IJSP Number 5, 2023

97 To address deeper situated problematics of a more noetic order, as V. Frankl [7] would have expressed it, the therapists should have, or get, some sort of “qualification” in order to understand just that: human life is more than just achieving promotion, getting the corner office or becoming a famous CEO or to make the first million (or billion). You cannot expect that once you have realized such dreams, everything else, meaning: happy family life, love, friends, well-being and happiness, would automatically fall in place and be given to you on a silver plate. Although the “try hard” dream – exported from America where the “number one” philosophy is still valid – has conquered the world, a human life should be considered and understood as more complex than just an impressive cursus honorum in a corporation. Unfortunately, from an existential point of view, “the thin ice of modern life” [8] is so superficial that it breaks very easily at the socio- psychological pressures of the market place. It is just a consequence that such chronical superficiality derails psychotherapy, from its more profound existential analysis, towards the healing or patching of petty neuroses. Modern citizens do not want a better, deeper humanness, one that is oriented towards the spirit manifested in us, but rather to be functional, efficient and well-paid, nothing more than another wheel in a huge socio-economic machine. It seems to be our responsibility to keep that mechanism or social machine in good order and working, like a clock, every day. After all, as psychologist Melanie Klein revealed, we are, from early childhood, after the “good breast” – meaning the good or best things in life – constantly trying to avoid the bad one [9]. But, as every mother, the superabundant neoliberal society has two very unequal “breasts”. On the one hand, there is work, and workload, stress and daily traffic – life is, after all, unfair – (the good breast) and, on the other, there are our evenings, weekends or vacations when we can suckle on the “good”, “better” or even the “best breast” that consumerist life has to offer. The former is to be avoided or at least minimized or psychologically disinvested, while the latter, the good one, should be augmented, enjoyed and exploited at every time, on every occasion. Satisfaction versus un- satisfaction, joy and freedom versus the daily gruelling of “try hard”, “be perfect”, “be the first” or “be the best” [10] in a never-ending story of competing because, after all, we live in a society where every man is for himself, homo homini lupus est . You can hardly find anymore that traditional family described above, where there was rather cooperation than competition, where all agreed that in order to have a family life you need to compromise and you cannot put your Ego always on the first place. In those families, egotism was not the supreme value and everyone had to learn a very subtle and subliminal lesson: the need for understanding and cooperation, empathy and mutual feeling, were more important than any egotistical drive to put oneself on the first place and in the centre of every group. In other words, our inherent humanness is greater and more important than our particular, personal Egos which emerge from that larger anthropological ocean into which they will eventually return and be dissolved after a short and very brief life stage. After