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The appreciation of the essential rationality of the irrational we owe to Sigmund Freud, who propounded and demonstrated it, specifically in his Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and more generally and consistently in his elaborations of psychoanalytic theory. It is not my intention therefor under the title of the Rationality of the Irrational in Psychodynamics to reargue or to elaborate upon such matters as the forgetting of names and words, or the making of mistakes.
I intend rather to analyze the significance in psychodynamics of grossly irrational, and crucially determining actions which are highly complicated and which are deliberately, that is not unconsciously, executed by otherwise seemingly intelligent persons. It is my intention to demonstrate that while in the perspective of the collective norm such actions are not only irrational but also patently neurotic, they are in effect, in the internal psychodynamic tension states of the individual neither irrational, nor neurotic, but rather reactive and sanitizing. I hope also to throw light on certain problems involved in the therapeutic reconciliation of the patient with his own past irrationalities, for, in my experience unless a reconciliation is effected, the patient is not fully cured, and is likely to suffer a rankling, self-recriminating, self-disparaging, compulsively fixated preoccupation with his so-called “stupidities.”
To illustrate and to support my thesis I will cite, rather briefly, three cases. These I might add, have successfully completed therapy, and are now living full and effective lives. In describing the persons involved I have for understandable reasons altered certain superficial particulars, but I have in no respect tampered with the psychiatric data. Each case involves a woman. The first to be described was in her middle forties; the second was in her middle