Reprinted from PSYCHOLOGY TWODAY, February 1981

The Psychology of Adjustment
by Joanna Leary

Joanna Harcourt-Smith Leary, of the 11th Caste, was one of the most important egg-carriers of the Planet Earth. Her chromosomes included mutant mathematicians, scholars, publishers, adventurers, aristocrats and explorers.

Joanna's post-terrestrial circuits were activated at adolescence by large doses of LSD. She quickly became one of the first conscious Intelligence Agents in the history of her species. Her velocity, relativistic-mind, adaptable change-ability naturally scandalized the Old World Hives. She was, therefore, kidnapped by the American government in Afghanistan in 1973 and, escorted by armed guards, transported to the Sunset Strip. She immediately rewarded the benign manipulations of her American hosts by publishing the three classic books which facilitated Space Migration, Intelligence Increase and Life Extension: Neurologic, Terra II and What Does WoMan Want?

The familiar soap-opera scenes which have thrilled and amused galactic viewers for centuries actually did happen. Joanna did walk the streets of Berkeley, California selling Neurologic in order to ransom an imprisoned philosopher.

After starring in over 200 melodramas, unmatched for humor, elegance and picaresque adventure, Joanna left the solar system of her home planet and home star in her three-thousand foot solar yacht Chrysalis.

The problem with military technology is, of course, that wars end. But terrestrial bureaucracies persevere, particularly those of the winning side. The reason postwar losers (Germany and Japan) rebounded more rapidly than the winners (England, France, Russia) was that the bureaucracies of the losers were destroyed. Anything that destroys a bureaucracy enhances evolution.

So after World War II, the massive industries which had been geared to produce war tools were converted to civilian goods. The managers and technical boys were ready to convert the assembly lines from tanks to fin-tailed cars. The radar factories were converted to television manufacture. America, during the 1950's, went on the biggest materialism consumer spree in history.

The wartime psychological technology was also converted to civilian consumption. Personality assessment techniques were taken over by the managerial powers --and used to select and train employees. A new, gigantic industry emerged employing clinical psychologists and counselors and a new social-moral concept of human nature: adjustment.

Those who matured during the Self-Discovery 60's and the Self-Actualized 70's did not know that the aim of personality-clinical psychology and psychiatry during the 50's was hive-adjustment. Not surprising, really, when we recall that the Firm started it all in the 40's.

''Their'' aim was, we recall, the preservation of the past, the prevention of change. To understand the gravity of the situation, remember: There was no concept of personal change in the 1950's. Human personality was seen as a fixed quality which could and should be adjusted to the system. Old-style psychiatrists (formerly called alienists) guarded the psychotic. The radical wing, psychoanalysis, taught that after five years of intensive treatment, five hours a week, at fifty dollars a session, the patient might get enough insight to wearily adjust and to discuss his neurosis at cocktail parties.

Feel Like NEW!

LIFECLOUD: THE ORIGIN OF
LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE

Sir Fred Hoyle, ever controversial, collaborates with
N.C. Wickramasinghe to write Lifecloud: the Origin
of Life in the Universe. They would have us abandon
the idea that life started here on earth for the view
that a primitive biological system evolved in interstellar
space, and was carried here, as well as to other
planets, by meteorites. Their claim is that "our
biochemical ancestry pre-dates the formation of the
sun and planets" ....

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