11. Arthur Janov has an excellent description of normalcy.

The goal of primal therapy is to bring one to what Janov describes as
post primal, ie normal. Post flood using the self help measures is post
primal and can be acheived in a short time if the measures are used
consistently at the first signs of detox crises. I don't necessarily
agree with psychological explanations nor find them useful, but I
identify with his description of normacly, having used the self help
measures. I like the definition of post flood as a sustainable euphoria,
not a 'high', but freedom from anxiety and distress.

-On Being Normal, Chapter 11, The Primal Scream, Arthur Janov, Perigee
Books, 1970. Hopefully I'm not in trouble because of copyright-- I think
this book is out of print._
It is the aim of Primal Therapy to make individuals real.
Normal people are real by definition. Post-Primal patients
become-real because of their therapy. These patients still carry
scars; however. They have been wounded many times over in their lives,
and one cannot wash away their memories; one can only defuse them so
that these memories no longer exert the force which made the
neurotic act out symbolically. With so much deprivation as a neurotic,
obviously the post-Primal person is not going to be a totally fulfilled
human being. As a neurotic he could only struggle toward fulfillment.
His therapy now frees him to fill his needs in the present. When I talk
about a normal human being, I am discussing a defense-free, tensionless,
non struggling person. My view of normality has nothing to do with
statistical norms, averages, social adjustment scales, conformity, or
nonconformity. When a person is himself, how he behaves may be as varied
and infinite as the number of people in the world. The normal is
himself. Primal Therapy makes someone into himself, rather than tries to
have a person "make something ou: of himself."
I shall discuss the normal in contrast with the neurotic. Later I shall
draw a composite picture of a post-Primal patient: how he feels, what
he does, and the kinds of relationships he has.Being satisfied makes the
normal relaxed. The neurotic who is dissatisfied because he did not have
his needs satisfied must search out apparent sources of his
dissatisfaction. This keeps him from knowing what the real sources of
his unhappiness are. So he dreams of getting a new job, going after
another college degree, moving some-place else, or finding a new
girlfriend. By focusing on his bad job, non understanding wife, etc., he
hopes the basic discontentment will be removed.I recall one patient
coming into therapy one day complaining about the political turn of
events in this country. He was obsessed with getting out and moving
abroad. What he had to say about the political atmosphere seemed to be
quite real. Nevertheless, when he felt his real discontentment, it did
not change his ideas about the political situation, but it did alter his
obsession to get out. What he felt was:"There is no good home for me."
He had never had a good home. Bad home = bad homeland. His dream was of
finding that good home elsewhere.Because he is not where he is, the
neurotic will never be content for any lasting period of time. He is
using the present to work out the past. So he will buy a house and fix
it up, and when he is done, he will want a new house. Or he will find a
girlfriend and then leave her after he has "conquered" her. To the
neurotic, the struggle, not the result, is important. Thus he often
cannot complete what he starts. He justifies his inadequate jobs on the
basis of having so much to do. But he has so much to do because he does
not finish. To finish and feel unfulfilled is to hurt. This is why so
many individuals have a hard time in the last months of working for an
advanced degree. It is also why some people cannot rest content with
money in the bank. Just after getting out of debt, they must borrow
again so as to maintain the struggle. To feel"I have arrived; I have
money in the bank, and I still feel unhappy" is intolerable. The
struggle takes care of that. Some neurotic house- wives rarely get up
early and finish their housework completely. Then they would have to
face the emptiness of their lives. Instead,they have one or two rooms in
constant disarray; in this way they maintain their struggles. The
normal, who does not need struggle, who needs no obstacles in his path
to keep him in that struggle, can get down to things. The neurotic,
delaying the feeling of his Pain, delays much of the rest of his living.
Indeed, feeling that Pain is the beginning of living for the neurotic.
Until he feels it, he must be elusive, in terms of eluding not
only what hurts but any unpleasantness as well. Because he is
constantly on the move away from his real self, he tends to be
flighty-if not physically, then mentally. His mind is filled with what
he plans to d6; he cannot sit still. He is on the move even in his
sleep, thrash-ing about or perspiring. He may be so activated that he
cannot sleep at all-obsessed with disturbing thoughts and unresolved
business. The normal can be with you completely. Part of him isn't
locked away in "reserve"; the normal, therefore, can be completely
interested. The neurotic is too often a whirlpool of.distractions; his
eyes, like his mind, seem to dart from one subject to another, unable to
focus for any length of time.
The normal, of course, is not split. This means that when he
shakes your hand, his eyes are not looking elsewhere. He can listen
completely, something which is rare in a neurotic society. The
neurotic can really hear only what he wants to hear. Most of the time he
is thinking about what he is going to say next. What he hears, as
a rule, will be valued only if it refers to himself in one way or
another. He cannot be objective and appreciate for itself what is
outside him (and that goes for his children). Neurotic conversations can
rarely transcend personal experience ("what I said," "what he said to
me")because neurotic interest is in the self which is unfulfilled.
The normal is interested in his self in a different way. Everything in
the world does not have to be related to it, but he is able to relate
himself to the world. He is not using his outer world to cover the inner
one. The normal does not feel lonely; he feels alone, and that
alone feeling is far different from what he felt before when alone.
It is a separate, unattached experience devoid of fear and panic.
Neurotic loneliness is a denial of being alone, a need to be with others
in order to flee from the catastrophic Primal feeling of being
rejected and really alone most of one's life. The inventors of Muzak and
the car radio understood neurotic loneliness; these are like Pain
relievers-defenses provided gratis so that the neurotic will not
have to feel his aloneness. For the normal, they are often
considered an invasion of one's privacy.
The normal is straight, and one can sense it in the way he
reacts.The neurotic leads an exaggerated life, he either overreacts or
underreacts; since the time he found his true reactions unacceptable,he
has had to react in phony ways or pretend not to react at
all. For example, a patient had a neurotic friend over to see her
new apartment. She asked her how she liked the decor. The friend
said, "Oh, I wish my rug looked as good as yours." She only saw the
room in terms of her own needs, and her reaction was a typically
neurotic response. Or, if some neurotics hear a joke, instead of
experiencing the humor and laughing, they will immediately counter with
a topper.Whenever someone must "identify," rather than feel, we see
this improper reaction. Thus, the normal reacts appropriately, not
because he is trying to produce an effect or has studied a book of
rules, but because he can feel what is appropriate. This means that to
be a good parent, he need not endlessly study parent guidance
manuals. He will be a natural person, allowing his children to he
natural people. Because the normal no longer must cover the feeling of
unimportance, he does not have to struggle to be treated as someone
special by waiters and hotel personnel. For the neurotic, this is often
a fulltime occupation. Part of the neurotic need is to surround oneself
with people, not to feel alone, or to join clubs, to cover the
feeling that one never belonged to a real family. All this incessant
struggle is over for the normal. When I think about the neurotic
struggle, I remember a recent advertisement for a brand of scotch: "It
can be a small way of paying yourself back for. all the years of
struggle it took to get where you are."
Neurotic struggles are manufactured. Thus, a woman can spend years
shopping for bargains and never feel that what she bought
was totally satisfactory. Probably it wasn't. II she could have got
her parents' love without struggle, then perhaps bargains wouldn't
he so important. Bargaining is the all-American neurosis. It's
much the same as the magic diet pill; it's getting something good for
little effort, like scotch. What makes bargaining especially delicious
is the struggle. The greater the struggle, the more valued the prize,
except that this is not the real prize desired for the great struggle of
the person's life. It is but a lowly substitute because years of
struggle for parental love came to naught. Bargaining is the analogue of
the neurotic's life with his parents with one difference: The neurotic
finally wins what he often doesn't want. Walking into a store and paying
the list price are difficult for many neurotics because to pay retail is
not to be made "special." Anyone can pay retail, and if you do, you are
just like anyone else. The normal is not a compulsive bargain hunter. He
tries to make his life easy, not difficult. Closely akin to bargaining
is the way neurotics treat money.
One patient said that he could never keep money in the bank before
therapy because it meant that he didn't have to struggle anymore. This
man was in a constant struggle away from an early feeling
of worthlessness. He had hoped (unconsciously) that money would
make him feel worthwhile. But of course there was never enough
money to do that. When he had money, he could not live with it
because he still felt worthless, and so he was driven on to
accumulate more. The normal is not using money symbolically to fill old
needs.He feels worthwhile because he was valued just as he was by
normal parents. Money is the natural preoccupation of so many
neurotics because the neurotic, by definition, must feel worthless; he
was not valued for what he was. Not being able to feel his true needs,
he will always want more than he needs. There are other neurotics who
can never spend money. Their struggle was possibly to try to feel safe
and secure. But again, money alone cannot make an insecure person
secure. This kind of neurotic is constantly postponing life: "Someday,
when things are right, I'll take my vacation." He never lives. Instead,
he clings to a fantasy of how life will be someday. That fantasy is
intimately associated with Pain, which helps explain why so many
individuals postpone so much of their lives. The normal, on the other
hand, can get to things now. He has no old Pains dragging him back and
making him put off matters. His real feelings eliminate the need for
unreal fantasies. The normal is stable. He is content to be just where
he is and doesn't have to imagine that real life is "out there"
somewhere. One woman put it this way: "I used to look in the mirror and
see my wrinkles and get terrified. I ran to one beauty expert after
another, tried special lotions, and when that didn't do it, I tried a
face lift. I was in a desperate flight from feeling that my youth was
over and I'd never have a chance to get what that little girl inside me
needed. Seeing those wrinkles and some gray hair set off my
hopelessness at ever being little again, and so I ran and ran. I went to
parties and functions by the dozens. Tried to be 'in' and attractive.
'Run' was my middle name. I couldn't stop." The normal can accept his
age because he is living now and has felt and experienced his youth. He
is not trying each day of his life to recapture something lost decades
before. He is neither excessively worried about the future nor
perpetually reminiscing about his past because he is not living a time
that doesn't exist. With the neurotic, "the personality is the message,"
to borrow from McLuhan's apothegm. The personality is warped toward the
message it must convey. Thus, the laconic person may he saying,
'Daddy, talk to me. Draw me out"; the fumbling, disorganized
sort is saying, "Mommy, I'm lost. Direct me"; the hangdog look,
"Mama, ask me what hurts"; the depressive may he saying, "Don't kick
me when I'm down." Because the normal is no longer trying to say
anything indirectly, he has no warped personality. Without old needs,
people are just what they are. I am not sure how to explain this in any
other way than to say that without a psychological frontispiece the
normal just lives and lets live. As I have already pointed out, the.
body is part of that overall personality so that neurotics often look
neurotic: we may find straight, thin lips closing down against
unacceptable words, narrowed eyes "unable to see everything that is
going on," as one patient put it. Or we will note drooping lips from
unexpressed and unresolved sorrow and a jaw set in perpetual anger. The
neurotic's entire organism is expressing the unconscious message. With
no message to convey, we may expect a properly proportioned body in the
normal, all else being equal. The physical changes I see in post-Primal
patients lead me to conclude that some of what we believe is
inherited may really be the results of neurosis.
The normal is able to enjoy himself. It is' surprising how few
neurotics are able to do that without artificial aid, such as
liquor. As one patient put it, "Fun torpedoes hope. I managed to turn
everything into something not pleasurable. If the whole day went well, I
would suddenly get irritable and pick a fight. I couldn't stomach a
steady diet of goodness. It made me feel uncomfortable, like the ax
was going to fall. I look back now, and I think that accepting all
that goodness meant giving up my struggle to make my parents good
people. If I accepted goodness wholeheartedly and really
enjoyed life, I'd have to give up hope of having my misery recognized."
Theneurotic isn't after pleasure now, he wants it to make up for
then. The same can be said for affection. The normal enjoys affection
without reservation. But for the neurotic to do so may mean, "I don't
need you anymore, parents. I've found someone to love me." It is
terrible difficult for the neurotic to feel that he is never going to be
that little boy or girl who is going to get from his parents what he
missed. An example of the difference between the normal reaction and
the neurotic one was illustrated by a patient who, after Christmas,
came in to say that he had got just "millions of presents." He
needed to make it more than it was to fill the large lifetime void.
Over and over one reads that children need chores or jobs to
learn responsibility. Children are pressed into service to earn
money, even when there is no necd. So, when a young child is asked by a
neighbor child to play, the first question out of the parent's mouth may
be, "Have you done all your chores?" Somehow, parents fear that to
let children do what they want means ~hat~they'll never do all
the "shoulds." So they put obstacles in front of each want until
the child comes to feel apprehensive about the simplest wants and be,
too, eventually avoids them. Later in life this person may never be
able to act spontaneously without the nagging question, "What should
I be doing first?" One patient told me, "If I had fun one day
andsomeone asked me to come over and spend the night the next day,
my mother would always squelch it because it was 'too much
excitement!'-meaning pleasure. She was probably terrified that I had
used up my allotment of fun without paying my dues."
The normal's life is much easier in this respect. He does not
keep himself from living the present, nor does he put his children
into the struggle so that they feel guilty about being free and
spontaneous. Nothing is ever exactly right for the neurotic, because he
was never right for his parents. It's an art form all its own never to
say one praising word to a child, one phrase that means you're all
right just the way you are, but patient after patient report they can
never remember such a word. Instead, the neurotic parent must speak
his Pain with every breath because that Pain is there every moment. The
result of being criticized for a lifetime takes many
forms. For example, you can buy some neurotics a present, and they will
invariably find something wrong with it. Or they will find the
bad in anything because only the bad was found in them. When the
neurotic reads the news, he reads about bad news: what went wrong; who
else is miserable or did bad things. In a neurotic society
where people must project their misery outside themselves to make life
tolerable, news becomes synonymous with bad rews. The normal is not
feasting on the misery of others. lie feels their misery and wants to
belp end it. When you try to fill a neurotic's void, you have to
remember what a bottomless pit it is The neurotic may need very
expensive gifts to cover years of emptiness and lovelessness. But no
gift can do that, no matter how expensive; there isn't enougl for in the
world to warm a lifetime of coldness. Even achieving long-sought goals
is not always the answer. A patient of mine finally got his PhD and went
into a severe depression. He thought that after eight years of terrible
struggle the diploma was going to do something for him but he still
didn't feel loved or important. He told me that getting that PhD was
like producing the final miracle and he couldn't feel it. The normal is
not hoping that something external will do anything for him, so be can
let things be what they are. For the neurotic, disappointment is thc
handmaiden of hope. hope which obscures reality often ensures that the
person, will be hurt by his unrealistic expectations. The neurotic is
bound to be disappointed by the Christmas party, for example, when
somehow that party is expected to make him feel wanted and loved.
The normal is healthy. He doesn't have to run around telling
doctors, '~I hurt," because he could never say it to his
parents. Because there is no pull toward being unreal, no symbolic
system to keep the body restless and fatigued, the normal is not only
more healthy but much more energetic. His energy is used for the
accomplishment of real tasks, not for struggling to achieve the
impossible.
And the normal finally knows when he feels good. one patient
told me, "I never even knew if I felt good. I was so far from my
feelings. When someone asked me how I felt and I didn't feel bad, I had
to deduce that since I wasn't feeling bad, there was only one
thing left-I must feel good." The normal doesn't put anyone else in the
struggle. He understands that children should be liked without having to
cant it. So he doesn't make his children struggle for an)'thing.
Paradoxically, those children seem to do very well in life, contrary to
the view that early struggle in life somehow prepares you for the later
one. Many neurotics never even realize that they shouldn't have had to
do anything to be liked by their parents. They have struggled for so
many years to be liked that they can't imagine just being liked for
being alive. The conditioning process of having to perform for approval
begins almost at birth, where the child is "kootchy-kooed" to try to get
him to smile(look happy). Later he is asked to wave "bye-bye" or to
dance for the grandparents or to say this word or that, irrespective of
how the child may feel at the moment. Almost every contact dturing
infancy is one of performing at the will of someone else. This need on
the part of parents and grandparents to get a constant response to them
seems a subtle outgrowth of how little response they were able to get
out of their own parents When one stacks the normal up against the.
neurotic, it's a wonder that neurotics last as long as they do. If
there were some key principle concerning real behavior, it
mightbe as follows: Reality surrounds itself with other reality in
the same way that unreality seeks out unreality. Real Or normal people
will not have continuing relationships with unreal people, and the
converse would also be true. Phoniness becomes intolerable to the
normal. He isn't going to flatter, submit, pamper, or mollify a
neurotic in order to get along. He also cannot be charmed,
conned, ordominated by the neurotic, so that. unless someone is fairly
straight, the relationship will he difficult. The normal will not be
ensnared in someone else's struggle. One patient reported that before,
he had had to finish his wife's sentences. She would start a sentence
and then look to him beseechingly, and he would immediately jump in
and take care of her. The reaction was automatic and unconscious.
The neurotic isn't likely to continue a relationship where his
neurotic needs are not being served. He has special requirements.
He will tend to seek out those individuals who share his kind of
unreal ideas and attitudes. We may often, expect, therefore, a
homogeneity of thought within his group of friends when it comes to
economics, politics, people, or general social phenomena. I am
indicating that being unreal is an encompassing pattern. The neurotic
must avoid reality until he is ready to face his own. Until that time he
will create a comfortable but unreal cocoon around him in the job he
has, the newspapers he reads, the friends he keeps. The strength of the
neurotic's social unreality will depend to some degree on how much of
himself he is forced to deny. If a man was never loved by his father, he
may have homosexual fantasies.
Some may recognize these fantasies and accept them; others may deny
them and possibly not even admit that they exist in their
dreams and daydreams. The latter group would be more denied than the
former. They may come to despise even seeing homosexuals and want to
pass laws against them. In their social behavior, then, they
will demand abrogation of any rights of homosexuals-all because
they want a daddy and can't say so. These same men might be so
fearful of their "weakness" that they come to despise it. Not only do
they try to act strong and independent, but they will want to pass
lawsagainst "welfare leeches" or any other group that can't be
tough and Make It on Their Own. To repress one's own needs, in short,
often means denying recognition of the needs of others.
To try to change the social philosophies of some neurotics is
tantamount to changing their whole psychophysical Systems. Neurotics
believe what they have to believe in order to make life
tolerable. To talk them out of their basic beliefs is like talking them
out of their constitutional equipment.The normal is not interested in
the exploitation of others.
There is nothing that he needs from people that is unrealistic. The
neurotic, helpless before his Pain, often needs to exploit others in
order to feel an importance he cannot feel. He must do this in order to
cover himself. He tends to need others to say what is good about him,
his child, his house, or his clothes. Someone who is not normal cannot
be giving of himself when that self is locked away inside. The neurotic
may feign concern and interest in others and may convince himself that
he is caring, but that self cannot care in any real sense until it can
feel and express itself fully. So long as that real self is stuffed
under fear and tension, so long as that self desperately needs, it
cannot give. The normal isn't likely to collect many friends as a buffer
against feeling alone in the world. His friends tend to be neither
trophies nor possessions. Post-Primal patients report that they can get
along with other real people, irrespective of their personalities. It is
their contention that real people are open and honest and undemanding
and that idiosyncrasies don't seem to be a threat.
The normal doesn't need an appointment book full of Saturday
night dates reaching months into the future in order to feel
wanted or popular. A normal doctor wouldn't need a waiting room full
of patients in order to feel needed. This last point seems to work
in two ways. The neurotic patient may also become apprehensive when he
is the only one in a doctor's waiting room and is taken in
immediately. Because he has not struggled, waiting and squirming, he may
feel that his doctor is not as good as the one who keeps people
waiting an hour. The normal, who acts realistically, will tend to be on
time because he operates on real time, not on some time from the past.
What this means is that he will not use time symbolically to feel
something he cannot otherwise feel. He will not be late, for example, to
try to feel important or to try not to feel rejected as in the case
with the neurotic. For example, being late can mean keeping unreal hope
alive. It's one more way the neurotic is not straight with life. Or he
will contrive a busyness that never leaves him time to feel. He keeps
on the go, feeling a pressure from outside that really lies inside.
Many neurotics manage their lives so that there is never time to live
leisurely. They plan so many projects (time fillers) for the purpose of
never having a free moment to feel or reflect. Pretty soon they have
more to do than there are hours in the day. The result is that they
are late to everything.
As discussed elsewhere, there are pseudo feelings that no longer
reside in the normal. This means that the normal would be
neither ealous nor guilt-ridden. The normal, content to be what he is,
would not envy others, want what they want, or demand what they have.
I suppose that this is another way of saying that he can allow
others -his wife, his children, his friends-to be themselves. He isn't
living through their achievements and successes. He isn't busy
stamping out their signs of happiness and life. The normal does not feel
alienated because it is Pain that produces alienation of one part of the
self from another. (Perhaps alienation from self is what enables
leaders to discuss killing so readily. Divorced from their own
humanity, they may not be able to feel for the humanity of others. Death
is evidently not a real tragedy for those who do not feel life. It is
in this sense that being "dead" internally makes the actual death of
others less real and, therefore, less horrifying.) The normal seems to
sense the pulse of life of others. He can
be tactful, not out of a deep dishonesty, but because he can sense
the Pain of others. He feels how much reality others may be capable
of feeling. The normal is sensitive in the true sense of the word. He
not only is mentally acute to the needs and drives of others, but has a
total organismic sensitivity where his mind and body are directly
affected by stimuli. I would differentiate neurotic, mental sensitivity
from the openness of the normal. I want to clarify this point because
there are many neurotics who are acutely perceptive and who do see
accurately into the personalities of those around them. What they cannot
do, I believe, is feel the situations they are in because they are
acting out denied feelings at the time. So, for instance, a brilliant
man may be expounding on some philosophic point at a dinner table,
acutely sensitive to the kinds of people who are his listeners, while
being totally insensitive to the fact that he is dominating the
conversation. He is too busy acting out his need for attention and
importance. This is why it is crucial for a therapist not only to be
trained in perceiving the personalities of others but to be normal. If
he isn't, he may be acting out his need to be needed, for example, with
his patients, thereby countervailing any good his insightfulness might
bring.The normal no longer suffers from "looking forward to," in
order to escape the emptiness of the present. One patient said, "I
used to rationalize that I wouldn't want to be rich because the rich
must be unhappy. They can have everything they want and therefore have
nothing to look forward to. I see now that if you can enjoy
everything at each moment, you don't need anything to look forward
to." The normal doesn't confuse hoping with planning. He may plan
for a future situation, but he doesn't keep himself so full of
plans that he has no present. It would seem that some neurotics keep
things in the future so that they can never quite take pleasure now. I
believe that this derives from early in a child's experience when to
have led his life his own way, to do exactly what he wanted, would have
meant rejection and possibly abandonment by parents who
expected things done their way. He had to put off doing what he wanted,
hoping for a future time when he could enjoy himself. This may
go far to explain the idea many of us have had as children-"When I
grow up, I'm going to be so happy." It would seem that some
neurotics continue this pattern into adulthood. The normal, having
given up unreal hope and the struggle to please, can lead his life as
he pleases. The neurotic "wants"; the normal "needs." For the neurotic
to want what he really needs is to feel Pain, so he must want
substitutes -something attainable. The normal has simple needs because
he wants what he needs, not some symbolic substitute. The neurotic
may want a drink or a cigarette, prestige, power, high grades, or a
fast car-all to cover Pains of emptiness, worthlessness,
powerlessness, or whatever. There is nothing to cover in the normal,
nothing to fill up. Life seems to conspire against the neurotic. He
wants so much because he got so little. Yet because he has had to twist
his personality in strange ways to satisfy himself even minimally, he
becomes the kind of person who turns people away. His cloying demands,
his dependence and narcissism become intolerable to others. The
normal, who isn't trying to fill a lifetime of personal neglect in each
social contact, is often sought after and emulated. The neurotic is a
taker. No matter how much you may do for him, it may not matter because
he must have those needs fulfilled over and over until they are properly
connected and resolved-something usually that can only be done with
Primal Therapy.The normal operates on the "musts" instead of the
"shoulds." Neurotic behavior, in the Primal context, means the
abdication of personal need in deference to parental wants and needs.
Parental wants become the child's shoulds. A "bad" child is one who
isn't doing his shoulds. The young child, trying to be good so he can
be loved, tries to be what his parents demand. He does this with
the implicit hope that finally they will fulfill his needs-that
they will hold him, for instance. But parental needs can never be
fulfilled by the child no matter how hard he tries. So the situation
arises where the child is perpetually trying to satisfy his parent, to
make him happy or pleased. It will never be enough; no child can make up
for parental misery. The shoulds of the child are the needs of the
parents. Not to perform them means giving up hope for parental love.
Neurotic children become so involved in the shoulds-being quiet, polite,
and helpful-that they lose sight of their personal needs. Having
lost those needs, they want what they don't need. The robbery of
children's needs is often subtle. Neurotic parents will remind children,
"You should be happy. Stop complaining. Look at all we're doing for you.
We've given you everything." Often children are convinced. They look
around and see material goods and believe that they have what they want,
and they no longer even know that they need something desperately-love.
The tragedy of the shoulds is that in performing them, the
child imagines that someday, when he does exactly what they want, hi~
parents will shower a rainbow of love upon him. But since his
parents themselves need what he can never give them, that day never
comes To operate on the shoulds is not to function according to ones
feelings. So the shoulds contain not only hope, but anger as
well-anger at having to do what one does not feel. Having spent a
lifetime doing what he did not want to do, the neurotic often has a
difficult time doing what he must. The normal does what must be done
because he acts in terms of realities.
The neurotic is often indecisive because he is split between
repressed needs and doing the shoulds. The normal can decide for
himself because he feels that self and what is right for it.
The neurotic relies on others to supply the shoulds. "What
should I order from the menu?" In this way, he maneuvers his life so
that people go on providing shoulds for him and he never allows
himself to function according to his feelings. That simple
question-"What should I order?"-is often a sign of the neurotic's
deadness. It is saying, "I have no wants, no feelings, no life. Live my
life for me."
The normal is not in the search for the meaning of life, for
meaning derives from feeling. How deeply one feels his life (the
life inside him) is how meaningful it is. The neurotic who had to shut
down against real catastrophic meaning early in his childhood must
be in the search, conscious or unconscious. He may try to find
meaning in a job or travel, and if his defenses are working, he may
imagine that his life is meaningful. Other neurotics sense that
something is missing and set out on the quest for meaning. They may
travel to gurus, study philosophy, steep themselves in religion or
cults-all to find a meaning that lies but a deep breath away.The
neurotic must be in search because real meaning is Pain
and must be avoided. Thus, the search becomes the meaning; because
the neurotic cannot fully feel his own life, be must find his
meaning through others or things outside him. He may find it in his
children or grandchildren, their accomplishments and successes. Or it
may lie in holding important office or making big business deals. It is
when the outside things are removed that the neurotic suffers. It is
then that he may begin to feel, "What's the use? What is it all for?
What is the meaning of it all anyway?" The normal lives inside himself
and does not feel that something is missing; no parts of him are
missing. The neurotic must feel this way if he ever stops his struggle
because part of him is missing. One patient put it this way: "I have a
fascinating job. It's too bad it doesn't interest me." It had no meaning
for him. The neurotic, unable to feel the full meaning of his life,
must often invent a superlife or an afterlife-places where real living
will go on. He must imagine that somewhere lie the real meaning and
purpose if it all. He may think that savants can find it for him when
only he can do that. The normal, by discovering his own body, has no
need to conjure a special place where life really is going on.
Implicit in the neurotic's seeking out psychotherapy is that possibly it
will help him find a more meaningful life. It, too, becomes one long
search. The normal has made a simple discovery: Meaning is not some-
thing to be detected, only felt. He therefore does not race to
weekend seninars on how to live the good life, find joy, or
whatever.The neurotic's search is exemplified by a patient who was
formerly a philosophy major in college: "I liked philosophy because I
never had to know anything for sure. I never understood how much I
wanted that state of limbo. I couldn't feel what was right in
life, any way, so limbo was perfect for me. I searched in the heavens
and in the intellectual clouds for some super meaning-all this so I
didn'thave to face that all my years of hassling at home had no
meaning.It was senseless. Finding meaning in Descartes and Spinoza was
a pleasant cover for all that." The normal is not trying to derive meaning from special
occasions such as Christmas and Thanksgiving (Primal season, as one
patient put it). The neurotic may be depressed during the holidays
because the holiday gatherings did not make him feel loved or that he
had a real, warm family. The normal has no need to make life what it is
not. He has no need for the broad philosophical search. He knows he is
just alive and living, no more. One could spend the test of this book
describing the normal. Normal is, simply, whatever normal people do--and
not digging endless holes to climb out of.