Perfekt.

You know the feeling well, that gnawing drive to achieve perfection. No satisfaction. Never getting it quite right, everything elusive -- that perfect performance, the perfect turnout, the perfect partner, the perfect relationship, the perfect weight, the perfect profile, the perfect solution. All just beyond reach. That kind of quest can be the great challenge of our lives, providing powerful motivation to keep us working harder than ever before. But over the years, chronic dissatisfaction with ourselves and our work can become a source of deep personal unhappiness and illness if we don't learn to accept the fact that the perception of perfection is an ideal, unattainable, and that there can be discrepencies between reality -- what we can achieve -- and what we keep striving to achieve.

Do you recognize yourself in this description? Or a close friend? Can you handle it? Yes? Good. Because not everybody can. As we all know. Highly motivated people, such as dancers, can be cruelly hard on themselves, often without suspecting that something could be wrong with this behavior. Some of us have never learned when to let up.

Clive Barnes reminded me recently of the worst case scenario we have known of self-destructive behavior in a dancer. The Danish danseur noble Erik Bruhn, one of the greatest dancers ever, was known for his purity of style and that relentless quest for unattainable perfection. Nothing was ever perfect enough. Magnificent performances -- flawless in the eyes of his adoring public-would leave him in weeping despair because of one small error, one fleeting shadow of imperfection. Injuries and stomach ulcers, the results of these demands on himself, contributed to Bruhn's early retirement and, possibly, his early death (a heavy smoker, he died of lung cancer in 1986). But his example is perhaps not as extreme among dancers as you may think. Here's another:

This column is motivated by an experience I had recently while abroad as an observer traveling with a large dance company on a bus-and-truck tour of one-night stands in large cities. Tuesday was Swan Lake, and the evening's leading ballerina was not only a very fine dancer but, I suspect, capable of performances at a level equal to any dancer onstage today. But traveling long hours every day on a bus is exhausting; eating at roadside restaurants is a dodgy business; audiences vary greatly from town to town; warm-ups and rehearsals can be inadequate. All of these are factors beyond the performer's control. Add to this the responsibility of dancing Odette-Odile and the ballerina's relentless perfectionism, and you have a volatile situation. She was often brutal with herself, suffering frequent bouts of depression and feelings of unworthiness and career decline -- all familiar feelings to high achievers.

After Act I (which consisted of the first two acts combined), she was met backstage by the ballet master who asked her, "What was wrong with your first act tonight?" That single question undermined completely her uneasy self-confidence. As a result, she did something completely unprofessional arid out of character: she refused to continue dancing. If the ballet master's question had been intentionally diabolical, it could not have caused greater damage. Fortunately, others backstage were able to talk her into continuing -- and finishing -- evening, to considerable effect, but her own deepest fears had been stirred. She had not measured up. And she still had the rest of a long tour ahead.

How do we get into -- and get out of -- situations like this? I asked Dr. Linda Hamilton, a clinical psychologist who contributes regularly to this magazine, and she suggested that dancers might benefit from treating their worst suspicions about themselves and their performances as hypotheses, not as facts. Don't believe you were awful until you have solid proof, and that comes from yourself. You know. Dancers -- and the rest of us -- who are at the mercy of the opinions of others are going to be chronically unhappy. Survivors, Dr. Hamilton suggests, are those who end up "validating themselves," who can say to themselves that they have done their best and believe it. It is easier to make these suggestions than it is to put them into practice, but recognizing problems with perfectionism in ourselves is a step toward doing something constructive about them.

Chinese ceramicists, famous through the ages for their magnificent creations, address the problems of the "perfect" bowl by applying a scratch at the end of the process, an imperfection, putting any issues of perfection aside. Could stage performers, likewise worried about perfection, be free of further worry if they made one intentional mistake early on? I don't know. But I do know that there are those times when we can't be any better than we are. Things happen in this world whether we make them happen or not. We talk aggressively about seizing the day -- the actual quote from Horace is "Seize the day, put no trust in the morrow!" -- and yet sometimes we benefit most by letting the day seize us.

You have to learn when to let up. Not being able to do so won't get you any closer to that elusive goal -- perfecktion.