The Foundations of Personality by Abraham Myerson (color ebook reader .TXT) 📕

country. Nay, any wrong to others would blast all our pleasure,

could we really feel it. Fortunately only a few are so cursed

with sympathy. When the capacity for joyous feeling is joined

with fortitude or endurance, then we have the really cheerful,

who spread their feeling everywhere, whom all men love. Where

cheerfulness is due to lack of sympathy and understanding, we

speak of a cheerful idiot; and well does that type merit the

name. There is a modern cult whose followers sing “La, la, la” at

all times and places, who minimize all misfortune, crime,

suffering, who find “good in everything,”—the “Pollyana” tribe.

My objection to them is based on this,—that mankind must see

clearly in order to rid itself of unnecessary suffering. Hiding

one’s head (and brains) in a desert of optimism merely

perpetuates evil, even though one sufferer here and there is

deluded into happiness.

Sorrow may enrich the nature or it may embitter and narrow it.

Wisdom may spring from it; indeed, who can be wise who has not

sorrowed? Says Goethe:

“Wer nie sein Brot in Thranen ass

Wer nie die kummervollen Nachte

Auf seinem Bette weinend sass

Er weiss Euch nicht—himmelischen Machte.”

The afflicted in their sorrow may turn from self-seeking to God

and good deeds. But sorrow may come in a trivial nature from

trivial causes; the soul may be plunged into despair because one

has been denied a gift or a pleasure. The demonstrativeness of

grief or sorrow is not at all in proportion to the emotion felt;

it is more often based on the effort to get sympathy and help.

For sorrow is “Help, help” in one form or another, even though

one refuses to be comforted. All our emotions, because they are

socially powerful, become somewhat theatrical; in some completely

theatrical. We are so constituted that emotional display is not

indifferent to us; it pleases, repels, annoys, angers, frightens,

disgusts or awes us according to the kind of emotion displayed,

the displayer and the circumstances.

The psychologists speak of sympathy as this susceptibility to the

emotions of others, but there is an antipathy to their emotions,

as well. If we feel that our emotions will be “well received,” we

do not fear to display them, and therein is one of the uses of

the friend. If we feel that they will be poorly received, that

they will annoy or anger or disgust, we strive to repress them.

The expression of emotion, especially of fear and sorrow, has

become synonymous with weakness, and a powerful self-feeling

operates against their display, especially in adults, men and

certain races. It is no accident that the greatest actors are

from the Latin and Hebrew races, for there is a certain

theatricality in fear and sorrow that those schooled to

repression lose. We resent what we call insincerity in emotional

expression because we fear being “fooled,” and there are many

whose experiences in being “fooled” chill sympathy with doubt. We

resent insincere sympathy, on the other hand, because we regret

showing weakness before those to whom that weakness is regarded

as such and who perhaps rejoice at it as ridiculous. We like the

emotional expression of children because we can always

sympathize, through our tender feeling with them, and their very

sincerity pleases as well.

Is there a harm in the repression of emotion?[1] Is emotion a

heaped-up tension which, unless it is discharged, causes damage?

Shall man inhibit his anger, fear, joy, sorrow, disgust, at least

in some measure, or shall he express them in gesture, speech and

act? The answer is obvious: he must control them, and in that

term control we mean, not inhibition, not expression in its naive

sense, but that combination of inhibition, expression and

intelligent act we call adjustment. To express fear in the face

of danger or anger at an offense might thwart the whole life’s

purpose, might bring disaster and ruin. The emotions are poor

adjustments in their most violent form, their natural form, and

invite disaster by clouding the intelligence and obscuring

permanent purposes. Therefore, they must be controlled. To

establish this control is a primary function of training and

intelligence and does no harm unless carried to excess. True,

there is a relief in emotional expression, a wiping out of sorrow

by tears, an increase of the pleasure of joy in freely laughing,

a discharge of anger in the blow or the hot word, even the

profane word. There is a time and a place for these things, and

to get so “controlled” that one rarely laughs or shows sadness or

anger is to atrophy, to dry up. But the emotional expression

makes it easy to become an habitual weeper or stormer, makes it

easy to become the overemotional type, whose reaction to life is

futile, undignified and a bodily injury. For emotion is in large

part a display of energy, and the overemotional rarely escape the

depleted neurasthenic state. In fact, hysteria and neurasthenia

are much more common in the races freely expressing emotion than

in the stolid, repressed races. Jew, Italian, French and Irish

figure much more largely than English, Scotch or Norwegian in the

statistics of neurasthenia and hysteria.

[1] Isador N. Coriat’s book, “The Repression of Emotions” deals

with the subject from psychoanalytic. point of view.

10. I have said but little on other emotions,—on admiration,

surprise and awe. This group of affective states is of great

importance. Surprise may be either agreeable or disagreeable and

is our reaction to the unexpected. Its expression, facially and

of body, is quite characteristic, with staring eyes and mouth

slightly open, raised eyebrows, hands hanging with fingers

tensely spread apart, so that a thing held therein is apt to

drop. Surprise heightens the feeling of internal tension, and in

all excitement it is an element, in that the novel brings

excitement and surprise, whereas the accustomed gives little

excitement or surprises. In all wit and humor surprise is part of

the technique and constitutes part of the pleasure. Surprise

usually heightens the succeeding feeling, whether of joy, sorrow,

anger, fear, pleasure or pain, or in any form. But sometimes the

effect of surprise is so benumbing that an incapacity to feel, to

realize, is the most marked result and it is only afterward that

the proper emotion or feeling becomes manifest.

The reaction to the unexpected is an important adjustment in

character. There are situations beyond the power of any of us

quickly to adjust ourselves to and we expect the great

catastrophe to surprise and overwhelm. Nevertheless, we judge

people by the way they react to the unexpected; the man who

rallies quickly from the confusion of surprise is, we say,

“cool-headed,” keeps his wits about him; and the man who does not

so rally or adjust “loses his head,”—“loses his wits.” Part of

this cool-headedness is not only the rallying from surprise but

also the throwing off of fear. A warning has for its purpose,

“Don’t be surprised!” and training must teach resources against

the unexpected. “If you expect everything you are armed against

half the trouble of the world.” The cautious in character

minimize the number of surprises they may get by preparing. The

impulsive, who rarely prepare, are always in danger from the

unforeseen. Aside from preparation and knowledge, there is in the

condition of the organism a big factor in the reaction to the

unexpected. Fatigue, neurasthenia, hysteria and certain depressed

conditions render a man more liable to react excessively and

badly to surprise. The tired soldier has lessened resources in

wit and courage when surprised, for fatigue heightens the

confusion and numbness of surprise and decreases the scope of

intelligent conduct. Choice is made difficult, and the

neurasthenic doubt is transformed to impotence by surprise.

Face to face with what is recognized as superior to ourselves in

a quality we hold to be good, we fall into that emotional state,

a mingling of surprise and pleasure, called admiration. In its

original usage, admiration meant wonder, and there is in all

admiration something of that feeling which is born in the

presence of the superior. The more profound the admiration, the

greater is the proportion of wonder in the feeling.

We find it difficult to admire where the competitive feeling is

strongly aroused, though there are some who can do so. It is the

essence of good sportsmanship, the ideal aimed at, to admire the

rival for his good qualities, though sticking fast to one’s

confidence in oneself. The English and American athletes, perhaps

also the athletes of other countries, make this part of their

code of conduct and so are impelled to act in a way not entirely

sincere. Wherever jealousy or envy are strongly aroused,

admiration is impossible, and so it comes about that men find it

easy to praise men in other noncompetitive fields or for

qualities in which they are not competing. Thus an author may

strongly admire an athlete or a novelist may praise the

historian; a beautiful woman admires another for her learning,

though with some reservation in her praise, and a successful

business man admires the self-sacrificing scientist, albeit there

is a little complacency in his approval.

He is truly generous-hearted who can admire his competitor. I do

not mean lip-admiration, through the fear of being held jealous.

Many a man joins in the praise of one who has outstripped him,

with envy gnawing at his heart, and waits for the first note of

criticism to get out the hammer. “He is very fine—but” is the

formula, and either through innuendo, insinuation or direct

attack, the “subordinate” statement becomes the most sincere and

significant. But there are those who can admire their conqueror,

not only through the masochism that lurks in all of us, but

because they have lifted their ideal of achievement and character

higher than their own possibilities and seek in others the

perfection they cannot hope to have in themselves. In other

words, where competition is hopeless, in the presence of the

greatly superior, a feeling of humility which is really

admiration to the point of worship comes over us, and we can

glory in the quality we love. To admire is to recede the

ego-feeling, is to feel oneself in an ecstasy that becomes

mystical, and in that sense the contradiction arises that we feel

ourselves larger in a unification with the admired one.

Each age, each country, each group and each family set up the

objects and qualities for admiration, in a word, the ideals. Out

of these the individual selects his specialties in admiration,

according to his nature and training. All the world admires

vigor, strength, courage and endurance,—and these in their

physical aspects. The hero of all times has had these qualities:

he is energetic, capable of feats beyond the power of others, is

fearless and bears his ills with equanimity. Beauty, especially

in the woman, but also in man, has received an over-great share

of homage, but here “tastes differ.” We have no difficulty in

agreement on what constitutes strength, and we have objective

tests for its measurement; but who can agree on beauty? What one

race prizes as its fairest is scorned by another race. We laugh

at the ideal of beauty of the Hottentot, and the physical

peculiarity they praise most either disgusts or amuses us. But

what is there about a white skin more lovely than a black one,

and why thrill over blue eyes and neglect the brown ones? What is

the rationale for the admiration of slimness as against

stoutness? Indeed, there are races who would turn with scorn from

our slender debutante[1] and worship their more buxom

heavy-busted and wide-hipped beauties. The only “rational” beauty

in face and figure is that which stands as the outer mask of

health, vigor, intelligence and normal procreative function. The

standards