38 ■ FLOW
aspirin, now empty, although there had been seventy tablets in it just
a while before.
Jim’s parents had separated a year earlier, and now they were
getting a divorce. During the week while he was in school, Jim lived with
his mother. Friday evenings he packed up to go and stay in his father’s
new apartment in the suburbs. One of the problems with this arrange
ment was that he was never able to be with his friends: during the week
they were all too busy, and on weekends Jim was stranded in foreign
territory where he knew nobody. He spent his free time on the phone,
trying to make connections with his friends. Or he listened to tapes that
he felt echoed the solitude gnawing inside him. But the worst thing, Jim
felt, was that his parents were constantly battling for his loyalty. They
kept making snide remarks about each other, trying to make Jim feel
guilty if he showed any interest or love toward one in the presence of
the other. “Help!” he scribbled in his diary a few days before his at
tempted suicide. “I don’t want to hate my Mom, I don’t want to hate
my Dad. I wish they stopped doing this to me.”
Luckily that evening Jim’s sister noticed the empty bottle of aspi
rin and called her mother, and Jim ended up in the hospital, where his
stomach was pumped and he was set back on his feet in a few days.
Thousands of kids his age are not that fortunate.
The flat tire that threw Julio into a temporary panic and the
divorce that almost killed Jim don’t act directly as physical causes pro
ducing a physical effect—as, for instance, one billiard ball hitting an
other and making it carom in a predictable direction. The outside event
appears in consciousness purely as information, without necessarily hav
ing a positive or negative value attached to it. It is the self that interprets
that raw information in the context of its own interests, and determines
whether it is harmful or not. For instance, if Julio had had more money
or some credit, his problem would have been perfectly innocuous. If in
the past he had invested more psychic energy in making friends on the
job, the flat tire would not have created panic, because he could have
always asked one of his co-workers to give him a ride for a few days. And
if he had had a stronger sense of self-confidence, the temporary setback
would not have affected him as much because he would have trusted his
ability to overcome it eventually. Similarly, if Jim had been more inde
pendent, the divorce would not have affected him as deeply. But at his
age his goals must have still been bound up too closely with those of his
mother and father, so that the split between them also split his sense
of self. Had he had closer friends or a longer record of goals successfully
achieved, his self would have had the strength to maintain its integrity.