G.H.'s letter in the August-September issue of The Life of The Spirit has found wide interest. Two priests and two doctors have already given their expert advice on a situation in which an ordinary person with no specific psychological experience or training is called upon to meet, efficiently and in a Christian manner, the difficulties of living with a neurotic Member of the family. The correspondents pointed to the danger of being eaten up by the neurotic and admonished those who are in constant contact with them to be prudent and not to mistake for Christian charity a weak, doormat-like attitude which allows the neurosis of the individual unlimited freedom in producing itself in ceaseless speech, the performance of all those many and varied antics of which the neurotic is capable and intruding into the privacy of other members of the family. The nature of neurosis and the correct attitude towards it was widely discussed and, if in approaching the problem from a slightly different angle, I touch on something that has been said before, I beg the reader's indulgence.

In a recent issue of The Life of the Spirit a question of the utmost importance was raised in a letter about neurosis. And among other points that of having an objective view about neurotic illness is worth serious consideration.

In a neurosis there arc two factors to be considered: the fundamental disorder of the psychic structure—the unhealthy psychic tensions which are die source of further trouble (the so-called ‘nerves’ of the ‘highly strung’ person)—and the consequent result of this psychic tension in terms of the reaction to life and its problems. The fundamental inner tension is not a single, definite fear of some evil, but rather a general, unspecified fearful attitude. And although this psychic tension is to be found in both introvert and extravert personalities its result in terms of adaptation to the demands of life is different in each type of temperament. The introvert whose psychological constitution is of a generally fearful kind tends to develop an illness which is itself a psychic disorder—depression, anxiety, morbid fear—and so is called a psychological illness.

In her autobiography, St Teresa of Lisieux has entered accurately, sometimes forcibly, a number of her peculiarities of disposition and character. They are so striking that no attentive reader can miss them. Most of her biographers however explain them away without realizing their true significance or dismiss them as of being of no importance. One well-known Teresian, for instance, speaks of St Teresa's ‘truly excessive sensitiveness’ and leaves it at that. ‘Excessive’ is the right word, ‘sensitiveness’ is not, and we believe that after considering the facts of the case, we shall come to the conclusion that this ‘sensitiveness’ of St Teresa has a medical signification and deserves another name. Why should we be reticent about any element of her personality? Every saint must build up his sanctity with the materials at hand, with, or in spite of, his temperament and constitution, his physical and mental gifts or deficiencies.

Taken one by one, the idiosyncrasies of St Teresa may seem obscure. Take them together and you soon perceive a logical link between them all. They are in fact extremely important since her personality is inexplicable unless you give them due consideration.

Three admitted facts of our actual times impose themselves on us more imperiously than the rest.

First is this need for experience which we touched on towards the beginning of this article. We have said that it needs to be kept within legitimate limits. Then everyone will take care not to be satisfied with notions which have no spiritual value, any more than with observances which are followed because they are prescribed or recommended but which are, in consequence, burdens: they must become the means of liberation. The actions of the clergy and of the faithful, the functioning of institutions should lead to an increasing experience of lucidity, coherence, control and peace. Every spiritual man knows, with an immediate intuitive certainty, that these are normally the criteria of an authentic spiritual experience. Let us put it that in other times one could leave the ‘spiritual senses’ in penance to the extent of opposing the effective and the affective, and imagining a charity which was not affective; today there could no longer be a question of living the Christian life without a certain sense of its success—success in its own order, which is, let us repeat, that of faith and hope, but which must no less, normally, be ‘palpable to the heart'.

To The embers of such faults, then, he now hastens to apply a suitable remedy, and laying aside the apostolic power which he recently called into play, he turns once more to speak with the heart of a kind father or a gentle physician, and, as speaking to his children or his patients, he presents the medicine of health with words of salutary counsel, on this wise: ‘Them that are such, we command and exhort in the Lord Jesus that with quietness they work and eat their own bread’ (2 Thess. 3, 12). He has cured with the one salutary precept of work the causes of such terrible sores which spring from the root of idleness, in the manner of some most skilled physician, and he knows also that the rest of the ailments which sprout up from the same soil will straightway vanish away, when once the primordial disease has been destroyed.

If gnawing sadness once gain, by individual attacks, or in different and unseen ways, a power of mastery over our souls, it separates us ever and always from any insight of divine contemplation, and casting down the mind from whatever of purity it might possess, entirely overthrows and depresses it.