It makes it easier to resolve our conflicts if there is someone we can trust to whom we can unburden ourselves. This, of course, is the basis of psychotherapy. However, there are quite a number of people who are disturbed by functional pain which is due to anxiety from causes which are clearly within their consciousness. As I write, two patients come to my mind, one a man, the other a woman. In both the conflict concerned an extramarital love affair. Both knew the reason for their anxiety, and both knew quite well that in their case there was only one way to resolve the problem. True, in such a situation it makes it easier to seek the moral support of a psychiatrist, but with a little determination and self-discipline the matter could have been resolved quite easily by the patients themselves. In saying this I do not intend in any way to

discourage people from seeking the help of a psychiatrist. The point I wish to make is that in many cases the significant conflict is really quite superficial and well within the capacity of the patient to resolve it, if he will only make a serious attempt to make his behaviour agree with his values.

On the other hand many patients are disturbed by conflicts that are deeply unconscious and thus quite inaccessible to the patient. However, it is well for the reader to know that those disturbed by deeply unconscious conflicts form only a minority of the patients coming to consultation in ordinary psychiatric practice.

I now come to the most important observation about psychological conflicts. It is this: that it is simply not necessary that all our conflicts should be resolved by discussion for us to obtain peace of mind and function as mature individuals. Psychotherapy in general and psychoanalysis in particular have become such a vogue of our present culture that many people lose sight of this simple fact. When all is said and done, psychoanalysis by its very nature is an artificial procedure. It can be helpful, but its easy access may make us forget that man in the process of evolution has developed within himself a mechanism for dealing with excessive anxiety and pain. It is to the reawakening of this mechanism that I would have you turn, rather than to the endless search for the unconscious conflicts of childhood.

*123\57\2*