Professor, you are a man after my own heart. You make things so simple. From what you say I get a hunch that maybe I have been foolish to be so inquisitive. For thousands of years I have believed that I was asking my big question about man because I wanted an answer. You make it clear that I didn’t ask because I desired an answer, or anything else, but only because I liked to ask questions. Come to think of it--it’s plain as a wart on a nose--I couldn’t ask a question _because_ of anything. In fact, it was not questions, but movements of my lips, that occurred. I’ve just been kidding myself, and I don’t need to worry any more about what goes on in this head of mine. I really don’t want an answer, and I don’t want to ask questions. Still, I should like to know what the rest of you fellows think about this. A Gestalt-Psychologist: The latest experiments upon both men and lower animals fail to justify any of the theories that man’s mind or his behavior is a composite of elements. The behavior of men, of chimpanzees, and even of domestic hens displays types of organization that cannot be explained as conditioned reflexes, or instinctive pushes, or associations of sense-elements. The organization is there when the response first occurs, not merely afterwards, and new organizations appear within new responses. The unit for psychology is the configuration, which is not a simple element. We are not composites of any kind of elements; we do not merely repeat and recombine old reactions; our behavior, through and through, looks forward to the organized world in which we live. I find the question of The Sphinx, therefore, not only rational, but inevitable. The supreme problem of psychology is: Whither? What are these already organized wholes that we recognize as mind? How and in what direction do they grow, and what are they going towards? Applied to man, the question is, What does this species really want? A Self-Psychologist: The circle is returning into itself! Psychology took its start--it always does so--from the experience of being a conscious self. This is the prime datum; it is the concrete actuality, from which all your alleged “elements,” sensory, affective, or instinctive, are derived by abstraction. Mind, as the Gestalt-Psychologist says, is a self-organizing object. Its activity, wherever you find it, is purposive striving. I should say that what ails the Sphinx’s head is simply the painful effort to become a complete self. The Sphinx: Thank you! You have saved my self-respect, and ... A Psychoanalyst: