Abstract
Arms akimbo and legs crossed, Mary sat on the floor staring blankly at the instructions spread before her. Just how the hell was she supposed to make sense of such gibberish, anyway! Barely attending to the directions for assembling her new bookcase, Mary was preoccupied with thoughts about her “damned mental block” for mechanical tasks. Finally, in mounting frustration, and without even unpacking the individual parts, she fled down the hall to the apartment of a male acquaintance for help.
We look upon symptoms as creations, as works of art. Thus when we try to prove something from any particular symptom we can do so only if we look upon the symptom as a single part of a complete whole, that is, we must find in every symptom something that lies deeper than the outward and visible signs, something that underlies the actual manifestation and the form of the complaint itself. We must look behind the headache, the anxiety symptom, the obsession idea, behind the fact of an individual being a thief or a loafer in school. For behind lies something more, something personal and entirely individual.... But there is one assumption we can make in all cases: a symptom is connected with the individual’s struggle to reach a chosen goal. (Adler in Ansbacher & Ansbacher, 1967, p. 330)
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Higgins, R.L., Berglas, S. (1990). The Maintenance and Treatment of Self-Handicapping. In: Self-Handicapping. The Springer Series in Social / Clinical Psychology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-0861-2_6
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