The Road to Happiness
Tins book has the interest and the significance of an explorit- t Lin into the interior of some knoWn but almost unpenetrated continent. The writer, " Joanna Field," had certain neurotic symptoms. She made the discovery that her life was not as she wished it to be, and she set about trying to change it. " All I can see as I look back is a picture of myself going about my daily affairs in a half-dream state, sometimes discontented but never trying to find out why." She then started to write a diary, and to make an analysis of herself. She seems always to have had a clear aim before her : the motive of her analysis was not self-interest : it was happiness : she wanted to dis- cover happiness for herself and happiness for other people in their relations to her.
It is important to emphasize this purpose in her diary, because criticism can be levelled at the book as an example of psycho-analysis. For any self-analysis is certain to be one sided. Yet, in order to achieve some external aim, a one sided self-analysis is a legitimate instrument. Indeed, it is impossible to achieve any aim without self-analysis. For example, few people are able to gain the most ordinary worldly successes without some examination of their own character, some honest attempt to discover their weaknesses, and, to reconcile their fantasy with objective fact. But if the aim is not merely success, but real happiness, a far greater honesty is needed. The importance of " Joanna Field " lies not so much in her analysis, as in the relation of her discoveries about herself to her aims, and in her growing realization Of what she meant when she wished to be happy. In order to have a life of her own, she wanted, in a word, Yo " get outside herself." She realized that there were several obstacles to this. For example, although she certainly was; find gang. the liziweasion of filing, person exceptionalli)
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considerate of the opinions of others, she had such a high sense of the difference between herself and other people, that she could hardly bring herself to believe that misfortunes that fell on others could ever touch her herself. At the same time, she was completely dependent on the judgements of the people round her. She could not believe that the thing said, if said by others about herself, might not be true. She was almost incapable of making any judgements about herself that were not extreme : she either lived her work as though it were some ardent propaganda, or else she felt that both life and work were equally useless. Yet she realized that all these attitudes were a mechanism and that they were false. She was subject to attacks of acute depression and anxiety.
She found a name for the process of chattering " thoughts which so prevented her from entering into any satisfactory human relationship, from listening to music or from looking at pictures ; she called it " blind " thinking. At the end of her quest she writes how " I realized that my blind thinking prompted by a present need and old forgotten fears, had kept me imprisoned in spiritual virginity."
The first stage of her journey was to note down the condi- tions in which she found happiness. This led her, conversely, to discover the things she was afraid of. She compared lists of the things which she loved with the things she hated. She then made a discovery which turned out to be her chief clue. This was, that a great part of her waking thought, particularly when she was depressed or anxious, was conducted in a manner and even a language that were completely childish. When she was in these moods, she noted down what she was thinking. She also released the stream of what she calls her " automatic thought " by writing down a symbolic word (such as " God " or " lover ") and freely noting its associa- tions. The results were surprising, for she discovered that part of her mind accepted beliefs which had long ago been rejected by her reasoning mind.
The theoretic conclusions at the end of the book are of great interest. Her diagnosis is that she suffered mainly from the imposition on her mind, through her education and through contemporary intellectual society, of.male reasoning, and male ways of thinking. The whole tendency of her upbringing and her environment was to suppress the female side of her. She advances an interesting theory of bisexuality. This theory is doubtless subject to certain objections, and the whole history is subject to two other objections. Firstly, that although she had such marked hysterical symptoms, she had a power of self-criticism which must always have distinguished het from the typically hysterical introvert. Secondly, that in her rationalization of her case, she is perhaps too anxious to stress the development of her inner life, so that she may tend to under-emphasize the importance of certain external events that took place while she was writing the diary : for example, her marriage, and the birth of a child.
These objections only make the book of greater interest to the general reader, because they show that " Joanna Field " is not an exceptional case, of interest only to the psychologist. She is a woman of courage and honesty who has written a confession of great interest, which compares with that other modern confession, The Shutter of Snow, by Emily Coleman. This is a social document of 'slue; because there are many men and women today in exactly the same predicament as that of " Joanna Field." The only way in which they can achieve happiness is by a kind of rebirth, an escape from " spiritual virginity " : and this book is an account of how to the writer this rebirth was. made possible.
' STEPHEN SPENDER.
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