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

physical courage but has not the hardihood of

soul to take on responsibility for choosing. Sometimes he gets

good ideas, but never dares to put them into execution and shifts

that to others.

 

He hates himself for this weakness in an essential phase of

personality but is gradually accepting himself as an inferior

person, despite intelligence, training and social connection.

 

Yet his sister is exactly the opposite type. She makes decisions

with great promptness, never hesitates, is “cocksure” and

aggressive. If M. is ambivalent, his sister B. M. is univalent.

Choice is an easy matter to her, though she is not impulsive. She

rapidly deliberates. She never has made any serious errors in

judgment, but if she makes a mistake she shrugs her shoulders and

says, “It’s all in the game.” Thus she is a leader in her set,

for if some difficulty is encountered, her mind is quickly at

work and prompt with a solution. If she is not brilliant, and she

is not, she collects the plans of her associates and chooses and

modifies until she is ready with her own plan. Her father sighs

as he watches her and regrets that she is not a man. It does not

occur to him or any of his family, including herself, that she

might do a man’s work in the business world.

 

In pathological cases the inability to choose becomes so marked

as to make it impossible for the patient to choose any line of

conduct. “To do or not to do” extends into every relationship and

every situation. The patient cannot choose as to his dress or his

meals; cannot decide whether to stay in or go out, finds it

difficult to choose to cross the street or to open a door; is

thrown into a pendulum of yea and nay about speaking, etc. This

psychasthenic state, the folie du doute of the French, is

accompanied by fear, restlessness and an oppressive feeling of

unreality. The records of every neurologist contain many such

cases, most of whom recover, but a few go on to severe incurable

mental disease.

 

I pass on, without regard for logic or completeness, to a

personality type that we may call the anhedonic or simpler a

restless, not easily satisfied, easily disgusted group. Some of

these are cyclothymic, overemotional, often monothymic but I am

discussing them from the standpoint of their satisfaction with

life and its experiences. The ordinary label of “finicky” well

expresses the type, but of course it neglects the basic

psychology. This I have discussed elsewhere in this book and will

here describe two cases, one a congenital type and the other

acquired.

 

T. was born dissatisfied, so his mother avers. As a baby he was

“a difficult feeding case” because the very slightest cause, the

least change in the milk, upset him, a fact attested to by

vigorous crying. Babies have a variability in desire and

satisfaction quite as much as their elders.

 

Apparently T. thrived, despite his start, for as a child he was

sturdy looking. Nevertheless, in toys, games, treats, etc., he

was hard to please and easy to displease. He turned up his nose

if a toy were not perfection, and he had to have his food

prepared according to specification or his appetite vanished.

Moreover, he had a very limited range of things he liked, and as

time went on he extended that list but little. He was very choice

in his clothes—not at all a regular boy—and quite disgusted

with dirt and disorder. “A little old maid” somebody called him,

having in mind of course the traditional maiden lady.

 

As T. grew his capacity for pleasure-feeling did not increase. On

the contrary his attention to the details necessary for his

pleasure made of him one of those finicky connoisseurs who,

though never really pleased with anything, get a sort of pleasure

in pointing out the crudity of other people’s tastes and

pleasures. This attitude of superiority is the one compensation

the finicky have, and since they are often fluent of speech and

tend to write and lecture, they impose their notions of good and

bad upon others, who seek to escape being “common.” In T.‘s case

his attitude toward food, clothes, companions, sports and work

created a tense disharmony in his family, and one of his brothers

labeled him “The Kill-joy.” Secretly envious of other people’s

simple enjoyment, T. made strenuous efforts at times to overcome

his repugnances and to enlarge the scope of his pleasures, but

because this forfeited for him the superiority he had reached as

a very “refined” person, he never persisted in this process.

 

When he was twenty he found himself the theater of many

conflicts. He was weary of life, yet lusted for experiences that

his hyperestheticism would not permit him to take. Sex seemed too

crude, and the girls of his age were “silly.” Yet their lure and

his own internal tensions dragged him to one place after another,

hoping that he would find the perfect woman, able to understand

him. At last he did find her, so he thought, in the person of a

young woman of twenty-five, a consummate mistress of the arts of

femininity. She sized him up at once, played on his vanity,

extolled his fine tastes and never exposed a single crudity of

her own, until she brought him to the point where his passion for

her, his conviction that he had found “the perfect woman,” led

him to propose marriage. Then came the blow: she laughed at him,

called him a silly boy, gave him a lecture as to what constituted

a fine man, extolling crudity, vigor and virility as the prime

virtues.

 

His world was shattered, and its shadowy pleasures gone. At first

his parents were inclined to believe that this was a good lesson,

that T. would learn from this adventure and become a more hardy

young man. Instead he became sleepless, restless and without

desire for food or drink; he shunned men and women alike; he

stared hollow-eyed at a world full of noise and motion but

without meaning or joy. Deep was this anhedonia, and all

exhortations to “brace up and be a man” failed. Diversion, travel

and all the usual medical consultations and attentions did no

good.

 

One day he announced to his family that he was all right, that

soon he would be well. He seemed cheerful, talked with some

animation and dressed himself with unusual care. His parents

rejoiced, but one of his brothers did not like what he called a

“gleam” in T.‘s eyes. So he followed him, in a skillful manner.

T. walked around for a while, then found his way to a bridge

crossing a swift deep river. He took off his coat, but before he

could mount the rail his watchful brother was upon him. He made

no struggle and consented to come back home. In his coat was a

letter stating that he saw no use in living, that he was not

taking his life because of disappointment in love but because he

felt that he never could enjoy what others found pleasurable, and

that he was an anomaly, a curse to himself and others.

 

He was sent away to a sanatorium but left it and came home. He

began to eat and drink again, found he could sleep at night (the

sleepless night had filled him with despair) and soon swung back

into his “normal” state. He passes throughout life a spectator of

the joys of others, wondering why his grip on content and desire

is so slender, but also he thinks himself of a finer clay than

his fellows.

 

As a complement to this case let me cite that of the ex-soldier

S. He reached the age of twenty-two with a very creditable

history. Born of middle-class parents he went through high school

and ranked in the upper third of his class for scholarship. His

physique was good; he was a joyous, popular young fellow; and

wherever he went was pointed out as the clean young American so

representative of our country. That means he worked hard as

assistant executive in a production plant, was ambitious to get

ahead, took special courses to fit himself, read a good deal

about “success” and how to reach it, dressed well, liked his

fellow men and more than liked women, enjoyed sports, a good

time, the theaters, slept well, ate well and surged with the

passions and longings of his youth. Had any one said to him,

“What is there to live for?” he would have had no answer ready

merely because it would have never occurred to him that any one

could really ask so foolish a question.

 

Came the war. Full of the ardor of patriotism and the longing for

the great experience, he enlisted. He took the “hardships” of

camp life, the long hikes, the daily drills, the food dished out

in tins, as a lark, and his hearty fellowship identified him with

the army, with its profanity, its rough friendliness, its

grumbling but quick obedience and its intense purpose to “show

‘em what the American can do.” He went overseas and learned that

French patriotism, like the American brand, did not prevent

profiteering, and that enlistment in a common cause does not

allay or abate racial prejudices and antagonisms. This, however,

did not prey on his mind, for he took his Americanism as superior

without argument and was not especially disappointed because of

French customs and morals. He took part in several battles, made

night attacks, bayonetted his first man with a horror that

however disappeared under the glory of victory.

 

One day as he and a few comrades were in a front line trench,

“Jerry” placed a high explosive “plump in the middle of it.” When

S. recovered consciousness, he found himself half covered with

dirt and debris of all kinds, and when he crawled out and brushed

himself off, he saw that of all his comrades he alone survived,

and that they were mangled and mutilated in a most gruesome way.

“Pieces of my friends everywhere,” is his terse account. He lay

in the trench, not daring to move for hours, the bitterest

thoughts assailing him,—anger, hatred and disgust for war, the

Germans, his own countrymen; and he even cursed God. When he did

this he shuddered at his blasphemy, became remorseful and prayed

for forgiveness. A little later he crawled out of the trench and

back to where he was picked up by the medical corps and taken to

a hospital. He was examined, nothing wrong was found and he was

sent back to duty.

 

From that episode dates as typical an anhedonia as I have ever

seen. Gradually he became sleepless and woke each day more tired

than he went to bed. The food displeased him, and he grumbled

over what were formerly trifles. He wearied easily, and nothing

seemed to move him to enthusiasm or desire. He gave up friendship

after friendship, because the friends annoyed him by their noise

and boisterousness. He dreaded the roar of the guns and the

shriek of shells with what amounted to physical agony. He brooded

alone, and though not melancholy in the positive insane sense,

was melancholy in the disappearance of desire, joy, energy,

interest and enthusiasm.

 

Fortunately the armistice came at this time. S. was examined and

discharged as well because he made no complaints, for he was

anxious to get home. This was his one great desire. At home, with

a nice bed to sleep in, good food to eat and the pleasant faces

of his own people, his “nerves” would yield, he had no doubt. But

he was mistaken; this was not the case. He became no better, and

though he tried his old “job,” he found that he could not find

the energy, enthusiasm or