The enigma of the mind [antikvár]

Reality l\visted"I didn't want to harm the man. I thought he was a very nice gentleman. Soft-spoken. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat." This was a drifter named Perry Smith recalling his role in the brutal slaying of a Kansas wheat farmer, Herbert Clutter, and three members of his family in 1959. The contrast between the mildness of Smith's feelings and the horror of his deed, perpetrated against total strangers, reveals the human mind at its most disordered. At that extreme, the workings of the mind are wholly alien to the average person's experience; he finds them beyond his ability to fathom. But at quite another level, the mind poses mysteries familiar to everyone. Why do some people bite their nails? Or overeat? Or habitually lose things? Or fail to arrive anywhere on time?Such quirks of behavior are commonplace; others are less so but still widespread. Any random sampling of people is likely to turn up someone who is obsessively neat or compulsively dedicated to work, or the victim of some sort of phobiaa fear of flying, for example, or of driving through a tunnel or Ijeing caught in the middle of a crowd. And it is I)y no means improbable that the same random sampling might reveal one or another individual suffering from formless, unreasoning anxieties, or delusions of persecution, or the effects of a split personality. Whether minor or major, all these are signs of a mind that is not operating the way it should, evidences of behavior that is not entirely "normal"though defining normality is itself no simple matter.What stirs up trouble in the mind is a question to which answers are still being sought. In times past, obvious mental disturbances were at-trilmted to the devil or to vengeance wreaked by gods. Newer theories point to inherited defects, an imbalance in body chemistry, or brain circuitry that has gone awry. One of the most widely held 20th Century theories blames unfavorable life experience. In this view, a troubled mind is beset by deep dissatisfaction over such basic concerns as the individual's image of himself; his relationships with other people; and7