Page:The Art of Helping People Out of Trouble (1924).pdf/244

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cident to the exclusion of many other important occurrences.

Nor can it be said that after one, two, or three years an individual has achieved a permanent adjustment. There is no such thing as permanency in adjustment, for adjustment is constant change. Always a new crisis is arising, a new event occurring; and the whole struggle must be gone over with again. Not until the whole of a man's career is reviewed can a verdict be announced. While life is being lived, one can only say that thus far the individual has succeeded in overcoming his difficulties and in building wisely for the future.

In some situations a successful adjustment is not possible. There are wildernesses of the mind from which to the eye of present knowledge there seems to be no egress. This applies not merely to the person who is feeble-minded or who is suffering from some chronic form of mental disease, but also to the large number of people who live in that psychic borderland which divides the clearly normal and usual from the clearly abnormal and unusual, the people of whom science admits its ignorance by such diagnoses as constitutionally inferior, psycho-neurotic, and the like. For these unhappy individuals any but the most temporary