Discussion

As far as we have been able to observe, living becomes painful for animals when they have insufficient food, inadequate shelter, wounds or diseases of the body, and are frustrated in carrying out strongly instinctual patterns of species existence. For man, in whom we can chart no strongly instinctual patterns of species existence, deprivation of creature comfort may be only one source of pain in an infinitude of possibilities. What makes for this aspect of the human condition is the human being's organization around and constant involvement in meaning. To be human throughout one's temporal experience is to be grasped by questions about oneself, about others, about matters of an ethical, religious, aesthetic, technical, and scientific nature. To be human is ever to evolve manifold value systems, for the most part unconscious, which direct the many operations in which man copes with his environments, outer and inner. Man is forever both a phenomenologist and a judge. He reacts to whatever phenomena he perceives with efforts to fit them into schemata or frames of reference. He also reacts with emotional outpouring compounded of varying degrees along the continua of obnoxious-to-pleasurable and strange-to-familiar. Whereas other animals respond more fully and genuinely to these modes of emotional response, man's reaction is modified by how well he can answer Who, What, How, When, Where, Why, and “Is it right?”: questions about whatever he encounters. His psychic well-being, and to a large degree his physical well-being, depend upon his coming up with subjectively agreeable answers to his own questions, whenever he is called upon to reflect upon them.

My reflections thus far were elicited by an important theme in Dr. Levy's paper, and particularly by his quoting Bettelheim's statement: “To help another in his ascent from