n who suffers from a sense of inferiority because his friend has a
handsomer or more intellectual wife is the same little boy who strove
with his father for possession of the mother, the most desired object
in his childish environment. The measure of escape from these childish
attitudes means the measure of success in life.

Fortunately for society, the average person achieves this success. The
normal person in his childhood learned how to switch the energy of his
primitive desires into channels approved by society. Stored away in
his subconscious, this acquired faculty carries him without conscious
effort through all the necessary adjustments in maturity. The nervous
person, less well equipped in childhood, may fortunately acquire the
faculty in all its completeness, although at the cost of genuine
effort and patient self-study.

=Sublimation the Key Word.= In the prevention and in the cure of
nervous disorders there is one factor of central importance, and that
factor is sublimation--or the freeing of sex-energy for socially
useful, non-sexual ends. To sublimate is to find vent for oneself and
to serve society as well; for sublimation opens up new channels for
pent-up energy, utilizing all the surplus of the sex-instinct in
substitute activities. When the dynamic of this impulse is turned
outward, not inward, it proves to be one of man's greatest
possessions, a valuable contribution of energy to creative activities
and personal relationships of every kind.

=The Failure to Sublimate.= A neurosis is nonconstructive use of one's
surplus steam. The trouble with a nervous person is that his
love-force is turned in on himself instead of out into the world of
reality. This is what his friends mean when they say that he is
self-absorbed; and this is what the psychologists mean when they say
that a neurotic is introverted. A person, in so far as he is nervous,
does not see other people at all--that is, he does not see them as
real persons, but only as auditors who may be made to listen to the
tale of his woes. His own problems loom so large that he becomes
especially afflicted with what Cabot calls "the sin of impersonality";
or to use President King's words, he lacks that "reverence for
personality" which enables one to see people vividly as real persons
and not as street-car conductors or servants or merely as members of
one's family. To be sure, many a so-called normal individual is
afflicted with this same kind of blin