"Spectator" Conference for Personal Problems—II.

IN last week's issue I described the work the Spectator Confer- ence for Personal Problems hopes to achieve. Anyone who feels he has a personal problem he would like help in solving is invited to submit it to the Conference. They will consult together over his question, and I shall be responsible for drafting the final answer from the information they provide.

Readers may be quite sure that any questions they submit will be treated as confidences and most religiously kept private. They will be seen only by members of the Conference. Even where questions are discussed in the columns of the Spectator, they will be questions of general interest, and every care will be taken to avoid giving details which might identify our correspondents.

The Conference has already begun its meetings, and perhaps it will help readers if I could give one or two examples of problems which members of it have met in previous experience and in which they have succeeded in giving help. I shall throw them, for greater clearness, into the shape of question and answer.

" I have a son of seventeen years of age, very intelligent and thoughtful, and I have always had great ambitions for him. Until three or four months ago he had been devoted to me and had always thought me the only woman in the world.' But now he is causing me great anxiety. He has begun to criticize everything I do. If I enjoy myself and seem gay he accuses me of being flippant. If I make myself pleasant to visitors he accuses me of being flirtatious. He keeps me on pins and needles by his constant desire to find fault, and this is particularly painful to me because I had always wished that our relations should be perfect and had really considered us as examples of how much a mother and son can mean to each other."

It is right that a mother should wish to have a perfect relation with her children. If she has played her part well, she has been the best introduction they could have into the wider world. They have learned from her that human beings can be trustworthy, and they have known what it is to experi- ence a disinterested affection. But there is always a risk that a great strain will come, exactly when the children are facing the responsibilities of adult age themselves, if parents have put themselves into the position of being gods and goddesses to their children. By such an attitude they really do not treat their children as human beings at all. They have much more wish to seem perfect themselves than to establish perfect relations with them.

Perhaps they will accept criticism from other people. The rest of the world knows that they can make mistakes, that they have faults and weaknesses ; but the poor children have to deny the evidence of their eyes. And yet this relation, in which one human being poses as absolutely impeccable before another, is supposed to be a relation of intimacy. There cannot be any intimacy between human beings unless they see each other completely and naturally and understand each other as they are.

A youth of seventeen is probably passing through a period of tension in himself, not very sure what he will make of himself in life, very anxious to stand on his own feet. It is very understandable that in such circumstances he tries to take it out of other people by, depreciating them ; especially if he has half begun to feel that he has been too dependent on them, and half realizes that it will be difficult to do without this dependence. Look at it from his point of view. He has held before him a conception of his parents as absolutely perfect, an ideal he cannot hope to realize himself, and one that makes it ten times more difficult for him to enter adult life with confidence. It is no wonder that he tries to take his parents down. It is his only, method of persuading himself that he can make a good job of his own life.

It is hard to descend from a pedestal, but if you make a wise and brave effort to gain equality with your son you will succeed. Your love for him will be much better shown by trying to give him confidence in himself than by trying to keep up your own prestige. Have you the courage to build up a real comradeship ? So far you have had the comfort of being perfect whatever you did : it would be a very great exercise of good will to show yourself a fellow-human being, an individual with just such failings and problems as we all share. This would be a triumph of a real unselfish love. It would be helpful, too, to take your husband, or other friends, into your confidence. It is hard to abolish " distance " between people in one instance only.

- The second example touches upon a still wider problem. Wherever we find disqualifying doubts or scruples over reli- gious faith, we may suspect that really the issue is something quite different. There are tasks or difficulties which the doubter cannot gain confidence to face.

" I am in real distress of mind because I have lost the religious faith in which I was brought up. The world seems so awful, so full of pain, that no man who considers things with an open mind can believe a benevolent providence has set it in motion. There may be a God, but, if so, he cannot be the God Christians believe in. The whole universal process seems to me senseless ; perhaps even malevolent. But if this is true, I cannot see what kind of sanction there is for moral duties or obligations. Now, when I am at the outset of a professional career, it leaves me very much puzzled as to the value of any effort to make the best of life."

Let me tell the circumstances of a man who found himself in the same difficulty. He had been an only child, much spoilt by his parents ; he had been brought up with the feeling that he had only to command, and everything would be done as he wished it. When he went out into the world he found that nobody treated him as if he had any such claim to con- sideration. He was faced with demands he felt perfectly unjustifiable. There was no one to minister to him ; they wanted him only for what he could do, not for what he was. He felt that he had been tricked ; the universe had played a joke on him ; and so he disclaimed all responsibility. He felt that society was hostile and God himself was hostile.

After a time he was able to see that he was asking for im- possibilities. He was insisting that people should continue to make him the centre of attention ; that they should go on doing everything for him and guarantee him love, devotion, and an easy time no matter what he did. He was only willing to make terms with the world if it gave him special privileges. Every neurosis shows the same desire for " payment on account." Behind this desire there is always a feeling of discouragement, as if it were impossible to win affection or to gain success by working for it. Discouraged people feel a need for a perpetual guarantee fund of sympathy for them to draw on ; and when they fail to discover it they accuse the world of hostility. Certainly the world is not constructed on these lines. Human society could not exist if everyone were demanding more than he gave.

In this case, as soon as he recognized that he was no longer being treated as a spoilt child but as a grown man, his religious doubts disappeared. The sense of injustice went with them ; he was able to recover his faith, and it inspired him to play a full and generous part in common life.

He felt religion not only as an eternal truth but also as something which eternally must be made true, as something which must be put into life ; and he began to understand in a fresh way the truth of the saying " The Kingdom of God is within you."

Next week I propose to deal with issues that readers them- selves have raised. The full plan of the Conference was described in last week's issue of the Spectator. This group of consultants is composed of two medical psychologists (one woman and one man), the chief pathologist of a London hospital, the head-mistress of a large London elementary school, and a priest of the Church of England. They hope to be able to offer guidance on any individual worry which a reader would like help in solving. Letters should be addressed to The Conference for Personal Problems, c 'o the Spectator, 13 York Street, Covent Garden, London, W.C. 1.

ALAN PORTER.

BOOKS RECOMMENDED.

Understanding Human Nature. By Alfred Adler. (Allen and Unwin. 12s. 6d.) The Inner Discipline. By C. Baudouin and A. Lestchin.sky. (Allen and Unwin. 3s. 6d.) The Beloved Ego. By W. Stekel. (Kegan Paul. Os. 6d.) Three-Minute Talks about Children. By Estelle Cole. (Daniel Co. as. ad.) Mind and Reality. By Viscount Haldane. (Benn. 6d.) Love in Children and its Aberrations. By 0. Pfister. (Allen and Unwin. 24s.)