elusive... In all this is to be seen the basic design of our common maladjustment. We may call it the IFD disease: from idealism to frustration to demoralization.

What Dr. Coyne Campbell said, in effect, was that the patients who were brought to him because they had been judged to be seriously maladjusted or even insane, showed one chief symptom: They were unable to tell him clearly what was the matter. They simply could not put into words the difficulties with which they were beset. Surely no one who has made it his business to help people in trouble has failed to observe their relative inarticulateness... Dr. Campbell remarked further that when be had succeeded in training a patient to verbalize his difficulties clearly and to the point, it was usually possible to release him... In other words, people who are confused and maladjusted are likely to remain so until they learn to state their problems clearly enough to indicate what sort of steps might be taken in order to change their situation or their behavior to advantage.