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.
Here, however, we meet with considerable resistances, this time resistances in ourselves as well as in our patients. Above all, we ourselves must have been really well analysed, right down to “rock bottom.” We must have learnt to recognize all our unpleasant external and internal character traits in order that we may be really prepared to face all those forms of hidden hatred and contempt that can be so cunningly disguised in our patients' associations.
The great enemy of any civilization is the enemy within.
The Webster Dictionary defines corruption as “impairment of integrity, virtue, or moral principle”; this definition is taken almost verbatim from Samuel Johnson's (1773) famous dictionary, which also adds “wickedness” and “a tendency to a worse state” to the definition. As an example of the sort of subtle corruption I wish to discuss in this article, Hamilton (1992) offers a description of the change in John F. Kennedy as part of his “coming of age” after he won his congressional election and began to be touted as a presidential candidate. A friend of Kennedy describes him in his earlier years as “charming, intelligent, self-searching” and “at the peak of his humanity.” What saddens this friend is his observation of “Jack's gradual abandonment of honesty, egality, and fraternity among friends as he donned his political mantle, like Prince Hal who, on coming of age, surrenders the boyhood friendships that have been his lifeline to truth” (p. 780). Hamilton goes on to describe some of Kennedy's subsequent behavior that showed inconsiderateness, narcissism, an increasing obsession with getting women to have sexual relations with him, and some downright cruelty and demeaning behavior toward even those who had supported and helped him: “It seemed a very cavalier way for Jack to