Our judgment of the “traumatic episode” is also influenced by the subject’s certainty. If the subject reports that he believes what he remembers, this has some value in raising a presumption. This is especially true if the subject has fought against the idea, but it has spontaneously continued to appear and plague his associations. But a reported sense of certainty is flimsy stuff, unless this certainty survives for some time. We know that individuals try to escape from anxiety feelings by a flight into explanations, and that they are ready to volunteer or to accept all kinds of interpretations of their behavior rather than to continue to endure anxiety. This is the basis for the credulity of the neurotic, and explains why everything from mysterious “glandular unbalances” to “astral perturbations” are accepted from time to time as completely adequate explanations of personal troubles. So the subject’s reported certainty must survive even disparaging suggestions and prolonged self-scrutiny, and become emancipated from affect, if it is to be taken very literally. Another criterion is the consistency of the reported episode with all the other relevant facts. There must be something wrong about the report that K was brutally punished by his father at a time which was some years after the parent’s death.[63] The obstacles which lie in the path of a research program which calls for objective records of as much as possible of what transpires in the interview situation are not to be minimized. The bulk of a verbatim report of an hour’s conversation per day over several months is almost overwhelming. But historians are accustomed to plow through whole libraries of pages about Napoleon or Bismarck, and from the standpoint of a comprehensive theory of personality development any personality is almost as good as any other, although high elaboration and distinguished achievement are advantages. There are some points in favor of applying this technique of personality study to people who are normal, at least in the sense that they are suspected of normality by themselves and others. There is a moral to be learned from some of Freud’s early mistakes when he assigned critical significance to certain childhood experiences which later investigation showed were very common. The clinical caricature is invaluable for the high relief in which certain tendencies of the normal are revealed. Indeed, “normality” is more difficult to understand than disease, from one point of view, since it involves a complicated integration of many tendencies, a flexible capacity to snap from one mood, preoccupation, and overt activity to another, as the changing demands of reality require. Normality is complexity and integration, and it ought to be approached as directly as possible as a control on the pathological.