You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Among the innumerable neurotic defenses against fear, there exists one which, although banal in itself, has not been worked out too clearly in our literature. I am referring to the constant need of some neurotics to prove that all protagonists have “feet of clay”. This demotion of the “potential enemy” is, at bottom, an unconscious attempt to demonstrate that the alleged adversary is too weak to be dangerous.
There is a clear cut difference between the unavoidable observation of the relatively healthy person to the effect that everyone has his peculiarities and ridiculous attitudes, and the compulsive necessity of neurotics to find the “weak spot”. The healthy person uses his observations for the purpose of making fun, the neurotic, under the disguise of making fun, uses them for the diminution of latent anxiety.
There is, from the common sense point of view, something puerile and immature in this constant search for “feet of clay”. The whole search is based on a mistaken premise: the assumption that there exist people without some weak or ridiculous “corners” in their personality. La Rochefoucauld summed it up nicely in his maxim: “If in some people the ridiculous part of their nature has not become apparent, obviously one has not yet searched thoroughly enough.”
To prove that a person you have first put on a pedestal has “feet of clay”, is as simple as that other incontestable proof: everybody has a nose!
Still, the discovery of “half-gods” is a favorite sport of neurotics. Experience teaches that the simplest way of being disappointed is—to expect too much.
In a previous paper on writers, (1) I described a specific aspect of that technique: