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

men in his class, and

they received the honors. L. was deeply offended at this and

claimed to his own friends that the professors were down on him,

especially a certain professor of medicine, who, so L. intimated,

was afraid that L.‘s theories would displace his own and so was

interested to keep him down. This feeling was intensified when he

came up for the examinations to a certain famous hospital and was

turned down. The real reason for this failure was his

unpopularity with his fellow students, for they let it be known

to the examiners that L. would undoubtedly be hard to get along

with, and it was part of the policy of the hospital to consider

the personality of an applicant as well as his ability.

 

L. obtained a hospital place in a small city and did very good

work, and though his peculiarities were noticed they excited only

a hidden current of amused criticism, while his abilities aroused

a good deal of praise. Stimulated by this, he started practice in

the same city as a surgeon and quickly rose to the leading

position. His indefatigable industry, his absolute self-confidence and his skill gave him prestige almost at once. His

conceit rose to the highest degree, and his mannerisms commenced

to become offensive to others. He came into collision with the

local medical society because he openly criticized the older men

in practice as “ignoramuses, asses, charlatans, etc.,” and indeed

was sued by one of them in the courts. The suit was won by the

plaintiff, the award was five thousand dollars and L. entered an

appeal.

 

From this on his career turned. In order to contest the case, and

because he began to believe that the courts and lawyers were in

league against him, he studied law and was admitted to the bar.

He had meanwhile married a rich woman who was wholly taken in by

his keen logical exposition of his “wrongs,” his imposing manner

of speech and action; and perhaps she really fell in love with

the able, aggressive and handsome man. She financed his law

school studies, for it was necessary for him to give up most of

his practice meanwhile.

 

As soon as he could appear before the Bar he did so in his own

behalf, for this case had now reached the proportions where it

had spread out into half a dozen cases. He refused to pay his

lawyers, and they sued. One of them dropped the statement that L.

was “crazy,” and he brought a suit against the lawyer. Moreover,

he began to believe, because of the adverse judgments, that the

courts were against him, and he wrote article after article in

the radical journals on the corruptness of the courts and entered

a strenuous campaign to provide for the public election and

recall of judges.

 

These activities brought him in close relations with a group of

unbalanced people operating under the high-sounding name League

of Freedom. These people, led by a man, J., eagerly welcomed L.,

largely because his wife was still financing his ventures. Here

comes a curious fact, and one prominent in the history of man,

for this group, led by two unbalanced men, actually engineered a

real reform, for they brought about a codification of the laws of

their State, a simple codification that made it possible to know

what the laws on any matter really are. This may be stated: the

average balanced person is apt to weigh consequences to himself,

but the paranoid does not; and so, when accident or

circumstances[1] enlist him in a good cause, he is a fighter

without fear and is enormously valuable.

 

[1] See Lombroso’s “Man of Genius” for many such cases.

 

This success brought L.‘s paranoia to the pinnacle of unreason.

He attacked the courts boldly, openly and publicly accused the

judges of corruption, said they were in conspiracy with the Bar

and the medical societies to do him up, added to this list of his

enemies the Irish and the Catholic Church, because the

prosecuting attorney in one county and the judge in that court

were Irish and Catholic, and then turned against his wife because

she now began to doubt his sanity. He brought suits in every

superior court in the State, and at the time he was committed to

an Insane Hospital he had forty trials on, had innumerable

manuscripts of his contemplated reforms, in which were included

the doing away with Insane Hospitals, the examination of all

persons in the State for venereal disease and their cure by a new

remedy of his own, the reform of the judiciary, etc., etc. He

accused his wife of infidelity, felt that he was being followed

by spies and police, claimed that dictagraphs were installed

everywhere to spy on him and had a classical delusional state. He

was committed, but later he escaped from the hospital and is now

at large. The State officials are making no effort to find him,

mainly because they are glad to get rid of him.

 

While the cases like L. are not common, the “mildly” paranoid

personality is common. Everywhere one finds the man or woman

whose abilities are not recognized, who is discriminated against,

who finds an enemy in every one who does not kotow and who

interprets as hostile every action not directly conciliating or

friendly. In every group of people there is one whose paranoid

temperament must be reckoned with, who is distrustful, conceited

and disruptive. Often they are high-minded, perhaps devoted to an

ideal, and if they convince others of their wrongs they increase

the social disharmonies by creating new social wars, large or

small according to their influence, intelligence and other

circumstances.

 

The type of the trusting need not be here illustrated by any case

history. Dickens has given us an immortal figure in the genial,

generous and impulsive Mr. Pickwick, and Cervantes satirized

knighthood by depicting the trusting, credulous Don Quixote. We

laugh at these figures, but we love them; they preserve for us

the sweetness of childhood and hurt only themselves and their

own. Trust in one’s fellows is not common, because the world is

organized on egoism more than on fellowship. Where fellowship

becomes a code, as in the relations of men associated together

for some great purpose, then a noble trust appears.

 

So I pass over those whose mood runs all one way the hopeful, the

despondent, the pessimist and the optimist—to other types. We

shall then consider the two great directions of interest,

introspection and extrospection, and those whose lives are

characterized by one or the other direction.

 

1. The introspective personality is no more of a unit than any

other type. Intelligence, energy and a host of other matters play

their part in the sum total of the character here as elsewhere.

 

H. I. is what might be called the intellectual introspective

personality. From the very earliest days he became interested in

himself as a thinker. “How do my words mean anything?” he asked

of his perplexed father at the investigative age of five. “Where

do my thoughts go to when I do not think them?” was the problem

he floored a learned uncle with a year later. This type of

curiosity is not uncommon in children; in fact, it is the

conventionality and laziness of the elders that stops children in

their study of the fundamentals. H. was not stopped, for the zeal

of his interest was heightened as time went on.

 

He played with other boys but early found their conclusions and

discussions primitive. He became an ardent bookworm, reading

incessantly or rather at such times when his parents permitted,

for they were simple folk who were rather alarmed at their boy’s

interests and zeal. No noticeable difference from other boys was

noted aside from precocity in study, yet even at the age of ten

life was running in two great currents for this boy. The one

current was the outer world with its ever varied happenings, the

other was the inner world of thoughts and moods, deeply,

fascinatingly interesting. It seemed to H. I. that there were

“two I’s, one of which sat just over my head and looking down on

the other I, watching its strivings, its emotions, its thoughts

with a detached and yet palpitating interest. When I watched the

other boys at play I wondered whether they too had this dual

existence, whether they chewed the cud of life over and over

again as I did.”

 

Came puberty with the great sex passions. The vibrating life

within him suddenly became tinged with new interests. One day at

a party a vixen of a girl threw herself boldly in his arms and

tried to push him into a chair. The bodily contact and the swift

bodily reaction threw him into a panic, for the passion that was

aroused was so powerful that he seemed to himself stripped of all

thought and reflection and impelled to actions against which he

rebelled. For he was fully acquainted, at second hand, with sex;

he knew boys and girls who had made excursions into its most

intimate practices and despised them.

 

This episode gave his introspective trends a new direction. From

now on sex was the theme his fancy embroidered. Curiously enough,

he became more austere than ever, shunned girls and especially

the heroine of his adventure, and even avoided the company of

boys who spoke habitually and “vulgarly” of sex. His mind built

up sex phantasies, sex adventures in which he was the hero and in

which girls he knew and those he imagined were the heroines, but

at the same time, standing aloof as it were, another part of him

seemed to watch his own reactions until “I nearly went crazy.” He

became obsessed by a feeling of unreality and adopted a Berkleyan

philosophy of idealism: nothing seemed to exist except his own

consciousness, and that seemed of doubtful existence. He took

long walks by himself, read philosophy and science with avidity,

yet turned by preference to these dreams of sex adventure,

palpitating, alluring, and yet so unreal to his critical self. To

others he was merely a bit moody and detached, though friendly

and kind.

 

He went to college, and his interest in sex became secondary

almost immediately. His student days were passed at Harvard at a

time when Royce, Palmer, Santayanna, and James ruled in its

philosophy, and H. I. became fascinated by these men and their

subject. His mind was again drawn into introspection, but in an

organized manner. He asked himself continually, “What are the

purposes of life; why do we love; does man will or is he an

automaton who watches the hands go around and thinks he moves

them?” Where before his feeling of unreality was largely

emotional, now it received an intellectual sanction, and he swung

from hither to yon in a never-ending cycle. He became wearied

beyond measure by his thoughts; he envied the beasts of the

field, the laborer in the ditch and all to whom life and living

were realities not in the least to be examined and questioned.

Deliberately he decided to shift his interests,—to buy an

automobile and learn about it; to play cards; to have his love

affair; to taste emotion and pleasure and to seek no intellectual

sanction for them.

 

He disappeared from college for a year and came back tanned,

ruddy and at rest. He had found a capacity for interest and

emotion outside of himself. He had experienced phases of life

about which he would not talk at first, but in later years he

admitted that he had been a “man of the world.” He regretted much

that had happened, but on the whole he rejoiced in an equanimity,

in a capacity for objective interest, that he had never had

before. His introspective trend