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

in their reality would shock us into

profoundest pain. The more jaded one is, the more used to

excitement, the more he seeks what are, ordinarily, disagreeable

methods of excitement. Thus pain in slight degree is exciting,

and in the sexual sphere pain is often sought as a means of

heightening the pleasure, especially by women and by the roue. I

suspect also that the haircloth shirt and the sackcloth and ashes

of the anhedonic hermit were painful methods of seeking

excitement.

 

Sometimes pain is used in small amounts to relieve excitement.

Thus the man who bites his finger nails to the quick gets a

degree of satisfaction from the habit. Indeed, all manner of

habitual and absurd movements, from scratching to pacing up and

down, are efforts to relieve the tension of excitement. One of my

patients under any excitement likes to put his hands in very hot

water, and the pain, by its localization, takes away from the

diffuse and unpleasant excitement. The diffuse uncontrolled

excitement of itching is often relieved by painful biting and

scratching. Here is an effort to localize a feeling and thus

avoid diffuse discomfort, a sort of homeopathic treatment.

 

3. As a corollary to the need of excitement and its pleasure is

the reaction to monotony. Monotony is one of the most dreaded

factors in the life of man. The internal resources of most of us

are but small; we can furnish excitement and interest from our

own store for but a short time, and there then ensues an intense

yearning for something or somebody that will take up our

attention and give a direction to our thought and action. Under

monotony the thought turns inward, there is daydreaming and

introspection,[1] which are pleasurable only at certain times for

most of us and which grow less pleasurable as we grow older.

Watch the faces of people thinking as they travel alone in

cars,—and rarely does one see a happy face. The lines of the

face droop and sighs are frequent. Monotony and melancholy are

not far apart; monotony and a restless seeking for excitement are

almost synonymous. Of course, what constitutes monotony will

differ in the viewpoint of each person, for some are so

constituted and habituated (for habit is a great factor) that it

takes but few stimuli to arouse a well-sustained interest, and

others need or think they need many things, a constantly changing

set of circumstances for pleasure.

 

[1] Stanley Hall, in his book “Adolescence,” lays great stress on

monotony and its effects. See also Graham Wallas’ “The Great

Society.”

 

Restlessness, eager searching for change, intense dissatisfaction

are the natural fruit of monotony. Here is an important item in

the problems of our times. Side by side with growth of the cities

and their excitement is the growing monotony of most labor. The

factory, with its specialized production, reduces the worker to a

cog in the machinery. In some factories, in the name of

efficiency, the windows are whitewashed so that the outside world

is shut out and talking is prohibited; the worker passes his day

performing his unvaried task from morning to night. Under such

circumstances there arises either a burning sense of wrong, of

injustice, of slavery and a thwarting of the individual dignity,

or else a yearning for the end of the day, for dancing, drinking,

gambling, for anything that offers excitement. Or perhaps both

reactions are combined. Our industrial world is poorly organized

economically, as witness the poor distribution of wealth and the

periodic crises, but it is abominably organized from the

standpoint of the happiness of the worker. Of this, more in

another place.

 

Monotony brings fatigue, because there is a shutting out of the

excitement that acts as an antidote to fatigue-feeling. A man

who works without fatigue six days a week is tired all day Sunday

and longs for Monday. The modern housewife,[1] with her four

walls and the unending, uninteresting tasks, is worn out, and her

fatigue reaction is the greater the more her previous life has

been exciting and varied. Fatigue often enough is present not

because of the work done but because the STIMULUS TO WORK HAS

DISAPPEARED. Monotony is an enemy of character. Variety, in its

normal aspect, is not only the spice of life; it is a great need.

Stabilization of purpose and work are necessary, but a

standardization that stamps out the excitement of variety is a

deadly blow to human happiness.

 

[1] See my book “The Nervous Housewife!”

 

Under monotony certain types of personalities develop an intense

inner life, which may be pathological, or it may be exceedingly

fruitful of productive thought.

 

Some build up a delusional thought and feeling. For delusion

merely means uncorrected thought and belief, and we can only

correct by contact and collision. The whole outer world may

vanish or become hostile and true mental disease develop. Perhaps

it is more nearly correct to say that minds predisposed to mental

disease find in monotony a circumstance favoring disease.

 

On the other hand, a vigorous mind shut out from outer stimuli[1]

finds in this circumstance the time to develop leisurely, finds a

freedom from distraction that leads to clear views of life and a

proper expression. A periodic retirement from the busy, too-busy

world is necessary for the thinker that he may digest his

material, that he may strip away unessential beliefs, that he may

find what it is he really needs, strives for and ought to have.

 

[1] Perhaps this is why real genius does not flourish in our

crowded, over-busy days, despite the great amount of talent.

 

4. Here we come to another corollary of the need for excitement,

the need of relaxation. At any rate, satisfaction and pleasure

need periods of hunger in order to be felt. In the story of

Buddha he is represented as being shielded from all sorrow and

pain, living a life filled with pleasure and excitement, yet he

sought out pain. So excitement, if too long continued—or rather

if a situation that produces excitement of a pleasurable kind be

too long endured—will result in boredom. “Things get to be the

same,” whether it be the excitement of love, the city, sports or

what not. This is a basic law of all pleasures. In order that

life may have zest, that excitement may be easily and pleasurably

evoked and by normal means, we need relaxation, periods free from

excitement, or we must pass on to a costly chase for excitement

that brings breakdown of the character.

 

5. If the seeking of excitement, as such, is one of the prime

pleasures of life, organized excitement in the form of interest

is the directing and guiding principle of activity. At the outset

of life interest is in the main involuntary and is aroused by the

sights, sounds and happenings of the outer world. As time goes

on, as the organism develops, as memories of past experiences

become active, as peculiarities of personality develop, and as

instincts reach activity, interest commences to take definite

direction, to become canalized, so to speak. In fact, the

development of interest is from the diffuse involuntary form of

early childhood to a specialization, a condensation into definite

voluntary channels. This development goes on unevenly, and is a

very variable feature in the lives of all of us. Great ability

expresses itself in a sustained interest; a narrow character is

one with overdeformed, too narrow interest; failure is often the

retention of the childish character of diffuse, involuntary

interest. And the capacity to sustain interest depends not only

on the special strength of the various abilities of the

individual, but remarkably on his energy and health. Sustained

“voluntary” interest is far more fatiguing than involuntary

interest, and where fatigue is already present it becomes

difficult and perhaps impossible. Thus after much work, whether

physical or mental, during and after illness—especially in

influenza, in neurasthenic states generally, or where there is an

inner conflict—interest in its adult form is at a low ebb.

 

There are two main directions which interest may take, because

there are two worlds in which we live. There is the inner world

of our feelings, our thoughts, our desires and our

struggles,[1]—and there is the outer world, with its people, its

things, its hostilities, its friendships, its problems and facts,

its attractions and repulsions. Man divides his interest between

the two worlds, for in both of them are the values of existence.

The chief source of voluntary interest lies in desire and value,

and though these are frequently in coalescence, so that the thing

we desire is the thing we value, more often they are not in

coalescence and then we have the divided self that James so

eloquently describes. So there are types of men to whom the outer

world, whether it is in its “other people,” or its things, or its

facts, or its attractions and repulsions, is the chief source of

interest and these are the objective types, exteriorized folks,

whose values lie in the goods they can accumulate, or the people

they can help, or the external power they exercise, or the

knowledge they possess of the phenomena of the world, or the

things they can do with their hands. These are on the whole

healthy-minded, finding in their pursuits and interest a real

value, rarely stopping from their work to ask, “Why do I work? To

what end? Are things real?” Contrasted with them are those whose

gaze is turned inward, who move through life carrying on the

activities of the average existence but absorbed in their

thoughts, their emotions, their desires, their

conflicts,—perhaps on their sensations and coenaesthetic

streams. Though there is no sharp line of division between the

two types, and all of us are blends in varying degrees, these

latter are the subjective introspective folk, interiorized,

living in the microcosmos, and much more apt than the objective

minded to be “sick souls” obsessed with “whys and wherefores.”

They are endlessly putting to themselves unanswerable questions,

are apt to be the mentally unbalanced, or, but now and then, they

furnish the race with one whose answers to the meaning of life

and the direction of efforts guide the steps of millions.

 

[1] Herbert Spencer’s description of these two worlds is the best

in literature. “Principles of Psychology.”

 

There is a good and a bad side to the two types of interest. The

objective minded conquer the world in dealing with what they call

reality. They bridge the water and dig up the earth; they invent,

they plow, they sell and buy, they produce and distribute wealth,

and they deal with the education that teaches how to do all these

things. They find in the outer world an unalterable sense of

reality, and they tend rather naively to accept themselves, their

interests and efforts as normal. In their highest forms they are

the scientist, reducing to law this tangle of outer realities, or

the artist, who though he is a hybrid with deep subjective and

objective interest, nevertheless remodels the outer world to his

concept of beauty. These objective-minded folk, the bulk of the

brawn and in lesser degree of the brain of the world, are apt to

be “materialists,” to value mainly quantity and to be

self-complacent. Of course, since no man is purely objective,

there come to them as to all moments of brooding over the eggs of

their inner life, when they wonder whether they have reached out

for the right things and whether the goods they seek or have are

worth while. Such introspective interest comes on them when they

are alone and the outer world does not reach in, or when they

have witnessed death and misfortune, or when sickness and fatigue

have reduced them to a feeling of weakness. For it is true that

the objective minded are more often robust, hearty, with more