The Collegiate Neurotic

The youthful neurotic's personality continues to wobble uncertainly during the college years, but the focus of anxiety gradually shifts over to the question of what he or she will do after graduation day. This question invites these basic approaches:

1. The most extreme neurotics have their whole lives mapped out on a piece of paper that they frequently pull out of a desk drawer and stare at. These people have known what they wanted to be ever since they saved a bird with a broken wing when they were eight years old, and heaven help anyone or anything that gets in their way. Such students do not partake in dormitory hijinks, they wear pajamas to bed, and they believe that the best way to start the day is with a good breakfast. They can be spotted walking across the campus engaging various professors in animated conversation or rushing back to the dorm after an exam to look up the answers. Their rooms are very tidy. Their stereo equipment is below par. They often have a few pieces of fruit on the window sill. They already know how many children they want to have, and when, and what their names will be.

If these students are nudged even for a moment from their designated path they easily can fall into a wild tailspin that ends up with them sleeping in the Bowery or wandering through India with no shoes on. They should be joshed good-naturedly but not asked pointed questions about the meaning of life.

2. The second group of collegiate neurotics comprises those who go through half-dozen or so complete personality changes in the course of the four years. These are the students who are so undecided about themselves and their features that they react to college society as if it were a succession of masquerade parties, and to the curriculum as if it were a penny candy display. It seems merely a matter of luck and timing as to whether they leave school as future brain surgeons, tree surgeons, or Moonies.

These people embrace each new thing (a particular brand of beer, a dance step, sociology) with initial enthusiam and eventual disillusionment. They try on majors as others might try on shoes: looking for something that fits and is practical yet stylish. They do not wish to make any decision regarding the future because if it turns out to be the wrong one they will have no one to blame but themselves. They hope that if they try enough approaches, the correct course of life will become obvious. It never becomes obvious.

3. The last group of neurotic collegiates practices avoidance behavior. They avoid going to classes, aviod establishing even so much as eye contact with professors, avoid joining campus activities, and avoid wearing the school colors to football games. Instead, they ingest great quantities of mind-altering substances and stay in their rooms listening to rock music. They believe that the answers to life lie in rock music rather than in the consequences of the Battle of Tours or in the uses of light and shadow in The Scarlet Letter. Because this assumption cannot be proven wrong, these students often are kicked out of school by insecure administrators.

Other forms of typical collegiate avoidance behavior include epic sleeping jags ("I think I have mono."), reversions to childlike nehavior ("Hello, Daddy? I don't like it here anymore."), unrequited love ("My whole life is ruined."), and political activism ("Your whole life is ruined.")

If any of these students manage to make their way through full term at college, it probably is only because they felt guilty enough to rouse themselves for a series of all-nighters. The all-nighter is a neurotic exercise that combines a Kafkaesque despair with the tension of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Things learned during an all-nighter are remembered for ten hours, tops, and then forgotten for all time (even under torture or hypnosis).

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