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

Praecox, but I seriously doubt it. One often finds that the

goody-goody boy of fifteen becomes the college fullback at

twenty,—that is, once thrown on the world, the really normal get

back their birthright of character. I think it likely that now

and then a feeling of inferiority is bred in this way, a feeling

that may cling and change the current of a boy’s life. The real

danger of too close a family life, in whatever way it manifests

itself, is that it cuts into real social life, narrows the field

of influences and sympathies, breeds a type of personality of

perhaps good morals but of poor humanity.

The home must never lose its contact with the world; it should

never be regarded as the real world for which a man works. It is

a place to rest in, to eat in, to work in; in it is the spirit of

family life, redolent of affection, mutual aid and

self-sacrifice; but more than these, it is the nodal point of

affections, concerns and activity which radiate from it to the

rest of the world.

CHAPTER XV. PLAY, RECREATION, HUMOR AND PLEASURE SEEKING

One of the great difficulties in thought is that often the same

word expresses quite different concepts. Some superficial

resemblance has taken possession of the mind and expressed itself

in a unifying word, disregarding the fundamental differences.

Take the word “play.” The play of childhood is indeed a

pleasurable activity to the child, but it is really his form of

grappling with life, a serious pursuit of knowledge and a form of

preparation for his adult activities. It is not a way of

relaxation; on the contrary, in play he organizes his activities,

shuffles and reshuffles his ideas and experiences, looking for

the new combinations we call “imaginations.” The kitten in its

play prepares to catch its prey later on; and the child digging

in a ditch and making believe “this is a house” and “this is a

river” is a symbol of Man the mighty changing the face of Nature.

The running and catching games like “Tag” and “I spy,” “Hide and

go seek,” “Rellevo” are really war games, with training in

endurance, agility, cool-headedness, cooperation and rivalry as

their goals. Only as the child grows older, and there is placed

on him the burden of school work, does play commence to change

its serious nature and partake of the frivolous character of

adult life.

For the play of adult life is an effort to find pleasure and

relaxation in the dropping of serious purposes, in the

“forgetting” of cares and worries, by indulging in excitement

which has no fundamental purpose. The pleasure of play for the

adult is in the release of trends from inhibition, exactly as we

may imagine that a harnessed horse, pulling at a load and with

his head held back by a checkrein, might feel if he were turned

loose in a meadow. This is the kind of play spirit manifested in

going out fishing, dressed in old clothes, with men who will not

care whatever is said or done. There is purpose, there is

competition and cooperation and fellowship, but the organization

is a loose one and does not bear heavily. So, too, with the

pleasure of a game of ball for the amateur who plays now and

then. There is organization, control and competition; but unless

one is a poor loser, there is a relaxed tension in that the

purpose is not vital, and one can shout, jump up and down and

express himself in uninhibited excitement. Whether this

excitement has a value in discharging other excitement and

feelings that are inhibited in the daily work is another matter;

if it has such a value, play becomes of necessary importance. In

outdoor games in general, the feeling of physical fitness, of

discharging energy along primordial lines and the happy feeling

that comes merely from color of sky and grass and the outdoor

world, bring a relief from sadness that comes with the work and

life of the city man.

Often the play is an effort to seek excitement and thus to forget

cares, or it is a seeking of excitement for its own sake. Thus

men gamble, not only for the gain but because such excitement as

is aroused offers relief from business worries or home

difficulties. The prize fights, the highly competitive

professional sports of all kinds are frequented and followed by

enormous numbers of men, not only because men greatly admire

physical prowess, but because the intense excitement is sought. I

know more than one business and professional man who goes to the

“fights” because only there can he get a thrill. There is a

generalized mild anhedonia in the community, which has its origin

in the fatigue of overintense purposes, failure to realize ideals

and the difficulties of choice. People who suffer in this way

often seek the sedentary satisfaction of watching competitive

professional games.

Indeed, the hold of competition on man exists not alone in his

rivalry feeling toward others; it is evidenced also in the

excitement he immediately feels in the presence of competitive

struggle, even though he himself has little or no personal stake.

Man is a partisan creature and loves to take sides. This is

remarkably demonstrated by children, and is almost as well shown

in the play of adults. A recent international prize fight

awakened more intense interest than almost any international

event of whatever real importance. That same day it passed

practically unnoticed that America ended a state of war with

Germany.

A law of excitement, that it lies in part in a personal hazard

accounts for the growth of betting at games. The effort to gain

adds to the interest, i. e., excitement. That it adds tension as

well and may result in fatigue and further boredom is not

reckoned with by the bettor or gambler. To follow the middle of

the road in anything is difficult, and nowhere is it more beset

with danger than in the seeking of excitement.

Games of skill of all kinds, whether out of doors or within;

baseball, cricket, billiards, and pool afford, then, the pleasure

of exertion and competition in an exciting way and yet one

removed from too great a stake. Defeat is not bitter, though

victory is sweet; a good game is desired, and an easy opponent is

not welcomed. The spirit of this kind of play has been of great

value to society, for it has brought the feeling of fair play and

sportsmanship to the world. Primitive in its origin, to take

defeat nobly and victory with becoming modesty is the civilizing

influence of sportsmanship. In the past women have lacked

good-fellowship and sportsmanship largely because they played no

competitive-cooperative games.

I shall not attempt to take up in any detail all the forms of

pleasure-excitement seeking. Dancing, music, the theater and the

movies offer outlets both for the artistic impulses and the

seeking of excitement. In the theater and the movies one seeks

also the interest we take in the lives of others, the awakening

of emotions and the happy ending. Only a few people will ever

care for the artistic wholesale calamity of a play like “Hamlet,”

and even they only once in a while.

Men and women seek variety, they seek excitement in any and all

directions, they want relief from the tyranny of purpose and of

care. But also,—they hate a vacuum, they can usually bear

themselves and their thoughts for only a little while, because

their thoughts are often basicly melancholy and full of

dissatisfaction. So they seek escape from themselves; they try to

kill time; reading, playing and going to entertainments. In fact,

most of our reading is actuated by the play spirit, and is an

effort to obtain excitement through the lives of others.

Humor[1] is a form of pleasure seeking and giving, but depends on

a certain technique, the object of which is to elicit the laugh

or its equivalent. The laugh is a discharge of tension, and while

usually it accompanies pleasure, it may indicate the tension of

embarrassment or even complex emotional states. But the laugh or

smile of humor has to be elicited in certain ways, chief of which

are to bring about a feeling of expectation, and by some novel

arrangement of words, to send the mind on a voyage of discovery

which suddenly ends with a burst of pleasure when the “point” is

seen. The pleasure felt in humor arises from the feeling of

novelty, the pleasure of discovering a hidden meaning and the

pleasure in the “point” or motive of the story, joke or conduct.

[1] I use this term to include wit, satire and even certain

phases of the comic.

Usually, the humorous pleasure has these motives: it points at

the folly and absurdity of other people’s conduct, thought, logic

and customs. It gives a feeling of superiority, and that is why

all races love to poke fun at other races: certain

characteristics of Jew, Irishman, Yankee, Scot, etc., are

presented in novel and striking fashion, in a playful manner.

It points out the weak and absurd side of people and institutions

with which we have trouble; and this brings in marriage,

business, mothers-in-law, creditors, debtors, as those whose

weakness is exposed by the technique of humor.

Humor likes to explode pretension, pedantry, dignity, pomposity;

we get a feeling of joy whenever those who are superior come a

cropper, which is increased when we feel that they have no right

to their places. So the humorous technique deals with the

get-rich-quick folk, the foolish nobleman, the politician, the

priest (especially in the Middle Ages), etc.

Not only does humor seek to obtain pleasure from an attack on

others and thus to feel superior or to compensate for

inferiority, but also it reaches its highest form in exposing man

himself, including the humorist. The humorist, seeking his own

weaknesses and contradictions, his falsities, strips the disguise

from himself in some surprising way. Bergson points out that to

strip away a disguise is naturely humorous unless it reveals too

rudely the horrible. The humorist takes off the mask from himself

and others, and in so far as we can detach ourselves from pride

and vanity, we laugh. The one who cannot thus detach himself is

“hurt” by humor; the one who somehow has become a spectator of

his own strivings can laugh at himself. Thus humor, in addition

to becoming a compensation and a form of entertainment, is a form

of self-revelation and self-understanding carried on by a

peculiar technique. On the whole this technique depends upon a

hiding of the real meaning of the story or situation under a

disguise of the commonplace. The humorist phrases his words or

develops his situation so as to send the thoughts of the listener

flying in several directions. There is a brief confusion, an

incongruity is felt, then suddenly from under a disguise the

point becomes clear and the laugh is in part one of triumph, in

part one of pleased surprise.

I shall not attempt an analysis of the psychology of humor, for

illustrious writers and thinkers have stubbed their intellectual

toes on this rock for centuries. In later years the analyses of

Freud and Bergson are noted, but there is a list of writers from

Aristotle down whose remarks and observations have brought out

clearly certain trends. For us the direction that any one’s humor

takes is a very important phase in the study of character.

Humor is a weapon, and the humorist has two ends in view: the one

to please his audience and to align them on his side, the second

to attack either playfully or seriously some person or

institution with the technique of humor. Certain trends are