The Foundations of Personality - Abraham Myerson (best large ereader .txt) 📗

technique of free

association, nor the Freudian account of humor, etc. There are

plenty of books on the market written by Freud himself and his

followers. Frankly I advise the average person not to read them.

I am opposed to the Freudian account of life and character,

though recognizing that he has caused the psychologist to examine

life with more realism, to strip away pretense, to be familiar

with the crude and to examine conduct with the microscope.

 

I do not believe there is an ORGANIZED subconsciousness, having a

PERSONALITY. Most of the work which proves this has been done on

hysterics. Hysterics are usually proficient liars, are very

suggestible and quite apt to give the examiner what he looks for,

because they seek his friendly interest and eager study. Wherever

I have checked up the “subconscious” facts as revealed by the

patient as a result of his psychoanalysis or through hypnosis, I

have found but little truth. On the other hand, the Freudians

practically never check up the statements of their patients; if a

woman tells all sorts of tales of her husband’s attitude toward

her, or of the attitude of her parents, it is taken for granted

that she tells the truth. My belief is that had the statements of

Freud’s patients been carefully investigated he would probably

never have evolved his theories.

 

The Freudians have made no consecutive study of normal childhood,

though they lay great stress on this period of life and in fact

trace the symptoms of their patients back to “infantile trauma.”

Most of Freud’s ideas on sex development can be traced to, the

one four-and-a-half-years-old child he analyzed, who was as

representative of normal childhood as the little chess champion

of nine years now astounding the world is representative of the

chess ability of the average child. Moreover, the basis of the

technique is the free association, an association released from

inhibitions of all kinds. There isn’t any such thing, as

Professor Woodworth has pointed out. All associations are

conditioned by the physical condition of the patient, by his

mood, by the nature of the environment he finds himself in, by

the personality of the examiner and his powers of suggesting, his

purposes and (very important) by the patient’s purposes, which he

cannot bid “Disappear!” As for the results of treatment, every

neurologist meets patients again and again who have been

“psychoanalyzed” without results. Moreover, psychoneurotic

patients get well without treatment, as do all other classes of

the sick, and the Christian Scientist, the osteopath and the

chiropractic also have records of “cures.”

 

This is not the place to discuss in further detail the Freudian

ideas (the wish, the symbol, the jargon of transference, etc).

The leading follower of Freud, Jung, has already broken away from

the parent church, and there is an amusing cry of heresy raised.

Soon the eminent Austrian will have the pleasure of seeing a

half-dozen schools that have split off from his own,—followers

of Bleuler, Jung, Adler and others.

 

There IS a subconsciousness in that much of the nervous activity

of the organism has but little or no relation to consciousness.

There are mechanisms laid down by heredity and by the racial

structure that accomplish great functions without any but the

most indirect effect on consciousness and without any control by

the conscious personality. We are spurred on to sex life, to

marriage, to the care of our children by instinct; but the

instinct is not a personality any more than the automatic

heartbeat is. We repress a forbidden desire; if we are successful

and really overcome the desire by setting up new desires or in

some other way, the inhibited desire is not locked up in a

subterranean limbo. There is nothing pathological about

inhibition, for inhibition is as normal a part of character as

desire, and the social instinct which bids us inhibit is as

fundamental as the sex instinct. Most conflicts are on a

conscious plane, but most people will not admit to any one else

their deeply abhorrent desires. To all of us, or nearly all, come

desires and temptations that we would not acknowledge for the

world. If a wise examiner succeeds in getting us to admit them,

it is very agreeable to find a scapegoat in the form of the

subconsciousness. I have often said this to students: if all our

thoughts and conscious desires could be exposed, the most of us

would almost die of shame. True, we do not clearly understand

ourselves and our conflicts and explanation is often necessary,

but that is not equivalent to the subconsciousness; it merely

means that introspection is not sagacious.

 

Nor is it true, in my belief, that dreams are important psychical

events, nor that the subconsciousness evades a censor in

elaborating them. To what end would that be done? What would be

the use of it? Suppose that Freud and his school had never been;

then dreams would always be useless, for they would have no

interpreter. Men have dreamed in the countless ages before Freud

was born,—in vain. Think how the poor, misguided

subconsciousness has labored for nothing,—and how grateful it

should be to Freud! Dreams are results and have the same kind of

function that a stomach-ache has.

 

Things, experiences are forgotten, and whether they are

remembered or not depends upon the number of times they are

experienced, the attention they are given, the use they are put

to and the quality of the brain experiencing them. Disease and

old age may lower the recording power of the brain so that

experiences and sensations do not stick, and now and then the

brain is hypermnesic so that things are remembered with

surprising ease.

 

The conflicts of life are generally conscious conflicts, in my

experience. Desires and lusts that one does not know of do no

harm; it is the conflict which we cannot settle, the choice we

cannot make, the doubt we cannot resolve, that injures. It is not

those who find it easy to inhibit a desire or any impulse that

are troubled, though they may and do grow narrow. It is those

whose unlawful or discordant desires are not easily inhibited who

find themselves the theater of a constant struggle that breaks

them down. The uneasiness of a desire that arises from the

activity of the sex organs is not a manifestation of a

subconscious personality, unless we include in our personality

our livers, spleen and internal organs of all kinds. Such an

uneasiness may not be clearly understood by the individual merely

because the uneasiness is diffuse and not localized. But there is

no personality, Do will, wish or desire in that uneasiness; it

may and does cause to arise in the conscious personality wills

and wishes and desires against which there is rebellion and

because of which there is conflict.

 

Upon the issue of the conflicts within the personality hangs the

fate of the individual. Race-old lines of conduct are inhibited

by custom, tradition, teaching, conformity and the social

instinct and its allies. Here is a subject worthy of extended

consideration.

 

Freud has done the thought of our times a great service in

emphasizing conflict. From the earliest restriction laid by men

on his own conduct, wrestling with desire and temptation has been

the greatest of man’s struggles. Internal warfare between

opposing purposes and desires may proceed to a disruption of the

personality, to failure and unhappiness, or else to a solidified

personality, efficient, single-minded and successful. Freud’s

work has directed our attention to the thousand and one aberrant

desires that we will hardly acknowledge to ourselves, and he has

forced the professional worker in abnormal and normal mental life

to disregard his own prejudices, to strip away the camouflage

that we put over our motives and our struggles. Together with

Jung and Bleuler, he has helped our science of character a great

deal through no other method than by arousing it to action

against him. In order to fight him, our thought has been forced

to arm itself with the weapons that he has used.

 

CHAPTER VI. EMOTION, INSTINCT, INTELLIGENCE AND WILL

 

In a preceding chapter we discussed man as an organism reacting

against an outside world and spurred on by internal activities

and needs. We discussed stimulation, reflexes, inhibition, choice

and the organizing activity, memory and habit, consciousness and

subconsciousness, all of which are primary activities of the

organism. But these are mere theories of function, for the

activities we are interested in reside in more definite

reactions, of which the foregoing are parts.

 

We see a dreaded object on the horizon or foresee a

calamity,—and we fear. That state of the organism (note I do not

say that STATE OF MIND) resulting from the vision is an emotion.

We fly at once, we hide, and the action is in obedience to an

instinct. But ordinarily we do not fly or hide haphazard; we

think of ways and means, if only in a rudimentary fashion; we

shape plans, perhaps as we fly; we pick up a stick on the run,

hoping to escape but preparing for the reaction of fight if

cornered. “What shall I do—what shall I do? finds no conscious

answer if the emotion is overwhelming or the instinctive flight a

pell-mell affair; but ordinarily memories of other experiences or

of teaching come into the mind and some effort is made to meet

the situation in an “intelligent” manner.

 

Here, then, is a response in which three cardinal reactions have

occurred and are blended,—the emotion, the instinctive action,

and the intelligent action; or to make abstractions, emotion,

instinct and intelligence. (Personally, I think half the trouble

with our thought is that, we abstract from our experiences a

common group of associations and believe that the abstraction has

some existence outside our thoughts.) Thus there arise in us, as

a result of things experienced, curious feelings and we speak of

the feelings as emotions; we make a race-old response to a

situation,—an instinctive reaction; our memories, past

experiences and present purposes are stirred into activity, and

we plan and scheme, and this is an intelligent reaction, but

there is in reality no metaphysical entity Emotion, Instinct,

Intelligence. I believe that here the philosophers whose mental

activities are essentially in the direction of forming abstract

ideas have misled us.

 

What I wish to point out is this: that to any situation all three

reactions may take place and modify one another. We are

insulted—some one slaps our face—the fierce emotion of anger

arises and through us surge waves of feeling manifested on the

motor side by tensed muscles, rapid heart, harsh breathing,

perhaps a general reddening of face and eyes. Instinctively our

fists are clenched, a part of the reaction of fight, and it needs

but the slightest increase of anger to send us leaping on the

aggressor, to fight him perhaps to the death. But no,—the

situation has aroused certain memories and certain inhibitions:

the one who struck us has been our friend and we can see that he

is acting under a mistaken impression, or else we perceive that

he is right, that we have done him a wrong for which his blow is

a sort of just reaction. We are checked by these cerebral

activities, we choose some other reaction than fight; perhaps we

prevent him from further assault, or we turn and walk away, or we

start to explain, to mollify and console, or to remonstrate and

reprove. In other words, “intelligence” steps in to inhibit, to

bring to the surface the possibilities, to choose, and thus

overrides the emotional instinctive reaction. It may not succeed

in the overriding; we may hesitate, inhibit, etc., for only a

second or so, before hot anger overcomes us, and the instinctive

response of fight and retaliation takes place.

 

These examples might be multiplied a thousandfold. Every day of