Few men combine psychological and spiritual insight with the force and breadth of Paul Tournier. The Strong and the Weak and other books he has written have dealt in various ways with this issue’s theme of “success.”
For this article, we selected portions from his book The Adventure of Living, in which he considers our inner selves and our true drives for success, revealing some of his own struggles as well.
Success and Failure
The joy of adventure is an anticipation of the joy of success. One pursues an adventure joyfully and effectively so long as one has not lost all hope of success.
The joy of success! Think of the joy a person has when he passes a difficult examination-or even one that is not very difficult! At the time it seems to eclipse everything else. For a moment the world, life, and all other problems fade away. The joy of success is everything. On the other hand, consider a person who is not enjoying success. I often see such cases. A student is terrified of failing in an examination for which he is nevertheless well prepared. He realizes quite well that his panic is unhealthy. But it is after his success that the sign of his illness is most clearly seen, in his incapacity to enjoy it. His success he feels to be an unmerited quirk of fortune which does nothing to reassure him on the subject of his personal worth. Truth to tell, I get far more pleasure from his success than he does himself!
Consider also the pleasure we can derive from the tiniest compliment from some important personage or someone whom we love. Much of the way we behave, even our protestation when we are complimented and our affectation of modesty, is a veiled means of soliciting compliments. A wife sighs loudly while washing the dishes; it is not that she wants her husband to come and help her, but she would like him to compliment her on her devotion to duty. And think of the minor pleasures afforded by various kinds of worldly success, and all the effort and expense men and women will go to in order to secure them, all the clever tricks they are capable of employing. A pretty dress, a new hair style in the latest fashion-here is quite an adventure for a woman, and for her husband if he understands her. And success in business! For a good businessman, every enterprise is an adventure, and when he pulls it off he is as happy as a schoolboy. And success in politics, in war, on the stage, in the university, or the church! If there had been no fear of failure, neither would there be any joy in success.
Such joy is legitimate. Jesus himself gave a sharp answer to the Pharisees who wanted to curb the enthusiasm of the crowds on his entry into Jerusalem (Luke 19:39-40). The Bible goes further; it praises success. David had success in all his undertakings, for the Lord was with him (1 Samuel 18:14). I was recently in Lebanon and received a magnificent gift in the form of a large, old Persian tray. Engraved in Arabic characters round the edge is the following maxim: “In the name of the merciful God: I cannot succeed without his help; no success is possible without his help; no victory without the help of God.”
The joy of victory and of success never lasts long, however. In the heat of the struggle, the hoped-for victory is felt to be a decisive term beyond which all the future remains in the halfshadow. Whether it is a war to be won or merely an examination to be passed, our minds are so filled with this immediate object that we are incapable of seriously envisaging what may happen afterwards, which may be the more disappointing the more we have enjoyed our success.
But there is a much more profound reason for the prompt and inexorable extinction of the joy of success. It is part of our human nature itself, always torn between its insatiable desire for perfection and the impossibility of ever achieving it. Every success makes us feel more keenly, and more cruelly, how far we fall short of complete self-fulfillment. So for every book I read, there are a score of others that I regret not having read, and not being able to read. For every book I write, I think with regret of many others that I should like to write, and that I shall never write. For every patient I heal, I suffer at my powerlessness to heal others. Every friendship, every fruitful experience of human relationship makes me feel more sharply how far short we fall of the full fellowship to which we all aspire.
Every victory recalls the remark made by Napoleon Bonaparte’s mother: “Provided it lasts!” “The insurmountable obstacle,” writes Varillon, “lies at the end of a road marked by obstacles that have been surmounted.” Animals are necessarily successful in life. They eat, drink, sleep, warm themselves in the sun, and mate when they can; they suffer pain or pleasure or fear, devour their prey or are overcome by others stronger than themselves. All this takes place without any meaning other than the fulfillment of the laws and functions of their nature. Man, on the other hand, is capable of spoiling his life. “I’ve made a mess of my life!” How often have I heard this tragic phrase in the intimacy of my consulting room! And yet the lives of these people are not yet over. They may often seem to outsiders to be brilliant successes; sometimes they have even achieved the most enviable celebrity.
These are the most clear-sighted people, the most keenly sensitive to the great problem of humanity., They are conscious of an inability ever to escape,; whatever they do, from the consequences of past errors, lost opportunities; an inability to shake off, the feeling of total failure for which no partial success can compensate. They feel that they may well 9 win many tactical victories, but still the strategic victory will elude them; that the balance sheet of their successes and failures, even if it seems to show a c credit balance, will never be able to satisfy their: longing to make a success of their lives. l
We all feel that we have something tremendous at < stake in our lives; that we have only one life to live; and that the stake is at risk in every minute of our: existence (and every minute is unique), in every decision and option we make. Our decisions derive their importance and their savor from it, yet what we have at stake, we feel, is far more important than any single decision. All men are haunted to some: extent by the fear of ruining their lives. Those who . do not feel it have thrust it into their subconscious. Think how often we dream of failure, dream of missing a train, a ship, or a plane, dream that some important objective escapes us just as we are about: to achieve it, or that fearful monsters bar our way.
All parents are anxious about their children’s future. They look after their health and strength, instruct them, teach them good manners, self-control, and ordinary prudence, all in order to equip them for the struggle of life. If they compel their children to follow courses of study that they detest, and are perturbed when they are put down into the bottom grade because their marks are not high enough in Greek or mathematics, this is not so much because they are worried about their intellectual development; it is because diplomas and certificates are trump cards that will help them to win in the game of life. The well-known educator Louis Raillon tells of a young mother who asked him if there was a rapid method of teaching her child to read.
“How old is he?” asked Raillon. “He’s four,” was the reply.
“Then there’s plenty of time for him to learn to read!”
“But think-if he’s going to succeed in life, he mustn’t waste any time! The whole of his time at school is going to be a race against the clock!”
The whole of education, the teaching of good manners, and character training are designed mainly with this in mind. Non-Christian parents send their children to Sunday school because “it may, after all, be of some use to them in their lives.”
Life does resemble a huge game, and all the things we have, know, and do are like so many pawns which we manipulate in an effort to win. There are never enough pawns. Each individual chooses his pawns, or rather uses those he has available-his body or his mind, his health or sickness, his family, titles, reputation, wealth. In this way the ego is enlarged to include all its pawns in order to increase its chances.
I sometimes shudder as I watch this universal comedy. All these innumerable individuals, in every country and every walk of life, in fashionable drawing rooms and disreputable saloons, in universities, religious meetings, and night clubs-all are constantly motivated by the single aim of making themselves appear in the best possible light. They are all, and always, on the watch, anxious lest their weaknesses, their faults, their ignorance, their fads, or their failings be discovered; anxious to distinguish themselves, to be noticed, admired, or commiserated with. Some do it openly and naively, and are considered vain. Others hide it better, but are no less vain. They are all capable of cowardice, duplicity, and cruelty when the stakes are high enough. And yet there is a better side, a noble side. This whole enormous, costly, and constant effort to make some small mark on the great chessboard of life has its source in man’s very human instinct of creative adventure.
It is not enough, of course, to have pawns. One must also know how to use them. And the more one has, the more difficult this is-and the more ignominious it would be to fail with so many pieces to play with!
We are all engaged in a rat race. No one is disinterested. The attempt to seem so is one more pawn brought into play in order to achieve one’s end. “We are all seeking happiness.” The remark is one I heard from Karl Barth, a theologian who certainly cannot be suspected of taking a view that confines human life within too human limits. Naturally there are religious people who criticize worldly careerists. They despise what the careerist is seeking-wealth, favors, pleasures, and honors. But they themselves are heavenly careerists, who hope through their contempt of even the lesser pleasures to achieve supreme bliss, and are often looking for some compensation for the failures they have suffered in real life.
Today the whole prestige of science, technology, and psychology has its roots in the promises they make of success-promises of the collective success of mankind, which, as discovery follows discovery, nurses its dream of indefinite progress in order to console itself for the stubborn ills that beset it still. What a success it will be to land on the moon and annex it, to conquer diseases that up till now have been incurable, to conquer hunger and poverty, tyranny and war, to increase the world’s sum of well-being! Promises also of individual success: science, technical skill, self-mastery, knowledge of the human mind, and an understanding of one’s own temperament seem to each of us to be the means of increasing our chances of success.
Medicine and the prestige it enjoys can also be interpreted from the point of view of the universal struggle against failure. Disease is a handicap in life, an obstacle to success, a suspension of the adventure of life. This is why the Bible frequently says of a man who has been healed that he “revived.”
But it can happen that a sick person undergoes experiences that are more valuable than all the successes of the healthy. Just because illness has brought a man up short in the rat race for worldly success, it can become an opportunity for withdrawal, for fruitful self-examination, for meeting God. “You know, my lord,” Calvin wrote to an illustrious invalid, “how difficult it is amidst the honours, riches and influences of the world to lend an ear to God. … God has willed to take you aside, as it were, so as to be heard more clearly. … He has given you this opportunity to profit in his school, as if he wanted to speak to you privately, in your ear.”
The Psychology of Failure
Extremely gifted people sometimes meet with nothing but failure, while others, less talented, go from success to success. The doctor is quick to see that the greatest obstacle to success in life is not physical disease. Against this obstacle he is relatively well armed, with his lancet, his medicines, and his advice. There are other much more frequent obstacles which are due to psychic factors, and which are very difficult to eradicate. A lapse of memory, a blank in an examination, a slip of the tongue reveal in us an unconscious impulse contrary to our sincerest and most ardent desires, sabotaging them in the shadowy secret places of the mind.
Here is an example: I was in the Marche aux Puces one day, thumbing through some old books. I picked one up, entitled Etrennes Religieuses 1866. It was an edifying religious annual, very much in the taste of its day. Glancing through the table of contents I saw “Louis Tournier: From the cure of souls to the sick-bed.” What luck! Here was an article by my own father, which, almost a century later, I could rewrite in my turn. Without haggling, I handed over the fifty cents and took the book away.
Delighted with my find, I told my family about it on my return home. Later that evening my wife asked to see the book. I could not find it anywhere! It was not until six months later that I found it on my shelves, in its proper place, where I had so often looked for it in vain. I had been conscious only of my pleasure at coming across a memento of my father, whom I had never known, and whose dominating interests I so strangely share. Within me, however, unconscious forces were striving in quite the opposite direction. They were trying to eliminate any reminder of my sufferings as an orphan. And more subtly still, by means of an Oedipean sense of guilt, these forces were trying to prevent me from competing posthumously with my father, not only in my work of soul healing among the sick, but also in writing books, as he did.
This mechanism, opposing our conscious aspirations with dark and contrary forces, may of course assume more serious proportions. It may go as far as failure neurosis, which causes the sufferer to act in the very way which will ensure the failure of the enterprises he has most at heart-studies, career, marriage, for example. A thing that strikes one in the daily practice of psychology is the fact that the people who fail are those who try hardest to succeed. It is because they think themselves not to be gifted that they try so hard. But it is also because they try so hard and are so anxious that they fail!
One man is so shy and embarrassed that he makes me feel embarrassed as well, and I have the greatest difficulty in establishing personal contact with him. But I perceive that it is personal contact that he longs for most, that he needs most. The very intensity of his need prevents him from being natural, spontaneous, and straightforward. As a result he has had nothing but failure in his attempts to establish close relationships, particularly with those whose friendship he most desires to win. And these failures aggravate his emotional reactions, his shyness, and his anxiety-and the vicious circle is complete.
A certain spinster suffers terribly from the fear of being an old maid. She is obsessed by her longing for marriage. She hides her suffering as well as she can, but it is what makes her behave awkwardly in the presence of men. She does the wrong thing, makes stupid remarks, and finds herself paralyzed in the expression of her feelings. She is able to act a little more naturally when she is with a man whom she could not possibly marry-a priest, or a solidly married man whom she knows to be very much attached to his wife, or perhaps a fickle-minded man whom she would not want to marry anyway. But she is awkward and seemingly cold in the presence of the man she would like to marry, and who, no doubt, would be best able to appreciate her.
Very few people judge themselves fairly. Some are too sure of themselves. But others-more sensitive, more adult, and more agreeable-easily fall into a sort of prejudice against themselves. The striking thing is the complete hopelessness of any attempt to bring them to a more objective view. It is no use pointing out all their good qualities. They look upon it as cruel irony, so clear does it seem to them that we are speaking of the very qualities they lack! For our part, we feel that this systematic negation of their obvious qualities is like an insatiable quest for compliments which, however, never reassure them.
A pretty woman has doubts about her own beauty and thinks she sees scorn in the insistent glances of the men who are attracted by her good looks. A man of modest gifts, who is nevertheless self-confident, knows instinctively how to make the most of the few talents he has at his disposal. Another, richly endowed with talent, stakes everything on other qualities which he would like to, but does not, possess.
Further, we sometimes lay more store by our efforts than by the success they are designed to achieve. A woman artist once told me she did not feel she was really working unless it was difficult/ as if the value of a piece of work could be measured in terms of the sweat it costs. I often fall into this error myself. I was talking about it recently to a colleague of whom I am very fond. I confessed to him my unease at being congratulated on a lecture whose preparation has cost me little in the way of time or effort.
“Then it strikes me,” he said, “that you, who are always talking about grace, set more store by your own merits than you do by grace. Do you not think you ought simply to be grateful to God for the natural ability he has given you?”
This same colleague, once when I was very worried about facing up to my responsibilities, left me a little note on which were written these words from Psalm 127: It is vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for he gives to his beloved sleep. Thank God for the friends he gives us! It is not much use saying to a person, “Have confidence in yourself.” If he lacks self-confidence, it is just because he knows his own shortcomings and exaggerates them; it is also because he has experienced the paralyzing effects of the vicious circle of emotion; he has not forgotten all his past failures. The thing that will help him is the feeling that he is understood, which he will not get if all we do is exhort him to be confident, as if we did not know all the difficulties he faces. At this point my “Calvinist pessimism” comes to my aid. I know that if a man is sincere he is always disappointed in himself and is incapable of saving himself. But though I am a pessimist as far as man is concerned, in regard to God I am an optimist. I know that trusting God is more sure than trusting oneself; I know that trust in God can always carry us forward, impel us resolutely into adventure despite our mistrust of ourselves.
The adventurous life is not one exempt from fear, but on the contrary one that is lived in full knowledge of fears of all kinds, one in which we go forward in spite of our fears. Many people have the utopian idea that others are less afraid than they are, and they feel therefore that they are inferior. All men are afraid, even desperately afraid. If they think they are exempt from fear, that is because they have repressed their fears. Fear is part of human nature. In the case of animals it reigns supreme. One has only to observe them to realize that they are constantly on the watch, attentive to every possible danger. In the animals, however, fear is always the servant of life, whereas in man it may turn insidiously against life and compromise it.
Paradoxes
I am often reminded, as I listen to my patients, of Aesop’s fable of the fox and the grapes. Like the fox, they claim to have had no desire to succeed, and so they feel less bitter about having failed. It would be wrong, however, to accuse them of duplicity. They are deceived by their own game, and quite honestly and humbly believe themselves to be exempt from the ambition to succeed. No one talks more eloquently than they of the vanity and stupidity of life. “What’s the point?” they say. “What good will it do me? If I get that, I shall want something else afterwards, always something more. The wisest thing is not to try for anything at all.”
And so many people take refuge from the disappointments of their real lives in a naive dream world. Those who have failed in their own enterprises often find it wonderfully consoling to hand out advice to all and sundry on how to succeed in life.
There are more modest consolations, too-all the things one may call “toys.” Everyone has his toys, some more expensive than others and some more effective than others-minor pleasures, little fads, private self-indulgences of which the conscience does not approve, but for which his excuse is the need to console himself for some painful failure. And there are entertainments and shows that are not related to any real cultural need in our lives. I remember one day when worn out with my efforts to see clearly what I ought to do in a certain matter that affected the whole course of my work, weary of waiting in vain for God’s answer to my prayers, and tired of fruitlessly discussing it with my wife, l said to her, “I’m going to the movies.” On the way I kept muttering to myself, “I’ll console myself with a movie, console myself with a movie. … ” I chose a cinema at random, and the natural result was that I hit upon a stupid film that was no consolation at all.
There is a certain philosophy of luck which is very widespread, and which is used as a consolation. If you fail in your marriage, you can fall back on the thought that it was just bad luck that your husband or wife turned out to be impossible to live with. Nothing is more trite and more sterile than this throwing of the responsibility for failure onto someone else-one’s parents, one’s boss, an unscrupulous competitor, the political system, or the government of the day. The supreme denial of responsibility is to throw the blame onto God, or even onto the devil.
So we come to the fundamental and tragic problem of fear and of its inexorable laws, namely, that fear creates what it fears. Fear of war impels a country to take the very measures which unleash war. The fear of losing the love of a loved one provokes us to just the lack of frankness which undermines love. The skier falls as soon as he begins to be afraid of falling. Fear of failing in an examination takes away the candidate’s presence of mind and makes success more difficult. But the person who imagines himself to be free from fear is likely to neglect the necessary precautions. He is sometimes capable of acting with a blind folly that is fatal. If on other occasions his audacity comes to his aid and gives him a measure of success, he becomes inflexible and hard, lacking the finesse and the sensitive perception that are indispensable to really significant success. As with medicines, it all depends on the dose; the right amount produces a cure, but too much can be poisonous.
And so our problem is turning out to be exceedingly complicated! Where is the frontier between success and failure? This was the question discussed in a 1955 conference by the Groupe Lyonnais d’Etudes Medicales, Philosophiques et Biologiques, founded more than thirty years ago by Dr. Rene Biot. There we heard a philosopher, Professor Hahn, set out all the paradoxes of failure and success. That of technology, for instance: Man takes pride in his technological successes, and the aim of technology is indeed to make success more certain, but the triumph of technology means the elimination of man-that is to say, his failure par excellence.
We heard a sociologist, Professor Joseph Folliet, speaking of civilizations having perished because they were too successful. “There is a perfection,” he said, “which is both success and failure.” He reminded us also of how it is often difficult to say which side has really won in a war- sometimes not the one with the military victory, but in fact the vanquished, who have. bequeathed to their vanquishers the fundamental principles of their civilization.
We heard an educator, Professor Louis Raillon, telling us that a complete success in education would be a failure because it would be the bringing of a man to perfect equilibrium-and perfect equilibrium is death.
I am often reminded of this when a patient says to me, with a rather anxious smile, “You must think I’m quite unbalanced.” And I reflect that he is in good company, with the majority of those who have given our world its greatest treasures of thought, literature, art, and faith. Of course I must treat my patient, trying to free him from the painful symptoms from which he is suffering. But I am interested in his person, not only his malady. What matters most from this human point of view-is it not that he should live a fruitful life, even if he is ill?
In the same way, we say of a sick person that he is unadapted to his environment. But would not the greatest misfortune be for a man to become so perfectly adapted that he ceased to be a person, become a robot? Society is often more to blame than the individual who can find no room in it for himself. I read that Albert Einstein was expelled from Munich school at the age of fifteen because he showed no interest in his studies; that he failed the entrance examination to Zurich Polytechnic; that he failed to secure a post as a mathematical assistant; that he was even dismissed from a post as a simple tutor in a private boarding-school and had to content himself with a job in the patents office at Berne! There is a story from which those who are in despair over their failures can well take comfort!
It is, then, extremely difficult to define failure and success, the line of demarcation between them is so elusive. Is the atomic bomb a success or a failure? Today’s failure will turn out to be tomorrow’s success. Today’s success will be revealed tomorrow to have been a failure. I am often struck that so few rich people really enjoy the fortune they have amassed. They have succeeded in life, but they have not made a success of their lives, and it seems to be a fact that the cause is in their very success. Some successes are won only at the cost of a betrayal of oneself and of one’s true vocation, which means they are really failures.
I have given many lectures, and I do not deny that it gives me pleasure when the lecture goes well. One of my most vivid memories is of a lecture I gave many years ago, one of my worst failures. It was at a university. I felt right from the first word that I was not going to make contact with my audience. I clung to my notes and laboriously recited, with growing nervousness, what I had to say. As the audience left
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