If It Were Not For Reality

When Gary Larson retired in 1995, the world became a poorer place. Everyone has their favourite cartoon. Mine is the lookalike Freudian psychiatrist carefully writing in his imposing notebook while a clearly disturbed patient on the couch talks and talks and talks and if you look carefully at the notebook he has written "Just Plain Mad". You know, psychiatrists get a bad rap. You "have to be crazy to become one" or "you get crazy after you become one" but, like a toilet flush, they are essential.
There is one psychiatrist, however, I admire. I have read her book "Neurosis And Human Growth" more than I have read any other book. Karen Horney, who died in 1952 at the age of 67, was an outstanding psychoanalyst. In some people's eyes, that's even more arcane that a plain old psychiatrist, but I love reading them and about them, especially Horney. She was a "Neo-Freudian",  a rather gentle term which actually means that she dramatically split from the pessimistic libido theory of Freud to an optimistic social and cultural theory. Theory of what, you ask? Well, er, stuff. It was all made up, anyway, with no evidence as we know it.
But the result is a classification of Personality, in Life and especially in the Workplace. And this is where Horney's book excels. You will read it and you will understand your friends, family and, especially, your workmates. Wordy, but beautifully written, it's terrific. All about our fight with reality, with our true self, or as one of Horney's patients put it: "If it were not for reality, I would be perfectly all right" I thought I was sane until I read this book. Now I know that everyone is insane. It's reassuring.