3.4 B. Strive to Thrive

➢ How do you understand the title?

1. Read the article.

In Time for a Divine Comedy4

By Peter Ustinov

Though it has become commonplace, I’ll run a risk of becoming a target of derogatory remarks and repeat a platitude “We live in the time of stress”. Trying to extricate themselves from the macabre web of its influence people turn to psychoanalysts, which has become especially popular in the USA.

Freud effectively invented psychoanalysis in 1895, and it goes without saying that his research contributed enormously to our understanding of the subconscious. But whether analysis has any place in modern medical treatment is open to doubt. The "talking cure" which Freud and his co-worker Joseph Breuer developed in Vienna was designed specifically to uncover the cause of hysterical symptoms, in which narrow field they had a few successes. But analysis was then adopted for all sorts of psychological problems to which it was entirely unsuited. Psychoanalysis was also tried as a cure for schizophrenia and mental deficiency on which it has no effect at all. It was used until very recently as a treatment for depression, which it can actually exacerbate - if your problem is morbid introspection then the worst thing you can do is spend hours talking about yourself.

Having failed to improve any of these conditions the analysts redirected their energies towards treating people who weren't ill at all, and here they struck gold. Such is the appeal of lying down and talking about yourself that the treatment became phenomenally popular. There is no stigma attached to seeking help for psychological problems. “Patients” are ready to pay exorbitant fees to get someone to listen to them. They usually reach the point of exhilaration when they speak about it with their friends who in their turn happily join the ranks of “patients”. We can say that it has become a national obsession.

In America it was finally the health insurance companies who called a halt to all this madness. Unable to keep up with the amounts being charged by psychoanalysts they finally insisted that therapists specify the length of treatment for different diagnoses. The analysts were forced to admit that treatment was open-ended, the benefits uncertain and could hardly be validated by scientific data. In fact, psychoanalysis, is potentially limitless You find yourself in a new quandary as fast as you solve some problems and the phony sense of progress is one of the things that makes it so addictive.

In their own defense, analysts will tell you now that curing you is not the purpose of the exercise. The point is simply to help people to understand themselves. But the assumption here is surely that understanding will produce change, which is highly doubtful. Any drunk driver who gets pulled over may well understand that he has behaved irresponsibly. But this understanding does not diminish the pleasure of drinking three gins and driving through town at 40 miles an hour. So what has this self knowledge achieved?

In view of the stress to which we are subjected, however, it is remarkable that we tend to live longer than our medieval ancestors. They would not have known what to make of the word "stress" unless it was used in the context of shipbuilding, architecture or the weaving of cloth.

Consider the limits of their experience. Even after many lessons their reflexes would have been utterly unable to cope with the new frontiers of possibility. The fastest thing they would ever have been liable to see was the flight of an arrow or, perhaps, a shooting star at night. In the realm of noise there was thunder and brass instruments in the cathedral, but nothing to match the total lack of silence we suffer from today.

The sirens of fire brigades and police, with their evil cadences, would have struck panic in the medieval heart. As for the sheer assault on the nerves practiced by certain discotheques, in which the volume is accompanied by psychedelic lighting - that stammering stuttering abuse of the optic nerves - the poor friar of long ago would have believed himself prematurely in a hell, out of range of even Dante's imagination.

Television would have proved painful to him also, the succession of images being far too rapid for his comprehension. We probably absorb more images in a day than our ancestor would have managed in a year, most of them ill-digested, lingering in the mind only as subliminal worry-beads, recurring every now and then in the hopeless quest for interpretation.

There's no doubt about it - our bodies and our sense: are pummelled in a way which would have been intolerable 600 years ago. And yet they surrendered to contagion and unhealthy living far more readily than we do.

For that reason, perhaps, death was perceived as a necessary adjunct to life. The concepts of heaven and hell, being devoutly believed in, lent a certain degree of morality to life and made death inevitable, sooner rather than later. Homeopathic medicine and herbalism were already far in advance of conventional medicine, but there was certainly a tendency towards fatalism which encouraged a gloomy acceptance of the worst.

There never seems to have been the almost hysterical fight before death which is apparent today, both in the sad bravery of those condemned by AIDS and in the struggles of brilliant surgeons in the transplant of more and more unlikely organs into the bodies of the barely living in the attempt to rejuvenate them.

Naturally, all this speaks highly for the resilience and the ingenuity of the human animal. In its contemporary form this animal is unwilling to accept the resignation of past times, and works over time to negate the implacable rules of nature. There is no telling whether this tendency will continue.

Certainly the increased activity of today has prolonged youth far into what was once considered advanced middle age, and middle age stretches far into what was thought of as the ultimate years of life's span. Exercise, the voluntary exhaustion of the human mechanism, is partly due to the speed of life and the need for lightning reactions. The new preoccupations with diet and physical well-being, expressed in many ways from cuisine minceur to that orgy of hopping and skipping enjoying the typical pseudo-scientific name of aerobics, are valid reflections of the preoccupations of today. Staunch supporters of “healthy” life style would either stuff themselves with vitamins or starve themselves to death in the pursuit of perfection, though it has always been known that moderation is the key to good health. For example, in denunciation of modern craze of health-conscious Americans that extra doses of vitamin supplements can cover a multitude of dietary sins, scientists have proved that One-A-Day is still OK, but swallowing supplements by megadose may be dangerous for health as they tend to interact with each other provoking cellular damage, stroke, heart attack and even cancer.

Human beings are under enormous pressure, not only from the stunning acceleration of technical development, but also from a gathering nostalgia for a past which seems so clear, so natural and so untroubled.

Is this so? How would you have enjoyed having a toothache in the 12th century? The dentist always came with a drummer to drown the patient's cries.

There's a lot to be said for the times we live in, especially once discotheques are not compulsory.

Culture

shooting star – a small piece of rock or metal from space, that burns brightly as it falls towards the Earth (meteor).

friar – a man who belongs to a Christian group, whose members in the past traveled around teaching about Christianity and asking for money and food.

ancestor – a member of your family who lived long ago; ancestry – the members of your family, who lived a long time ago: of Russian ancestry (having ancestors who were Russian); ant. descendant – someone who is related to a person who lived a long time ago: direct descendant; compare predecessor –someone who had the job before you started it and successor – someone who takes a position previously held by someone else.