The Foundations of Personality - Abraham Myerson (best large ereader .txt) 📗
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not depends upon its cause and the methods it employs. Righteous
anger, whether against one’s own wrongs or the wrongs of others,
is the hall-mark of the brave and noble spirit; mean, egoistic
anger is a great world danger, born of prejudice and egoism. A
violent-tempered child may be such because he is outraged by
wrong; if so, teach him control but do not tell him in modern
wishy-washy fashion that “one must never get angry.” Control it,
intellectualize it, do not permit it to destroy effectiveness, as
it is prone to do; but it cannot be eliminated without
endangering personality.
Fear and anger have this in common: whenever the controlling
energy of the mind goes, as in illness, fatigue or early mental
disease, they become more prominent and uncontrolled. This cannot
be overemphasized. When a man (or woman) finds himself
continually getting apprehensive and irritable, then it is the
time to ask, “What’s the matter with me,” and to get expert
opinion on the subject.
These two emotions are in more need of rationalizing and
intelligent control than the other emotions, for they are more
explosive. Certainly of anger it is truly said that “He who is
master of himself is greater than he who taketh a city.” The
angry man is disliked, he arouses unpleasant feelings, he is
unpopular and a nuisance and a danger in the view of his fellows.
The underlying idea underneath courtesy and social regulations is
to avoid anger and humiliation. Controversial subjects are
avoided, and one must not brag or display concern because these
things cause anger and disgust. Politeness and tact are essential
to turn away wrath, to avoid that ego injury that brings anger.
We contrast with the brusque type, careless of whether he arouses
anger, the tactful, which conciliates by avoiding prejudice, and
which hates force and anger as unpleasant. Against the quick to
anger there is the slow type, whose anger may be enduring. We may
contrast egoistic anger with the altruistic and oppose the anger
which is effective with the anger that disturbs reason and
judgment; intellectual anger against brute anger. Rarely do men
show anger to their superiors; extreme provocation and
desperation are necessary. Men flare up easily against equals but
more easily and with mingled contempt against the inferior.
Anger, though behind the fighting spirit, need not bluster or
storm; usually that is a “worked up” condition intended in a
naive way to frighten and intimidate, or through disgust, to win
a point. Anger is not necessarily courage, which replaces it the
higher up one goes in culture.
8. Disgust, also a primary emotion, is one of the basic reactions
of life and civilization. Literally “disagreeable taste,” its
facial expression, with mouth open and lower lip drawn down,[1]
is that preliminary to vomiting. We eject or retract when
disgusted; we are not afraid nor are we angry. We say “he—or
she, or it—makes me sick,” and this is the stock phrase of
disgust. Inelegant as it is, it exactly expresses the situation.
Disgust easily mingles with fear and anger; it is often dispelled
by curiosity and interest, as in the morbid, as in medical
science, and it of ten displaces less intense curiosity and
interest.
[1] See Darwin’s “The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals,”
—a great book by a great man.
After anything has been accepted as standard in cleanliness, a
deviation in a “lower” direction causes disgust. Those who are
accustomed to clean tablecloths, clean linen are disgusted by
dirty tablecloths, dirty linen. The excreta of the body have been
so effectively tabooed, in the interest perhaps of sanitation,
that their sight or smell is disgusting, and they are used as
symbols of disgust in everyday language. Indeed, the so-called
animal functions have to be decorated and ceremonialized to avoid
disgust. We turn with ridicule and repugnance from him who eats
without “manners” and one of the functions of manners is to avoid
arousing disgust.
Disgust kills desire and passion, and from that fact we may trace
a large part of moral progress. Satiety brings a slight disgust;
thus after a heavy meal there may be contentment but the sight of
food is not at all appealing and often enough rather repelling.
In the sex field, a deep repulsion is often felt when lust alone
has brought the man and woman together or when the situation is
illegal or unhallowed. With satisfaction of desire, the
inhibiting forces come to their own, and the violence of
repentance and disgust may be extreme. Stanley Hall, Havelock
Ellis and other writers lay stress on this; and, indeed, one of
the bases of asceticism is this disgust. Further, when we have no
desires or passion, the sight of others hugging and kissing, or
acting “intimate” in any way, is usually disgusting, an offense
against “good taste” based on the “bad taste” it arouses in the
observer. In memory we are often disgusted at what we did in the
heat of desire, but usually memory itself does not prevent us
from repeating the act; desire itself must slacken. Thus the old
are often intensely disgusted at the conduct of the young, and it
is never wise for a young couple to live with older people. For
in the early days of married life the intensity of the intimate
feelings needs seclusion in order to avoid disgusting others. It
is no accident that Dame Grundy is depicted as an elderly person
with a “sour look”; her prudishness has an origin in disgust at
that which she has outlived. Sometimes the old are wise—not
often enough—and then their humor, love and sympathy keeps them
from disgust.
Love counteracts disgust. The young girl who turns in loathing
from uncleanliness finds it easy and a pleasure to care for her
soiled baby. In fact, tender feeling of any kind overcomes—or
tends to overcome—disgust; and pity, the tenderest of all
feelings and without passion, impels us to march into the very
jaws of disgust. The angry may have no pity,—but they are not
less unkind in commission than the disgusted are unkind in
omission. Thus a too refined breeding leads people away from
effective pity and that sturdiness of conduct which is real
philanthropy. Indeed, too much of refinement increases the number
of disgusting things in the world; he who must have this or that
luxury is not so much pleased with it as disgusted without it.
Raising standards in things material cannot increase the
happiness or contentment of the world, for it merely makes men
impatient and disgusted at lesser standards. We cannot hope to
increase happiness through the material improvements of
civilization.
Self-disgust and shame are not identical but are so kindred that
shame may well be studied here. Shame is lowered self-valuation,
brought on by social or self-disapproval. Usually it is acute
and, like fear, it tends to make the individual hide or fly. It
is based on insight, and there are thus some who are never
ashamed, simply because they do not understand disapproval. Shame
is essentially a feeling of inferiority, and when we say to a
man, “Shame on you,” we say, “You have done wrong, humble
yourself, be little!” When we say, “I am ashamed of you,” we say,
“I had pride in you; I enlarged myself through you, and now you
make me little.” When the community cries shame, it uses a force
that redresses wrong by the need of the one addressed to
vindicate himself. When a man feels shame he feels small,
inferior in his own eyes and in the eyes of others. He feels
impelled, if he is generous, to make amends or to do penance, and
thus he recovers his self-esteem. Unfortunately, shame arises
more frequently and often more violently from a violation of
custom and manner than from a violation of ethics or morals. Thus
we are more ashamed of the so-called “bad break” than of our
failures to be kind. Sometimes our fellow feeling is so strong
that we avoid seeing any one who is humiliated or embarrassed,
because sympathy spreads his feeling to us. Gentle people are
those who dislike to shame any one else, and often one of this
type will endure being wronged rather than reprimand or cause
humiliation and shame. Let something be said to shame any member
of a company and a feeling of shame spreads through the group,
except in the case of those who are very hostile.
Disgust, too, is extremely contagious, especially its
manifestations. One of the most crude of all manifestations, to
spit upon some one, is a symbol taken from disgust, though it has
come to mean contempt, which is a mixture of hatred and disgust.
To raise the tastes and not raise the acquisitions is a sure way
to bring about chronic disgust, which is really an angry
dissatisfaction mixed with disgust. This type of reaction is very
common as a factor in neurasthenia. In fact, my motto is “search
for the disgust” in all cases of neurasthenia and “search for it
in the intimate often secret desires and relationships. Seek for
it in the husband-wife relationship, especially from the
standpoint of the wife.” Women, we say, are more refined in their
feelings than men, which is another way of saying they are more
easily disgusted and therefore more easily injured. For disgust
is an injury, when chronic or too easily elicited, and is then a
sign and symbol of weakness.
Thus disgust is a great reenforcer of social taboo and custom, as
well as morality. Just as it fails to keep us from eating the
wrong kind of foods, so it may fail to keep us from the wrong
conduct. Like every emotion it is only in part adapted to our
lives, and in those people where it becomes a prominent emotion
it is a great mischief worker, subordinating life to finickiness
and hindering the growth of generous feeling.
9. We come to two opposite emotions, very readily considered
together. One of the linkings of opposites is in the connection
of Joy and Sorrow. Whether these are primary emotions or
outgrowths of Pleasure and Pain I leave to others. For Shand the
fact that Joy tends to prolong a situation in which it occurs
raises it into an active emotion.
Joy is perhaps the most energizing of the emotions for it tends
to express itself in shouts, smiles and laughter, dancing and
leaping. Sorrow ordinarily is quite the reverse and expresses
itself by immobility, bowed head and hands that shut out from the
view the sights of the world. There is, however, a quiet joy
called relief, which is like sailing into a smooth, safe harbor
after a tempestuous voyage; and there is an agitated grief, with
lamentation, the wringing of hands and self-punishment of a
frantic kind. Joy and triumph are closely associated, sorrow and
defeat likewise. There are some whose rivalry-competitive
feelings are so widespread that they cannot rejoice even at the
triumph of a friend, and a little of that nature is in even the
noblest of us. There are others who find sorrow in defeat of an
enemy, so widespread is their sympathy. This is the generous
victor. For the most of us youth is the most joyous period
because youth finds in its pleasures a novelty and freshness that
tend to disappear with experience. For the same reason the sorrow
of youth, though evanescent, is unreasoning and intense.
Joy and sorrow are reactions and they are noble or the reverse,
according to the nature of the person. Joy may be noble,
sensuous, trivial or mean; many a “jolly” person is such because
he has no real sympathy. At the present time not one of us could
rejoice over anything could we SEE and sympathize deeply with the
misery of Europe and China,
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