On the Road

to Happiness
with the
Novelist
and the
Analyst of
the Mind
A Lecture Delivered by Anthony St. John
15 March 1978
Under the Auspices of the Instituto Cultural Venezolano-Britanico and
The British Council
Caracas, Venezuela
G
ood evening
ladies and
gentlemen,
distinguished members of the
audience, and all my friends who
have chosen to be with us this
evening…
I am pleased to present to you this
evening my lecture, On the Road to
Happiness with the Novelist and the
Analyst of the Mind. I hope you enjoy
its significance.
Happiness brings to mind a term
which is difficult to define but easy to
intuit. The word very often attracts
attention in Literature and Moral
Philosophy, and it has been
deliberated upon by Aristotle, John
Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham and by
the here and now authorities of
psychology—to name a few.
Most of us will admit that happiness
is, as a goal, equivalent in value to
the highest good attainable by man,
and to seek happiness is the
mandate implored by family, friends,
lovers, the clergy and politicians.
When one thinks about it, the term
happiness conjures for us a myriad of
meanings. Whatever, it is possible to
be happy in different degrees. I may
be happier than one of you; a year
ago, I may have been less happier
than one of you. It is possible that
happiness might become less
happiness or even unhappiness. It is
possible for someone to be happy
when he or she is not happy with
certain conditions in his or her life. It
is possible for someone to possess
numerous sensory pleasures and still
not be happy.
Philosophers agree that two elements
are a constituent in making us happy:
In order to be happy it is necessary
2
that one likes those parts of one’s
total life pattern and the
circumstances surrounding it which
one thinks are consequential; and,
happiness must possess certain
feelings or emotions. The first
component implies a “measuring up”
of the many facets of a person’s life,
and the second precludes, obviously,
continuous states of depression,
guilt, anxiety, restlessness,
confusion, anger, and other
antipathetical emotional resistances.
Happiness is not an all-or-nothing
condition, for sure. We may love our
work but hate our manager. We may
adore our children but not love their
mother or father. We may take pride
in our country but wish to live in
another. Here, a problem presents
itself to the philosopher. To be happy
do we have to be happy with all the
attributes of life we consider of great
consequence? Then too, how happy
do we have to be with each feature?
Nonetheless, philosophers do agree
that a life which adheres to moral
principles, is not given to excess, and
which is imbued with an
understanding of the world and one’s
position in it, makes for a happy life.
And it helps if we are interested in
other people, in good causes, in
positive gratifications, and in life
itself.
Whether this happiness is valid or
invalid poses still another
philosophical subject of dispute. For
instance, our children might find a
delusive happiness in the adventures
of some cartoon character when they
try to satisfy an urge for unmediated
violence and an attempt to allay
paranoia by identifying with an
invalid character rather than his or
her victim or even the heroic
protagonist. Happiness, when valid,
subscribes to those conditions which
represent, in a fair way, the
tendencies in man to seek validity in
what is understood to be the good—
to seek it in such a way that it
objectifies our place in the world.
Who makes us happy? Ourselves,
naturally. Your happiness depends on
yourself (Marcel Proust). But let us
not assume we are prevented from
looking for happiness in others. We
poke around for life’s touchstones all
the time. Man is a social animal, an
imitative being. The universal
consent of millions of people
throughout thousands of years, has
handed down to us multitudinous
truths, happinesses, about life. We
probe for happiness every day.
Traditionally, individuals have
gravitated to the leaders of
institutionalised systems of religious
attitudes, beliefs and practices. But,
modern society has frequently
rejected these persuasions. With no
sect to fall back on, association with
one’s fellows has become a
disinheriting retrogression—often
nihilistic, often steeped in despair,
certainly confused, certainly anxious.
And always unhappy.
Because the ecclesiastics have failed
us, we have been tempted to give
up. In this transitional phase, we
delve for incorporeal resuscitation
not from within ourselves, but from
that which is outside of us. We are at
a loss to relinquish life no matter how
meaningless the world’s condition
might appear to us, yet most of us
are convinced that we cannot be
happy because of ourselves. With
the most pressing economic and
social knotty points the world has
been faced with through the ages,
most of us strive for happiness as
often as not it is an invalid type of
happiness. Very few individuals
grope for happiness from within their
T
own being.
onight I wish to
discuss the role of
two characters
whose purpose it is to interpret
human experience for us and whose
rationale, very often, attempts to
lead us to happiness. The novelist
and the analyst of the mind deal
exclusively with human behaviour.
3
And each has a function of his or her
own when he or she sets about to
understand the human condition.
The task of dissecting human
behavior is a difficult one. The
novelist and the analyst of the mind
occupy themselves with human
experiences which in themselves are
often irrational, mysterious. In fact,
human behavior can be explained
only in the most malleable and
unscientific manner, and it yields few
secrets under objective analysis. The
assignment, then, is a formidable
one.
It would appear that the novelist and
the analyst of the mind have usurped
the long-held, front-running position
of the religious leader. Without a
doubt, to many they are the new trail
blazers of a “new” religion—if it can
be said that a “new” religion does in
reality exist. Mathew Arnold
predicted that literature would
become religion, and today it is to
the writers and novelists and
psychologists and psychoanalysts—
not the priests and ministers—that
the television producer turns to for
observations regarding what is valid.
Reading is frequently referred to as
“therapy.” Psychologists,
psychoanalysts, psychotherapists,
psychiatrists, group therapists and
clinical psychologists have their
offices brimming with those in search
of a personal spiritualism they feel
has been denied them because of
anxiety, depression, guilt, and other
forms of antipathetical emotional
resistances.
I believe the novelist and the analyst
of the mind have been burdened with
an enormous challenge, and although
they have not been able to reckon
with this bidding efficaciously, they
have, notwithstanding, mellowed into
something important for us. To
present this idea to you, my dear
listeners, I wish first to discuss the
roles of both in modern society, go
on to talk about their functions, and
finally, query you—in a parley of idea
exchanging—about the places these
characters play in our lives. Both of
them are guides on the Road to
Happiness; both of them struggling,
obviously, to find their own
happiness.
I
cannot think of a better
description to apply to the
novelist than the dictum of
the Cambridge Platonist Henry More
who believes that “the soul sings out
the whole song upon the first hint as
knowing it very well before.” The
novelist is the soul and the song he
sings out upon the first hint is the
creative work of literature which he
renders to us as a vital force. In the
inherited pattern of thought, the
novelist is the acting cause of an
individual life gifted to a group of
other individuals. The siring of the
novelist is at once unique, but his
original work of art is something
which has fermented in his soul in a
state of incipient development before
reaching the boiling point of
realization where it becomes
necessary for the novelist to express
himself in order to influence others—
whether for valid or invalid
happiness. Thus acting, the novelist
invents prose narration which is
usually long and complex, delighting
and enlightening, and has as its
subject the human experience—
whether or not given voice to
through a connected sequence of
events. Characters are portrayed,
actions are developed, scenes are
represented. Novelists generally
write about men and women and
they very often deal with society. If
the novelist’s examination of human
character does not concern public or
social ruminations, it might very well
treat the rational and irrational
depths of man’s personality as far as
the writer’s imagination might take
him or her. All things considered, the
novelist has the capacity to weave
the backgrounds of a host of
characters and their differing life
situations.
When he or she is ready to create the
written imaginative expression, the
novelist embarks on a long journey
which, when completed, can be an
art form that offers a valuable
addition to Literature. To achieve this
4
tour de force, characters, who will
engage our imagination, are
selected. Disparate types of
interesting personalities are needed
to maintain the reader’s interest and
dab the work with conversant colors
appealing to the thought processes
of the reader. When the novelist has
perfected the technique, an
engrossing relationship between him
or her and their readers takes root.
The reader is free to take part in the
creative method of the writer, and if
he or she is willing, to embrace what
is perceived as worthwhile from the
extended prose narrative. The
acceptance of what the novelist
articulates—usually because the
reader finds his or her ideas and
character analyses plausible in light
of the reader’s common sense
experiences with life—makes for a
“holy alliance” of writer and reader,
one, because the writer receives
appreciation for his or her creation
from the reader; and, two, because
the reader has been delighted and
enlightened by the writer. Once this
entente has been clenched, the
novelist goes on expecting a
sufficient return of book royalties
which will permit him to write still
another novel—if the author does not
live in a Marxist state.
The novelist is extremely sensitive to
the mysteries of life and he or she is
usually not attached to any one
interpretation of them. His or her
ability, unique as it is, has been
cultivated by many years of reading,
by inordinate attention to the
nuances of life, and by his or her own
personal experiences which have
shaped their attitudes and
interpretations of episodes as they
appear, without design, in the
scheme of reality. It is not surprising
then that in our own time the best of
writers do not produce their best
works until they are beyond a point
of judiciousness. In the complicated
world in which we live, it takes
considerably longer to achieve the
maturity needed to deal capably with
the difficult task of interpreting and
recounting the complexities of
human behavior. Point of fact, the
best writers are philosophers—
usually non-professional ones. Some
critics have called their products
“wisdom literature” because in order
to satisfy the requirements of an
ever-increasing sophisticated
audience, the novelist has had to
bring himself or herself to a higher
level of refinement where he or she
must have the sufficient mental
facilities to take the reins of the
intricacies of the arduous time in
which we live. As mankind advances
to new heights of intelligibility, the
novelist must keep pace with the
upward thrust so that he or she
might be able to interpret it properly
and with an enormous degree of
sophistication. The greatest of
writers, from any age, have given us
the “wisdom literature” we need to
understand and decipher our position
in this world. They have pointed out
to us the ways and the means that
enable us to relive our own doubts
and fears through the representation
of others, to separate fact from
fiction in our lives, and to broaden
our horizons in a spirit of freedom
I
and intellectual equitableness.
wish now to turn to the
analyst of the mind. Let us
assume he or she possesses
two functions: First, the analyst of
the mind deals with individuals in
whose lives conflict or weakness has
become seriously enough an integral
part of their temperament so as to
produce inhibiting mental discomfort.
In this role, the analyst of the mind
acts as healer. Regardless of the
school of psychic analysis, the
process utilised to rectify this
condition that stalls is generally a
prolonged engagement, and for our
purposes it is a one-on-one, patient-
analyst relationship. This
qualification does not intend to
exclude any particular school of
psychoanalysis, and it considers the
commonly-accepted stereotype of
the analyst as a point of reference
only. In this primary impersonation
the patient is taken by the analyst of
the mind into therapy and the patient
begins the journey along the Road to
Happiness sufficiently certain that
5
psychologically inhibiting factors—
which in the mind of the clinician
have been diagnosed as serious
impediments and warrant some sort
of corrective action—will be melted
away. Simply put, the patient is
acutely depressed, guilty, anxious,
confused, angered or endures other
negative emotional reactions—or
combinations of them—which cause
the patient to feel desperately
unhappy. The métier of the analyst
of the mind is to lead the patient to
an awareness of his or her problem in
a way that he or she can deal with it
successfully.
The second task of the analyst is the
one which concerns itself with the on-
going study and research into the
intricacies of the human mind.
Whether this is effectuated in the
differing schools of analysis, in the
experimental laboratories of the
psychologist, or in the methodologies
of the psychological philosophers,
the study of the mind is—as a
relatively new field—one which is
forever expanding in discovery and
accumulating new applications of
untried techniques.
I now wish to review synoptically two
traditional schools of analysis in
order to point up, one, a feel for the
technique of the analyst of the mind
and, two, to explore—in an ever so
gingerly way—the facets of human
behavior which have been revealed
to us by the analysts of the mind.
The Freudian and Jungian schools are
well regarded as pioneer schools in
the field of psychoanalysis as much
as their methods, nowadays, might
be under scrutiny, even attack, by
those seeking new directions and
propinquities to psychoanalysis.
Regardless, both schools are
important foundations of
psychoanalytical theory and study no
matter what use is made of them by
the analyst of the mind. The genius
of Freud is obvious to all of us, and
his impact on contemporary society
is far-reaching…perhaps more
extensive than Freud himself would
have cared his theories to extend.
The institutor of psychoanalysis
devised a system of dream analysis
designed to enable the patient to
become aware of motives which,
before analysis, were unconscious,
unknown, to the patient. These
hidden, painful emotions were
considered by Freud the source of the
patient’s neurosis, and to relieve
them Freud experimented with
various methods—including hypnosis
—before he settled on the use of free
association and dream interpretation.
In Freudian analysis, the patient
discusses his thoughts in a general
way, and from time to time, the
analyst offers an explanation of what
the patient is experiencing. The
Freudian analyst’s purpose is to get
the patient to recover lost memories
with which the patient might return
to the point where conflicts or
weaknesses had become so forcefully
emplaced in the patient’s character.
Only by facing his or her problems
will the patient improve. The process
takes time because at first the
patient is reluctant to go back to
those disturbing unconscious
motives. The analyst must help the
patient to overcome his or her initial
resistances. We must realize that
this process is not a purely
intellectual event. The patient is
actually brought back to the painful
experiences of his or her life, and
suffers during this regressive
passage often becoming worse
before becoming better. When the
patient ultimately transfers to the
analyst the attitudes and emotions
which were originally directed at his
parents in childhood, a successful
Freudian analysis might be said to be
achieved and the patient can be
thought of as having come finally to
confront the difficulties which were
embedded so powerfully in his
unconscious.
Carl Gustov Jung interrupted his
collaboration with Freud in 1914 and
founded his own school which today
is referred to as the analytical
method of psychoanalysis. Jung
modified Freudian psychoanalysis to
suit his own purposes. One
difference he had with Freud was that
he believed the neurotic symptom
should not be explained only in terms
of the patient’s past. In Jungian
analysis the present of the patient is
crucial—even prone to elicit
6
compensating experiences—because
it is in the present that the neurotic
symptom can be confronted by the
patient attempting to solve his
problem in medias res. In Jungian
analysis the patient is encouraged
not only to recognize unconscious
motives, he is brought to
acknowledge unseen-before parts of
his personality during the process of
his analysis. In identifying these
segments of his personality, the
patient joins in a procedure set in
motion to bring out his or her
individuality and to participate in an
harmonious synthesis between
himself or herself and the functions
external to them. In Jungian analysis,
much of the patient’s unconscious is
explicable in terms of his or her own
life history, but that unconscious has
features which are common to all
individuals and they do not derive
solely from the patient’s personal
history. The patient’s personal
unconscious comes to agree with the
collective unconscious to which we
all belong. The departure point for
Jungian psychoanalysis is when the
patient’s ego has failed to achieve
this acquiescent coupling by
identifying too strongly or too weakly
(extrovert or introvert) with his or her
self—their persona.
These brief sketches of two different
schools of psychoanalysis serve to
point up to us the intent of the
analyst of the mind. They refer to
two systems of examination of a
complexity, its elements, and their
affinities. The intricacy involved is
the human personality, and it is the
task of the analyst of the mind to
decipher the blocked passages of the
human intellect on behalf of his or
her patient so that he or she may
continue on the Road to Happiness
without encountering inhibiting
obstacles which impede progress. By
assisting the patient, the analyst of
the mind brings about a
confrontation between the patient
and his or her ideas which are not
marked by conscious thought,
sensation, or feeling. The encounter
serves to make the patient face his
or her problems which hitherto had
been hidden in the depths of his or
her psyche—haunting and dreadful,
irrational and unhappy.

The skill of the analyst of the mind
depends greatly on his or her ability
to adjust the knowledge he or she
has of the system of analysis he or
she prefers to serve the individual,
peculiar needs of the patient. In
doing so the analyst depends a great
deal on his or her imagination, and
he or she must be a versatile,
discriminating individual who, in
devising explanations of his or her
patient’s symptoms, couples
ingenuity to the soundness of the
theory he or she has studied with
diligence for many years. An
understanding of a patient’s
experiences and world view must be
approached with a careful
consideration of the proven terms of
the psychoanalytical school the
analyst has chosen as his or her forte
and the specifically human aspects of
the patient’s human needs and
O
idiosyncrasies.
ne of the
underlying
themes of this
discussion has been the supposition
that the novelist and the analyst of
the mind are capable of ushering us
along the Road to Happiness. I have
hinted at similarities, some
differences. Let us now attempt to
contrast the two by studying their
methodologies in a generalized
overview.
The novelist, as an artist, is apt to
proceed with a method akin to
inductive reasoning whereby he or
she processes thoughts from a part
to a whole—from particulars to
generalities, from the individual to
the universal. Permit me to be more
specific. The novelist places himself
or herself before blank pages, comes
to them with an inclination in a line
with the direction he or she intends
to pursue. His or her work is created
as he or she proceeds. He or she
builds upon the sequence of events
that have passed on previous pages,
and he or she struggles to lead up to
7
a successful conclusion of these
events. When the work is finished,
the essence of the creation might
then be finally understood. We may
guess at the eventual conclusion of a
novel midstream the manuscript, but
we may never know the author’s
purpose until he or she has written
the last pages or page. When a
novel draws to a close, it is left to the
scrutiny of the public and the critics
who determine its artistic relevance.
The novelist’s creation, then, is one
which commences as a tabula rasa,
an empty state of the mind, directs
itself along a path of development
and complication, and soft lands with
a conclusion, resolution, that is
satisfactory to the author first and
ultimately his or her readers. The
novelist, through this process, has
taken a piece of the drama of life and
has molded it into his or her own
ideal of the state of reality. Once this
has been accomplished, he or she
offers it to their readers for their
deliberation, their advantage.
This effort is burdened with intense
difficulties. The novelist is forced to
adhere to the shadings of human
behavior with all its subtle
distinctions and variations and, at the
same time, gel his or her composition
into an acceptable art form. We are
often reminded of the struggling
artist, the suffering literary thespian,
the man or woman alone in his or her
room cut off from society, glued to
the typewriter. There can be no
greater misconception of the
novelist. For like anyone who revels
in the fruits of his or her enjoyed
labours, like anyone who loves his or
her labor for its own sake, there can
be only satisfaction and enjoyment
upon completion of a triumphant
work of creative fiction.
The analyst of the mind guides us
along the Road to Happiness
employing a different series of
actions or operations showing the
way to a closing stage. His or her
method is deductive—conclusions
follow from premises, necessarily.
The clinician comes to his or her
patient equipped with the theories
and principles established by the
school of analysis, or combination of
schools of analysis, which he or she
has determined suit the requirements
most conveniently. The analyst of
the mind toils within the framework
of the doctrines which have been
advanced by his or her school. With
these supposedly time-honoured
propositions, the analyst directs his
or her patient to conform to a well-
recognized approach to the
understanding of human behavior.
The analyst of the mind—in order to
reach his or her level of proficiency—
has studied psychoanalytical theory
and practice for numerous years
under varying sets of circumstances
which have afforded him or her the
chance to gain the skill needed to
function solitarily. In analysis, the
fruits of the analyst’s labours are
reaped as he or she guides their
patients to a successful
understanding (analysis) of their
complicated lives. The
psychoanalytical process is an
educational process. Education and
therapy work hand in hand as the
analyst endeavors, ever so
assiduously, to explain behavior by
means of what happened before
rather than by what might yet befall.
The end of the analyst’s effort comes
with the fruitful readjustment of the
patient to the realities of life which
before had been clouded by states of
depression, guilt, anxiety,
restlessness, confusion, anger, and
other antipathetical emotional
resistances.

Thank you.

* * *

Anthony St. John

Casella Postale 38
50041 CALENZANO FI
Italia