ABSTRACT
This very difficult problem was the subject of a separate paper (Malan, 1959). The whole difficulty may be illustrated by a single example, the agoraphobic girl quoted by Bandler (in Oberndorf, Greenacre, and Kubie, op. cit. 1948) and already mentioned in Chapter 3 (p. 23). The essential point illustrated by this patient is that (i) while she dressed and behaved in such a way that men were attracted by her, she suffered from agoraphobia; and that (ii) when she lost her agoraphobia, she was found to have changed her behaviour in such a way that men were no longer interested in her. It is thus hardly difficult to postulate (i) that the agoraphobia and the problem of her relation to men were dynamically linked, (ii) that the 'real' underlying disturbance lay in her relation to men, and (iii) that there had therefore been no resolution of her 'real' problem, which on the contrary had been solved merely by avoidance. In other words, emotional health cannot simply be equated with the absence of symptoms. It is hardly necessary to drive this home by drawing the medical parallel, and discussing whether freedom from pulmonary tuberculosis should be equated with the absence of cough.
