Understanding yourself : the mental hygiene of personality / by Ernest R. Groves.

  • Ernest R. Groves
Date:
[1935]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Understanding yourself : the mental hygiene of personality / by Ernest R. Groves. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    our luck. It is in this more practical and less exacting sense of partial fulfillment of desire as compared with complete satisfaction that the parent, for example, asserts that he wants to have his child grow up to be happy. And when we probe the expression, we are likely to find that what the father or mother wants is that the child shall live wisely. In our blue moments, happiness seems what everyone wants and no one has. When we are more hopeful, we often think of it as something so near that we are sure soon to have it. It is just around the corner. This confidence that the happiness that has so long slipped us we are about to capture was to the crusty-minded Dean Swift the one per¬ sistent human illusion. No one has ever expressed greater pessimism than he when he wrote, “Happiness is the per¬ petual possession of being well-deceived.” Happiness to him was nothing more than an excursion into fairyland upon which childish adults insist. Happiness not only seems unattainable but even a neb¬ ulous idea. We know we want it, but rarely do we know just what it is we desire. Often we are convinced that, if only we could accomplish this or gain possession of that or obtain some coveted recognition, we should be happy. But in our most naive moments we do not believe that the mere doing or having something or winning prestige is all that happiness means. It is a word that suggests more than pleasure. Pleasure seems to us an individual, fleeting ex¬ perience; happiness, the underlying, continuing mode of life. Although happiness is something hazy, impossible [8]