a short, nervous clearing of the throat because no one has caught the joke (and how can you tell what is meant to be funny? Extreme caution is advisable: you might laugh at the wrong place, it’s better to hold back, an attentive smile always looks good on a listener, nothing can happen to you, at worst your facial muscles freeze) . . .

Hertzog, challenged by failure, now puts his shoulder to the wheel. The notion of health has been clarified, so let’s go back to disease, to document what I have said let me give you a few examples—a merry Mardi Gras procession of all kinds of neurosis is drawn up; now it’s really hard not to laugh, hilarious, all these kinds of lunacy, things get quite wild, and Hertzog realizes it: he soon calls the neuropathic clowns back and leads us into the real horror chambers of psychiatry, here even the attentive smile is no longer appropriate, so stiffen the corners of your mouth, look at the floor, earnestly but attentively (the ludicrous footwear of the discussion-group members offers diversion), pull yourself together, damn it! Let us concentrate with ethical frowns on the graphically described cases, tut-tut-tut, the things that exist in the world, it’s like Hieronymus Bosch, a finger up the ass (Hertzog says “anus,” of course) seems like sheer grace in contrast, Botticelli, so to speak—but Hertzog does not wish to be cruel: I feel like Raphael, who, as we know, refused to paint a martyr (even the experts will have a hard time finding the Nietzsche quotation in so much subtlety), so I’ll spare you far more dreadful cases (which is too bad: when you read the church fathers of depth psychology, those cases are the most interesting), which cannot be helped by any focus on the experience of faith, alas! Now you will probably say: How can there be such terrible deformations of the human mind? Yes indeed, how? Some most likely have organic roots; schizophrenia, for example, may have something to do with the chemistry of the brain cells, and manic-depressive psychosis may be connected to the glands, this is unfortunately a rather unresearched area, offering science many fascinating problems, psychosurgery, as I have said, is making terrific progress, let me just mention in passing the slicing of certain nerve fibers in the brain, which procedure often turns out to be highly beneficial for some patients who have suffered from incurable states of agitation and depression, for the first time in years they now can leave the hospital and lead a more or less normal life, at times, to be sure, they are a bit irresponsible and carefree and must therefore remain under close surveillance to avoid their doing anything disastrous to themselves or others, in some cases the cure seems worse than the illness to their near and dear, but you don’t have to worry about that for the moment, thank you ever so much, that’s our problem, I mean for us medicine men—the point here and now, today, in our first discussion evening, which I so heartily welcome, is to establish that neuroses and psychoses are increasing at a terrifying speed; the further our civilization moves away from nature and its compelling givens, the more acute the danger grows for everyone—yes indeed, for practically everyone!—just think of America, where the percentage of mentally disturbed people in official statistics is frightening, just think of the high suicide rate in Scandinavia, the higher the level of civilization, the more dubious the whole business becomes, the question naturally arises whether the unspirituality of this civilization, its absolute rationalism, its narrower and narrower restriction of any possibility of providing a valve for our natural drives—whether, as I have said, this mind-and-soul-strangulating world, in which mankind believes it can erect an earthly paradise in materialism, may not be one of the causes for the obvious loss of vital harmony.