ABSTRACT
In both the professional and the popular literature, one frequently encounters the idea that excessive goal striving and frustration because of failure to reach desired goals are responsible for mental illness. Merton [55, pp. 125–49], for instance, has stimulated considerable research in this area by his suggestive work concerning the relationship of anomie, status striving, and deviant behavior (e.g., crime, mental illness, alcoholism, etc.). Also some of the theorizing and experimental research of Lewin, Festinger, and their associates [48] on the determinants of goal-striving behavior is related to this problem.
