The Foundations of Personality - Abraham Myerson (best large ereader .txt) 📗
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persist and are easily dissipated by encouragement or good
fortune. She is readily angered and “raises a row” with great
facility and without restraint. For this reason her relatives and
friends become panic-stricken when she becomes angry, for they
know that she does not hesitate to make an embarrassing scene. In
the efforts to conciliate her they are apt to give her her own
way, as a result of which she is the proverbial spoiled child,
capitalizing her weakness.
Our Jewess uses her emotions for effect, which means that she has
become theatrical. Though there is reality in her emotional
display, time and the advantages she has gained have brought
enough finish and restraint to her manifestations to gain the
designation artistic. True, it is a crude artistry, for
intelligence does not sufficiently guide it, and her art is used
sometimes indiscriminately and inopportunely. As she grows older
the value of her tears is less, and she is becoming that prime
nuisance, the elderly scold.
Among the emotional types well recognized by the neurologist is
that known as the cyclothymic. In the individuals of this group
there is a periodicity to mood (rather than to emotions). There
is a definitely pathological trend to the cyclothymic, and in its
most marked form one sees the recurring depressions and
excitement of Manic Depressive Insanity.
Aside from these pathological forms, there are persons who show
curious periodic changes in mood. They become depressed for no
especial reason, are “blue” for day after day and then quickly
return to their normal. Sometimes these blue spells alternate
with periods of exaltation and happiness, but in my experience
this is far less common than periodic blue spells, a kind of
recurrent anhedonia.
L. D. is ordinarily what is known as a vivacious person. Bright,
talkative, keen in her discriminations, she has all her life been
at the mercy of strange alterations in mood, alterations which
come and go without what seems to others adequate reason.
As a child L. D. was sick a great deal. She showed an unusual
susceptibility to infection, and it was not until she was nine
years of age that she attended school regularly. Her illnesses
made it impossible to discipline her, and so she has always been
a bit “spoiled,” though her kind and generous nature makes her a
charming person. But more important than the fact that she could
not be disciplined is the lowering of energy that these
sicknesses produced, a lowering marked mainly by a liability to
fatigue and depression.
Let there come a sickness, and this woman’s stock of hopeful mood
goes and there results a loss of interest in life, a loss of zest
and joyousness.
A digression,—and a return to the theme of the first chapter of
this book. The dependence of the mental life on bodily structure,
equally true in the both sexes, is exquisitely demonstrated in
woman. In many women there occurs an extraordinary increase of
sex desire just before the menstrual period and in some to the
point where it causes great internal conflict. Others show
moderate depression and even confusion at this time, and to the
majority of women some mood and thought change is taken for
granted. At the menopause mental difficulties to the point of
insanity are witnessed, and in some cases the change is
permanent. Back of mood is the entire organic life of the
organism, and back of the nature of our thoughts and deeds is
mood.
A peculiarity of fatigue is remarkably well shown by this person.
When she is tired or convalescent a depressing thought sticks,
becomes an obsession, a fixed idea, to the plague of her life.
Thus when she was nursing her first baby the night feedings
exhausted her. One night, half asleep and half awake, with the
vigorous little animal pulling away at her breast, she watched
the pulsing fontanelle on the top of the baby’s head, and the
thought came to her how dreadfully easy it would be to injure the
brain beneath. Her heart pounced in fear, she almost fainted at
the thought, and yet it “stuck” and came back to her with each
random association. I need not detail how the idea recurred a
dozen times a day and brought the fear that she was going insane.
She stopped nursing the baby at night, got a good rest, and the
idea disappeared. She was “able to shake off” when rested that
which was a hideous obsession when fatigued.
Indeed, one might speak of persons of this type as hypothymic as
well as cyclothymic. The hypothymic are those whose stock of
courage and hope is easily exhausted, who become easily
discouraged. They are borrowers of energy and vigor, they need
sturdier folk around them; often they are said to be sensitive,
and while this is sometimes true, it is more often the case that
they are more affected. That is, two persons may notice the same
thing or suffer the same sickness, but the so-called sensitive
has a reserve of courage and energy that disappears, whereas the
other has enough left in stock so that he does not feel any
change.
The extraordinary complexity of human character is well
illustrated by C. D. She is hypothymic or cyclothymic to the
little affairs of life and to the minor illnesses. Yet when her
family fortunes were greatly imperilled by a financial crisis,
she stood up against the strain far better than did her husband,
a man sturdy and buoyant in most of the affairs of life. His ego
was more concerned with financial fortune than was hers, and
against this ill she was the philosopher and not he.
We may well contrast L. D. with her husband. He belongs to the
sturdy in emotions and morals,—the stable. Dark days and bright
days, sickness and health, fatigue and rest seem to impair his
courage, hope and general cheerfulness of mood but little. He has
a high organic balance and a well-built-up philosophy. I started
to say of him that he is an optimist, but this is not true. He is
cheerful, but he does not sing, “Tra la la, all the things that
are, are good.” He says, “There are bad things, but I must carry
on and fight the good fight.” His is a philosophy of courage and
endurance, but not of optimistic twaddle. He is too wide-brained
to speak of life as “all good” when he knows of inherited
disease, cruelty, preventable poverty, gross neglect and
unmerited misfortune. Yet he lends hope and comfort to the
afflicted, and he has an unvarying comfort for his cyclothymic
mate.
He has built up his ego around a business, one in which there was
sunk not only his own fortune but that of a host of friends. When
this was so threatened as to seem inevitably lost, his ego was
deeply wounded, he lost courage and hope and then needed the
strength of his wife. This she gave, and when the tide of affairs
turned, his own courage was ready and unimpaired. We are like
trees,—the hard, strong, knotty parts of our fiber are
distributed in irregular fashion, and he who seems strongest has
a weak place somewhere. Attack that, and his resistance, courage
and hope disappear.
While there are the types of mood and emotional make-up, there
are curious monothymic types, people who habitually tend to react
with one emotion or mood.
The fear type. It must again be emphasized that we cannot
separate emotion, mood, instinct, intelligence in our analysis.
And so we shall speak of individuals of this or that type when
what we mean is that they reacted habitually and remarkably in
one direction. Thus with the man F., who has quick imagination,
and whose ability to forecast is inextricably mixed with a
liability to fear. It is true that some do not fear because they
do not foresee, and that placidity and calmness are less often
due to courage than to lack of imagination.
F. feared animals excessively as a child and injury to himself as
a boy, so that he played few rough games. To a large extent his
parents fostered this fear in him by carefully guarding and
watching him, by putting him through that neurasthenic regimen so
brilliantly described by Arthur Guiterman in his story of the
aseptic pup. Yet he had a brother as carefully brought up as
himself who became a rough-and-tumble lad, with as little
likelihood to fear as any boy. So that we may only assume that
F.‘s training fostered fear in him; it did not cause it.
At the age of thirteen the fear of death entered F.‘s life, the
occasion being the death of an uncle. The mourning, the quick
fleeting sight of the dead man in the black box, the interment of
the once vigorous, joyous man in the earth struck terror into the
heart of the boy. From that time much of his life was controlled
by his struggles with the fear of death, and his history is his
reaction to that fear. At fourteen he astonished his
free-thinking family by becoming a devout Christian, by praying,
attending church regularly and by becoming so moral in his
conduct as to warrant the belief that there was something wrong
with him. Indeed, had a psychiatrist examined him at this time,
there is no doubt he would have diagnosed his condition as a
beginning Dementia Precox. But he was not; he simply was
compensating for his fear of death.
At sixteen he entered an academy where he was forced to go into
athletics. The fear of injury and death plagued him so that he
broke down, but this breakdown did not last long, and he
reentered athletics and did fairly well. Indeed, in order to
break himself of fear, he became outwardly a rather daring
gymnast, hoping that what he had so often read of the sickly and
puny becoming strong and vigorous through training would be true
of him. As soon as he reached a stage in school where compulsory
training was dropped, he discontinued athletics, with much inward
relief. In fact, pride, fear of being considered a coward, was
mainly responsible for his efforts in this direction.
In college he fell under the influence of Omar Khayam and the
epicurean reaction to death. He feverishly entered pleasure and
swung easily from religious fervor to a complete agnosticism. He
became a first-nighter, knew all the chorus girls it was
possible for him to become acquainted with, learned to drink but
never learned to enjoy it. In fact, after each sensual indulgence
his reaction against himself led him to a despair which might
have terminated in suicide were it not that he feared death more
than the reproaches of his conscience. Then he fell under the
influence of a group of men and women in his college town,
philanthropists and social reformers, whose enthusiasm and energy
seemed to him miraculous, and as he grew to know them he realized
with a something like ecstasy and yet governed by intelligence,
that in such work was a compensation for death that might satisfy
both his emotions and his intelligence. Again to the surprise of
his parents, and in the face of their prediction that he would
soon “tire” of this fad, he entered into their activities and
proved himself a devoted worker. Too devoted, for now and then he
needs medical attention, and it was in one of these
“neurasthenic” periods that I met him. I learned that the spur
that kept him going, that made him energetic, was the fear that
death would overtake him before he achieved anything worth while;
that he hated to die and was appalled by the thought of death,
but that he could forget all this in work of
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