The Foundations of Personality by Abraham Myerson (color ebook reader .TXT) 📕
[1] It is to be remembered that phrenology had a good standing atone time, though it has since lapsed into quackdom. This is thehistory of many a "short cut" into knowledge. Thus the wisest menof past centuries believed in astrology. Paracelsus, who gave tothe world the use of Hg in therapeutics, relied in large part forhis diagnosis and cures upon alchemy and astrology.
Without meaning to pun, we may dismiss the claims of palmistryoffhand. Normally the lines of the hand do not change from birthto death, but character does change. The hand, its shape and itstexture are markedly influenced by illness,[1] toil
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association, nor the Freudian account of humor, etc. There are
plenty of books on the market written by Freud himself and his
followers. Frankly I advise the average person not to read them.
I am opposed to the Freudian account of life and character,
though recognizing that he has caused the psychologist to examine
life with more realism, to strip away pretense, to be familiar
with the crude and to examine conduct with the microscope.
I do not believe there is an ORGANIZED subconsciousness, having a
PERSONALITY. Most of the work which proves this has been done on
hysterics. Hysterics are usually proficient liars, are very
suggestible and quite apt to give the examiner what he looks for,
because they seek his friendly interest and eager study. Wherever
I have checked up the “subconscious” facts as revealed by the
patient as a result of his psychoanalysis or through hypnosis, I
have found but little truth. On the other hand, the Freudians
practically never check up the statements of their patients; if a
woman tells all sorts of tales of her husband’s attitude toward
her, or of the attitude of her parents, it is taken for granted
that she tells the truth. My belief is that had the statements of
Freud’s patients been carefully investigated he would probably
never have evolved his theories.
The Freudians have made no consecutive study of normal childhood,
though they lay great stress on this period of life and in fact
trace the symptoms of their patients back to “infantile trauma.”
Most of Freud’s ideas on sex development can be traced to, the
one four-and-a-half-years-old child he analyzed, who was as
representative of normal childhood as the little chess champion
of nine years now astounding the world is representative of the
chess ability of the average child. Moreover, the basis of the
technique is the free association, an association released from
inhibitions of all kinds. There isn’t any such thing, as
Professor Woodworth has pointed out. All associations are
conditioned by the physical condition of the patient, by his
mood, by the nature of the environment he finds himself in, by
the personality of the examiner and his powers of suggesting, his
purposes and (very important) by the patient’s purposes, which he
cannot bid “Disappear!” As for the results of treatment, every
neurologist meets patients again and again who have been
“psychoanalyzed” without results. Moreover, psychoneurotic
patients get well without treatment, as do all other classes of
the sick, and the Christian Scientist, the osteopath and the
chiropractic also have records of “cures.”
This is not the place to discuss in further detail the Freudian
ideas (the wish, the symbol, the jargon of transference, etc).
The leading follower of Freud, Jung, has already broken away from
the parent church, and there is an amusing cry of heresy raised.
Soon the eminent Austrian will have the pleasure of seeing a
half-dozen schools that have split off from his own,—followers
of Bleuler, Jung, Adler and others.
There IS a subconsciousness in that much of the nervous activity
of the organism has but little or no relation to consciousness.
There are mechanisms laid down by heredity and by the racial
structure that accomplish great functions without any but the
most indirect effect on consciousness and without any control by
the conscious personality. We are spurred on to sex life, to
marriage, to the care of our children by instinct; but the
instinct is not a personality any more than the automatic
heartbeat is. We repress a forbidden desire; if we are successful
and really overcome the desire by setting up new desires or in
some other way, the inhibited desire is not locked up in a
subterranean limbo. There is nothing pathological about
inhibition, for inhibition is as normal a part of character as
desire, and the social instinct which bids us inhibit is as
fundamental as the sex instinct. Most conflicts are on a
conscious plane, but most people will not admit to any one else
their deeply abhorrent desires. To all of us, or nearly all, come
desires and temptations that we would not acknowledge for the
world. If a wise examiner succeeds in getting us to admit them,
it is very agreeable to find a scapegoat in the form of the
subconsciousness. I have often said this to students: if all our
thoughts and conscious desires could be exposed, the most of us
would almost die of shame. True, we do not clearly understand
ourselves and our conflicts and explanation is often necessary,
but that is not equivalent to the subconsciousness; it merely
means that introspection is not sagacious.
Nor is it true, in my belief, that dreams are important psychical
events, nor that the subconsciousness evades a censor in
elaborating them. To what end would that be done? What would be
the use of it? Suppose that Freud and his school had never been;
then dreams would always be useless, for they would have no
interpreter. Men have dreamed in the countless ages before Freud
was born,—in vain. Think how the poor, misguided
subconsciousness has labored for nothing,—and how grateful it
should be to Freud! Dreams are results and have the same kind of
function that a stomach-ache has.
Things, experiences are forgotten, and whether they are
remembered or not depends upon the number of times they are
experienced, the attention they are given, the use they are put
to and the quality of the brain experiencing them. Disease and
old age may lower the recording power of the brain so that
experiences and sensations do not stick, and now and then the
brain is hypermnesic so that things are remembered with
surprising ease.
The conflicts of life are generally conscious conflicts, in my
experience. Desires and lusts that one does not know of do no
harm; it is the conflict which we cannot settle, the choice we
cannot make, the doubt we cannot resolve, that injures. It is not
those who find it easy to inhibit a desire or any impulse that
are troubled, though they may and do grow narrow. It is those
whose unlawful or discordant desires are not easily inhibited who
find themselves the theater of a constant struggle that breaks
them down. The uneasiness of a desire that arises from the
activity of the sex organs is not a manifestation of a
subconscious personality, unless we include in our personality
our livers, spleen and internal organs of all kinds. Such an
uneasiness may not be clearly understood by the individual merely
because the uneasiness is diffuse and not localized. But there is
no personality, Do will, wish or desire in that uneasiness; it
may and does cause to arise in the conscious personality wills
and wishes and desires against which there is rebellion and
because of which there is conflict.
Upon the issue of the conflicts within the personality hangs the
fate of the individual. Race-old lines of conduct are inhibited
by custom, tradition, teaching, conformity and the social
instinct and its allies. Here is a subject worthy of extended
consideration.
Freud has done the thought of our times a great service in
emphasizing conflict. From the earliest restriction laid by men
on his own conduct, wrestling with desire and temptation has been
the greatest of man’s struggles. Internal warfare between
opposing purposes and desires may proceed to a disruption of the
personality, to failure and unhappiness, or else to a solidified
personality, efficient, single-minded and successful. Freud’s
work has directed our attention to the thousand and one aberrant
desires that we will hardly acknowledge to ourselves, and he has
forced the professional worker in abnormal and normal mental life
to disregard his own prejudices, to strip away the camouflage
that we put over our motives and our struggles. Together with
Jung and Bleuler, he has helped our science of character a great
deal through no other method than by arousing it to action
against him. In order to fight him, our thought has been forced
to arm itself with the weapons that he has used.
CHAPTER VI. EMOTION, INSTINCT, INTELLIGENCE AND WILL
In a preceding chapter we discussed man as an organism reacting
against an outside world and spurred on by internal activities
and needs. We discussed stimulation, reflexes, inhibition, choice
and the organizing activity, memory and habit, consciousness and
subconsciousness, all of which are primary activities of the
organism. But these are mere theories of function, for the
activities we are interested in reside in more definite
reactions, of which the foregoing are parts.
We see a dreaded object on the horizon or foresee a
calamity,—and we fear. That state of the organism (note I do not
say that STATE OF MIND) resulting from the vision is an emotion.
We fly at once, we hide, and the action is in obedience to an
instinct. But ordinarily we do not fly or hide haphazard; we
think of ways and means, if only in a rudimentary fashion; we
shape plans, perhaps as we fly; we pick up a stick on the run,
hoping to escape but preparing for the reaction of fight if
cornered. “What shall I do—what shall I do? finds no conscious
answer if the emotion is overwhelming or the instinctive flight a
pell-mell affair; but ordinarily memories of other experiences or
of teaching come into the mind and some effort is made to meet
the situation in an “intelligent” manner.
Here, then, is a response in which three cardinal reactions have
occurred and are blended,—the emotion, the instinctive action,
and the intelligent action; or to make abstractions, emotion,
instinct and intelligence. (Personally, I think half the trouble
with our thought is that, we abstract from our experiences a
common group of associations and believe that the abstraction has
some existence outside our thoughts.) Thus there arise in us, as
a result of things experienced, curious feelings and we speak of
the feelings as emotions; we make a race-old response to a
situation,—an instinctive reaction; our memories, past
experiences and present purposes are stirred into activity, and
we plan and scheme, and this is an intelligent reaction, but
there is in reality no metaphysical entity Emotion, Instinct,
Intelligence. I believe that here the philosophers whose mental
activities are essentially in the direction of forming abstract
ideas have misled us.
What I wish to point out is this: that to any situation all three
reactions may take place and modify one another. We are
insulted—some one slaps our face—the fierce emotion of anger
arises and through us surge waves of feeling manifested on the
motor side by tensed muscles, rapid heart, harsh breathing,
perhaps a general reddening of face and eyes. Instinctively our
fists are clenched, a part of the reaction of fight, and it needs
but the slightest increase of anger to send us leaping on the
aggressor, to fight him perhaps to the death. But no,—the
situation has aroused certain memories and certain inhibitions:
the one who struck us has been our friend and we can see that he
is acting under a mistaken impression, or else we perceive that
he is right, that we have done him a wrong for which his blow is
a sort of just reaction. We are checked by these cerebral
activities, we choose some other reaction than fight; perhaps we
prevent him from further assault, or we turn and walk away, or we
start to explain, to mollify and console, or to remonstrate and
reprove. In other words, “intelligence” steps in to inhibit, to
bring to the surface the possibilities, to choose, and thus
overrides the emotional instinctive reaction. It may not succeed
in the overriding; we may hesitate, inhibit, etc., for only a
second or so, before hot anger overcomes us, and the instinctive
response of fight and retaliation takes place.
These examples might be multiplied a thousandfold. Every day of
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