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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    and we say that those who are constantly inspecting the self, forever turning the attention inward, are morbid. Their mistake is not diat they consider the self-life, but that they do little else. Their interest in personal experience is so out of proportion that they have distorted their life- program. There is, however, the much more common mistake made by those who go the other way and ignore *■ their own inner life. They, too, in a different way, are morbid, for their reaction is as unwholesome as is that of the first group. It is interesting to notice that these two different types both suffer from lack of adequate knowledge of the self. The first have become aware of the fact that something is wrong, but unassisted cannot penetrate into the trouble. When they are helped by the psychiatrist, they are not turned away from getting knowledge of themselves but are helped to get thorough and objective understanding until they have so heroically explored their inner life that they are able to take themselves for granted and put an end to what has been a futile endeavor to gain adequate self- knowledge. They have been morbid not because they have been scrutinizing their inner life but because they have failed to do it successfully. Their inability to carry through the task they vaguely have felt the need of undertaking explains their concentration on the self and their failure to put to use the information they have gained. The other type has not even come to realize the necessity in the building of a sound program for life of sizing up in [15]