52
PARTISAN REVIEW
I spent many hours daily listening to men and women who
thought they needed longer psychological treatment or full-scale
psychotherapy because they could not "come to terms with
themselves"; because they could not master their difficulties, inhibi–
tions, fears, or obsessions with their own powers; because they were
forever finding themselves in blind alleys; because they failed in
their relationships with their parents, children, spouses, lovers,
superiors, or underlings, or did not receive the recognition they
thought they deserved; because they constantly created conflicts of
which they felt themselves the victims; because they were unhappy
in love or could not love; because they were sexually frigid, or sex–
ually obsessed, or thought they loved only their own sex; because
their jealousy or that of their partners made marriage a hell; because
they could no longer tolerate their mate but feared separation more
than the greatest of evils.
There were those who began speaking before they were prop–
erly seated and did not stop until they were already on the stairs.
Others needed many hours before they got beyond the most meager
beginnings, painful laments over troubles which they described in–
adequately, in used-up words they repeated too often. Others spoke
quickly but continually faltered - runners who came in either too
early or too late because they stumbled over their own legs. Finally
there were the "roving patients": they knew all the respected
specialists and maintained that they had read all the important
books and therefore knew what Freud, Jung, Adler, Steckel, and
others would think of their unusual case.
Almost all of them imagined that they were special, interesting
cases. Adler often spoke of the fact that the neurotic soon becomes a
stereotype: his way of provoking conflicts and reacting to them, of
suffering and thus inducing pity in his near and dear, the "ar–
rangements" of the neurotic manner of living - all this at first glance
seems so unusual, but at second glance reveals itself as an imperfect
but automatic mechanism, as a machine for producing the same old
stuff again and again, a womb which gives birth to oldsters.
* *
*
It
happened in Leningrad, in the square in front of the Finland
Station. A poorly dressed, gaunt man was pushed off the sidewalk
onto the trolley tracks by a swarm of heedless, hurrying passersby.
He stood there a moment in a daze, paying no attention to the warn-
