The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [175]
Describing an unforgettable experience in a real concentration camp, Bettelheim tells of a group of naked prisoners—no longer human, merely docile robots—who were lined up to enter the gas chamber. The SS commanding officer, learning that one of the women prisoners had been a dancer, ordered her to dance for him. She did, and as she danced, she approached him, seized his gun and shot him down. She was immediately shot to death, but Bettelheim is moved to ask:
Isn’t it probable that despite the grotesque setting in which she danced, dancing made her once again a person. Dancing, she was singled out as an individual, asked to perform in what had once been her chosen vocation. No longer was she a number, a nameless depersonalized prisoner, but the dancer she used to be. Transformed however momentarily, she responded like her old self, destroying the enemy bent on her destruction even if she had to die in the process.
Despite the hundreds of thousands of living dead men who moved quietly to their graves, this one example shows that in an instant, the old personality can be regained, its destruction undone, once we decide on our own that we wish to cease being units in a system. Exercising the lost freedom that not even the concentration camp could take away—to decide how one wishes to think and feel about the conditions of one’s life—this dancer threw off her real prison. This she could do because she was willing to risk her life to achieve autonomy once more.24
The suburban house is not a German concentration camp, nor are American housewives on their way to the gas chamber. But they are in a trap, and to escape they must, like the dancer, finally exercise their human freedom, and recapture their sense of self. They must refuse to be nameless, depersonalized, manipulated and live their own lives again according to a self-chosen purpose. They must begin to grow.
13
The Forfeited Self
Scientists of human behavior have become increasingly interested in the basic human need to grow, man’s will to be all that is in him to be. Thinkers in many fields—from Bergson to Kurt Goldstein, Heinz Hartmann, Allport, Rogers, Jung, Adler, Rank, Horney, Angyal, Fromm, May, Maslow, Bettelheim, Riesman, Tillich and the existentialists—all postulate some positive growth tendency within the organism, which, from within, drives it to fuller development, to self-realization. This “will to power,” “self-assertion,” “dominance,” or “autonomy,” as it is variously called, does not imply aggression or competitive striving in the usual sense; it is the individual affirming his existence and his potentialities as a being in his own right; it is “the courage to be an individual.”1 Moreover, many of these thinkers have advanced a new concept of the psychologically healthy man—and of normality and pathology. Normality is considered to be the “highest excellence of which we are capable.” The premise is that man is happy, self-accepting, healthy, without guilt, only when he is fulfilling himself and becoming what he can be.
In this new psychological thinking, which seeks to understand what makes men human, and defines neurosis in terms of that which destroys man’s capacity to fulfill his own being, the significant tense is the future. It is not enough for an individual to be loved and accepted by others, to be “adjusted” to his culture. He must take his existence seriously enough to make his own commitment to life, and to the future; he forfeits his existence by failing to fulfill his entire being.
For years, psychiatrists have tried to “cure” their patients’ conflicts by fitting them to the culture. But adjustment to a culture which does not permit the realization of one’s entire being is not a cure at all, according to the new psychological thinkers.
Then the patient accepts a confined world without conflict, for now his world is identical with the culture. And since anxiety comes only with freedom, the patient naturally gets over his anxiety: he is relieved from his symptoms because he surrenders the possibilities which caused