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

class="calibre1">phrase these have a “wishbone in the place of a backbone.” They

are the daydreamers, the inveterate readers of novels, who carry

into adult life what is relatively normal in the child. The

introspective are this latter type; rarely indeed do the

objective personalities spend much time in wishing. Undoubtedly

it is from the introspective that the wish as a symbol and worker

of power gained its influence and meaning. This transformation of

the wish to a power is found in all primitive thought, in the

power of the blessing and the curse, in the delusions of certain

of the insane who build up the belief in their greatness out of

the wish to be great; and in our days New Thought and kindred

beliefs are modernized forms of this ancient fallacy.

 

It is a comforting thought to those who seek an optimistic point

of view that most men wish to do right. Very few, indeed,

deliberately wish to do wrong. But the difficulty lies in this,

that this wish to do right camouflages all their wishes, no

matter what their essential character. Thus the contestants on

either side of any controversy color as right their opposing

wishes, and cruelties even if they burn people at the stake for

heresy, kill and ruin, degrade and cheat, lie and steal. Thus has

arisen the dictum, “The end justifies the means.” The good

desired hallows the methods used, and all kinds of evil have

resulted. Practical wisdom believes that up to a certain point

you must seek your purpose with all the methods at hand. But the

temptation to go farther always operates; a man starts to do

something a little underhanded in behalf of his noble wish and

finds himself committed to conduct unqualifiedly evil.

 

5. There are certain other emotional states associated with

energy and the energy feeling of great interest. What we call

eagerness, enthusiasm, passion, refers to the intensity of an

instinct, wish, desire or purpose. In childhood this energy is

quite striking; it is one of the great charms of childhood and is

a trait all adults envy. For it is the disappearance of passion,

eagerness and enthusiasm that is the tragedy of old age and which

really constitutes getting old. Youth anticipates with eagerness

and relishes with keen satisfaction. The enthusiasm of typical

youth is easily aroused and sweeps it on to action, a feature

called impulsiveness. Sympathy, pity, hope, sex feeling—all the

self-feelings and all the other feelings—are at once more lively

and more demonstrative in youth, and thus it is that in youth the

reform spirit is at its height and recedes as time goes on. What

we call “experience” chills enthusiasm and passion, but though

hope deferred and a realization of the complexity of human

affairs has a moderating, inhibiting result, there is as much or

more importance to be attached to bodily changes. If you could

attach to the old man’s experience and knowledge the body of

youth, with its fresher arteries, more resilient muscles and

joints, its exuberant glands and fresh bodily juices,—desire,

passion, enthusiasm would return. In the chemistry of life,

passion and enthusiasm arise; sickness, fatigue, experience and

time are their antagonists.

 

This is not to deny that these energy manifestations can be

aroused from the outside. That is the purpose of teaching and

preaching; the purpose of writer and orator. There is a social

spread of enthusiasm that is the most marked feature of crowds

and assemblies, and this eagerness makes a unit of thousands of

diverse personalities. Further, the problem of awakening

enthusiasm and desire is the therapeutic problem of the physician

and especially in the condition described as anhedonia.

 

In anhedonia, as first described by Ribot, mentioned by James,

and which has recently been worked up by myself as a group of

symptoms in mental and nervous disease, as well as in life in

general, there is a characteristic lack of enthusiasm in

anticipation and realization, a lack of appetite and desire, a

lack of satisfaction. Nothing appeals, and the values drop out of

existence. The victims of anhedonia at first pass from one

“pleasure” to another, hoping each will please and satisfy, but

it does not. Food, drink, work, play, sex, music, art,—all have

lost their savor. Restless, introspective, with a feeling of

unreality gripping at his heart, the patient finds himself

confronting a world that has lost meaning because it has lost

enthusiasm in desire and satisfaction.

 

How does this unhappy state arise? In the first place, from the

very start of life people differ in the quality of eagerness.

There is a wide variability in these qualities. Of two infants

one will call lustily for whatever he wants, show great glee in

anticipating, great eagerness in seeking, and a high degree of

satisfaction when his desire is gratified. And another will be

lackadaisical in his appetite, whimsical, “hard to please” and

much more difficult to keep pleased. Fatigue will strip the

second child of the capacity to eat and sleep, to say nothing of

his desires for social pleasures, whereas it will only dampen the

zeal and eagerness of the first child. There is a hearty simple

type of person who is naively eager and enthusiastic, full of

desire, passion and enthusiasm, who finds joy and satisfaction in

simple things, whose purposes do not grow stale or monotonous;

there is a finicky type, easily displeased and dissatisfied,

laying weight on trifles, easily made anhedonic, victims of any

reduction in their own energy (which is on the whole low) or of

any disagreeable event. True, these sensitive folk are creators

of beauty and the esthetic, but also they are the victims of the

malady we are here discussing.

 

Aside from this temperament, training plays its part. I think it

a crime against childhood to make its joys complex or

sophisticated. Too much adult company and adult amusements are

destructive of desire and satisfaction to the child. A boy or

girl whose wishes are at once gratified gets none of the pleasure

of effort and misses one of the essential lessons of life.—that

pleasure and satisfaction must come from the chase and not from

the quarry, from the struggle and effort as well as from the

goal. Montaigne, that wise skeptic, lays much homely emphasis on

this, as indeed all wise men do. But too great a struggle, too

desperate an effort, exhausts, and as a runner lies panting and

motionless at the tape, so we all have seen men reach a desired

place after untold privation and sacrifice and who then found

that there seemed to be no energy, no zeal or desire, no

satisfaction left for them. The too eager and enthusiastic are

exposed, like all the overemotional, to great recessions, great

ebbs, in the volume of their feeling and feel for a time the

direst pain in all experience, the death in life of anhedonia.

 

After an illness, particularly influenza, when recovery has

seemingly taken place, there develops a lack of energy feeling

and the whole syndrome of anhedonia which lasts until the subtle

damage done by the disease passes off. Half or more of the

“nervousness” in the world is based on actual physical trouble,

and the rest relates to temperament.

 

When a great purpose or desire has been built up, has drained all

the enthusiasm of the individual and then suddenly becomes

blocked, as in a love affair, or when a business is threatened or

crashes or when beauty starts to leave,—then one sees the

syndrome of anhedonia in essential purity. A great fear, or an

obsessive moral struggle (as when one fights hopelessly against

temptation), has the same effect. The enthusiasm of purpose and

the eagerness of appetite go at once, in certain delicate people,

when pride is seriously injured or when a once established

superiority is crumbled. The humiliated man is anhedonic, even if

he is a philosopher.

 

The most striking cases are seen in men who have been swung from

humdrum existence to the exciting, disagreeable life of war and

then back to their former life. The former task cannot be taken

up or is carried on with great effort; the zest of things has

disappeared, and what was so longed for while in the service

seems flat and stale, especially if it is now realized that there

are far more interesting fields of effort. In a lesser degree,

the romances that girls feed on unfit them for sober realities,

and the expectation of marriage built up by romantic novel and

theater do far more harm than good. The triangle play or story is

less mischievous than the one which paints married life as an

amorous glow.

 

One could write a volume on eagerness, enthusiasm and passion,

satisfaction and dissatisfaction. Life, to be worth the living,

must have its enthusiasms, must swing constantly from desire to

satisfaction, or else seems void and painful. Great purposes are

the surest to maintain enthusiasm, little purposes become flat.

He who hitches his wagon to a star must risk indeed, but there is

a thrill to his life outweighing the joy of minor success.

 

To reenthuse the apathetic is an individual problem. When the

lowered pressure of the energy feeling is physical in origin,

then rest and exercise, massage hydrotherapy, medicines

(especially the bitter tonics), change of scene are valuable. And

even where the cause is not in illness, these procedures have

great value for in stimulating the organism the function of

enthusiasm is recharged. But one does not neglect the value of

new hopes, new interests, friendship, physical pleasure and above

all a new philosophy, a philosophy based on readjustment and the

nobility of struggle. Not all people can thus be reached, for in

some, perhaps many cases, the loss of these desires is the

beginning of mental disease, but patient effort and intelligent

sympathetic understanding still work their miracles.

 

CHAPTER XI. THE EVOLUTION OF CHARACTER WITH ESPECIAL REFERENCE TO

THE GROWTH OF PURPOSE AND PERSONALITY

 

There have been various philosophies dealing with the purposes of

man. Man seeks this or that—the eternal good, beauty, happiness,

pleasure, survival—but always he is represented as a seeker. A

very popular doctrine, Hedonism, now somewhat in disfavor,

represents him as seeking pleasurable, affective states. The

difficulty of understanding the essential nature of pleasure and

pain, the fact that what is pleasure to one man is pain to

another, rather discredited this as a psychological explanation.

I think we may phrase the situation fairly on an empirical basis

when we say that seeking arises in instinct but receives its

impulse to continuity by some agreeable affective state of

satisfaction. Man steers towards pleasure and satisfaction of

some type or other, but the force is the unbalance of an

instinct.

 

When we speak of man as a seeker, we are not separating him from

the rest of living things. All life seeks, and the more mobile a

living thing is the more it seeks. A sessile mussel chained to a

rock seeks little but the fundamentals of nutrition and

generation and these in a simple way. An animal that builds

habitations for its young, courts its mate, plays, teaches and

fights, may do nothing more than seek nutrition and generation,

but it seeks these through many intermediary “end” points,

through many impulses, and thus it has many types of

satisfaction. When a creature develops to the point that it

establishes all kinds of rules governing conduct, when it

establishes sanctions that are eternal and has purposes that have

a terminus in a hereafter which is out of the span of life of the

planner, it becomes quite difficult to say just what it is man

seeks. In fact, every man seeks many things, many satisfactions,

and whatever it may be that Man in the abstract seeks, individual

men differ very decidedly not only as to what they seek but as to