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

usually leads to selfishness and petty vanity. As a

subsidiary aim it balances character, but unfortunately, as we

have before seen, it is inculcated as a primary aim early in the

life of a girl. True, men seek to be beautiful in a masculine

way, but the goal of masculine beauty is strength, which is

directly serviceable. This is not to say that there are no men

who are vain of their good looks, for there are many. But only

occasionally does one find a man who organizes his life efforts

to be beautiful, who establishes criteria of success or failure

on complexion, hair, features of face and lines of figure. So

long, therefore, as woman can obtain power through beauty and sex

appeal, so long may we expect a trivial trend in her character.

 

We have lost track of our hypothetical child in the history of

his character development, lost sight of him as he struggles in a

morass of desires and purposes of power, fellowship and

superiority. His situations become still more complex as we watch

him seek to unify his life around permanent purposes, against a

pestering, surging, recurring, temporary desire. He desires, let

us say, to conform to the restriction in sex, but as he

approaches adolescence, within and without stimuli of breathless

ardor assail him. He must inhibit them if he proposes to be

chaste, and his continent road is beset with never-resting

temptations. He calls himself a fool at times for resisting, and

his mind pictures the delights he misses—if not from direct

experience, from information he gathers in books and from those

who know—and if he yields, then self-reproach embitters him. But

correctly to portray the situation is to drop our hypothetical

adolescent, for here is where individual reaction and individual

situations are too varied to be met with in one case. Some do not

inhibit their sex desires at all; others resist now and then,

others yield occasionally; still others remain faithful to the

ideal. Some drop the conventional ideal and replace with

unconventional substitutes, some resist at great cost to

themselves, and others find no difficulty in resisting what is no

temptation at all to them. Passion, resistance, opportunity,

training and sublimation differ as remarkably as nuns differ from

prostitutes.

 

A similar situation is found in the work purposes. To work

steadily, with industry and unflagging effort, at something

perhaps not inherently attractive is not merely a measure of

energy,—it is a measure of inhibition and will. For there are so

many more immediate pleasures to be had, even if offering only

variety and relaxation. There is the country, there is the lake

for fishing; there is the dance hall where a pretty girl smiles

as your arm encircles her waist; there is the ball field where on

a fine day you may go and forget duty and strained effort in the

swirl of an enthusiasm that emanates from the thousands around

you as they applaud the splendid athletes; there is the good

fellowship and pleasure that beckon as you bend to a task. To

shut these out, to inhibit the temporary “good” for the permanent

good, is the measure of character.

 

These sex and work situations we must take up in detail in

separate chapters. What is important is that as life goes on,

necessity, the social organization and gradual concentration of

energy canalize the purposes, reduce the power of the irrelevant

and temporary desires. Habit and custom bring a person into

definite relationship with society; the man becomes husband,

father, worker in some definite field of industry; ambition

becomes narrowed down to the possibilities or is entirely

discarded as hopeless. The character becomes a collection of

habits, with some controlling purpose and some characteristic

relaxations. This at least is true of the majority of men. Here

and there are those who have not been able to form a unification

even along such simple lines; they are without steady habits,

derelicts morally, financially and socially, or if with means

independent of personal effort they are wastrels and idlers. And

again there are the doers and thinkers of the world, the

fortunate, whose lives are associated with successful purposes,

whose ambitions grow and grow until they reach the power of which

they dreamed. There are the reformers living in a fever heat of

purpose, disdaining rest and relaxation, dangerously near

fanaticism and not far from mental unbalance, but achieving

through that unbalance things the balanced never have the will to

attempt. He who works merely to get rich or powerful or to

provide food for his family cannot understand the zealots who see

the world as a place where SOMETHING MUST happen,—where slavery

MUST be abolished, women MUST have votes, children MUST go to

school until sixteen, prostitution MUST disappear, alcohol MUST

be prohibited, etc. Such people miss the pretty, pleasant

relaxing joys of life, but they gain in intensity of life what

they lose in diffuseness.

 

This war of the permanent unified purposes versus the temporary

scattering desires—the power of inhibition —is involved in the

health and vigor of the person. Disease, fatigue and often enough

old age show themselves in lowered purpose, in the failure of the

will (in the sense of the energy of purpose), in a scattering of

activity. Indeed, in the senile states one too often sees the

disappearance of moral control where one least expected it. And

one of the greatest tragedies of our times occurred when an

elderly statesman, on the brink of arterial disease of the brain,

lost the strength and firmness of purpose that hitherto had

characterized him. One of the worst features of the government of

nations is the predominance of old men in the governing bodies.

For not only are they apt to have over-intellectualized life,

not only have they become specialists in purpose and therefore

narrow, but the atrophy of the passions and desires of youth and

middle life has rendered them unfit to legislate for the bulk of

the race, who are the young and middle-aged. It is no true

democracy where old age governs the rest of the periods of life.

 

Unification of purpose often goes too far. Men lose sight of the

duties they owe to wife and family in their pursuit of wealth or

fame; they forget that relaxation and pleasure-seeking are normal

and legitimate aims. They deify a purpose; they attach it to

themselves so that it becomes more essentially themselves than

their religion or their family. They speak of their work as if

every letter were capitalized and lose sympathy and interest in

the rest of the wide striving world. Men grow hard, even if

philanthropists, in too excessive a devotion to a purpose, and

soon it is their master, and they are its slaves. Happy is he who

can follow his purpose efficiently and earnestly, but who can

find interest in many things, pleasure in the wide range of joys

the world offers and a youthful curiosity and zest in the new.

 

Every human being, no matter how civilized and unified, how

modern and social in his conduct, has within him a core of

uncivilized, disintegrating, ancient and egoistic desires and

purposes. “I feel two natures struggling within me” is the

epitome of every man’s life. This is what has been called

conflict by the psychoanalysts, and my own disagreement with them

is that I believe it to be distinctly conscious in the main. A

man knows that the pretty young girls he meets tempt him from his

allegiance to his wife and his desires to be good; a woman knows

that the prosaic husband no longer pleases, and why he does not

please,—only if you ask either of them bluntly and directly they

will deny their difficulties. The organic activities of the body,

basic in desire of all kinds, are crude and give rise to crude

forbidden wishes, but the struggle that goes on is repressed,

rebelled against and gives rise to trains of secondary

symptoms,—fatigue, headache, indigestion, weariness of life and

many other complaints. It is perfectly proper to complain of

headache, but it is a humiliation to say that you have chosen

wrongly in marriage, or that you are essentially polygamous, or

that an eight-hour day of work at clerking or bookkeeping

disgusts and bores you. People complain of that which is proper

and allows them to maintain self-respect, but they hide that

which may lower them in the eyes of others. Gain their

confidence, show that you see deeper than their words and you get

revelations that need no psychoanalytic technique to elicit and

which are distinctly conscious.

 

This brings me to the point that the constant inhibition,

blocking and balking of desires and wishes, though in part

socially necessary and ethically justifiable, is decidedly

wearisome, at times to all, and to many at all times. It seems so

easy and pleasant to relax in purposes, in morals, in thought, to

be a vagrant spirit seeking nothing but the pleasures right at

hand; to be like a traditional bee flitting from the rose to rose

of desire. (Only the bee is a decidedly purposive creature, out

for business not pleasure.) “Why all this striving and

self-control?” cries the unorganized in all of us. “Why build up

when Death tears down?” cries the pessimist in our hearts. Great

epochs in history are marked by different answers to these

questions, and in our own civilization there has grown up a

belief that bodily pleasure in itself is wrong, that life is

vanity unless yoked to service and effort. The Puritan idea that

we best serve God in this way has been modified by a more

skeptical idea that we serve man by swinging our efforts away

from bodily pleasure and toward work, organized to some good end;

but essentially the idea of inhibition, control, as the highest

virtue, remains. Such an ideal gains force for a time, then grows

too wearisome, too extreme, and a generation grows up that throws

it off and seeks pleasure frankly; paints, powders, dances,

sings, develops the art of “living,” indulges the sense; becomes

loose in morals, and hyperesthetic and over-refined in tastes.

Then the ennui, boredom and disgust that always follow sensual

pleasures become diffuse; happiness cannot come through the

seeking of pleasure and excitement and anhedonia of the exhausted

type arises. Preachers, prophets, seers and poets vigorously

proclaim the futility of pleasure, and the happiness of service;

inhibition comes into its own again and a Puritan cycle

recommences. Stoic, epicurean; Roman republic, Roman empire;

Puritan England, Restoration; Victorian days, early twentieth

century; for to-day we are surging into an era of revolt against

form, custom, tradition; in a word against inhibition.

 

As with periods, so with people; self-indulgence, i. e.,

indulgence of the passing desires, follows the idealism of

adolescence. Youth sows its wild oats. Then the steadying

purposes appear partly because the pleasure of indulgence passes.

Marriage, responsibility, straining effort mark the passing of

ten or a dozen years; then in middle life, and often before,

things get flat and without savor, monotony creeps in and a

curiosity as to the possibilities of pleasure formerly

experienced is awakened. (I believe that most of the sexual

unfaithfulness in men and women over thirty springs not from

passion but from curiosity.)

 

There occurs a dangerous age in the late thirties and early

forties, one in which self-indulgence makes itself clamorous. The

monotony of labor, the fatigue of inhibition make themselves

felt, and at this time men (and women) need to add relaxation and

pleasure of a legitimate kind. Golf, the fishing trip, games of

all kinds; legitimate excitement which need not be inhibited is

necessary. This need of excitement without inhibition is behind

most of the gambling and card playing; it explains the

extraordinary attraction of the detective story and the thrilling

movies; it gives great social value to the prize fight and the