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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    heart, gives himself more rest, that it may recuperate its strength. We also recognize the need of the person who is beginning to reveal nervous or mental disturbance seek¬ ing a specialist for help, and we realize that this means gaining the same kind of knowledge of the psychic life that in the other cases is obtained regarding the condi¬ tions of the body. Investigation of the body or mind, when there is threat of disease, seems to us an act of common sense. Unfortunately we are not so apt to see that the gaining of similar information regarding the body and the mind, that is, the self, for the purpose of making the best of oneself and of gaining the greatest possible vigor of body and mind and of squeezing out of life’s experiences the fullest quantity possible of satisfaction is also good sense. He who is sound in his knowledge of himself is most likely to meet successfully the social problems that con¬ front him in life. His willingness to scrutinize himself shows a fact-facing disposition which augurs well for any undertaking. More than this, it indicates his thorough¬ going determination to discover the resources he has at hand, and his recognition that his own character, purposes, and powers are related to any problem he attempts to handle, however external it may seem. Nothing so brings out the failure of present education to prepare the student for life as the fact that we have no word that precisely calls attention to the failure of the individual to know himself. We see the opposite extreme, [ 14]