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

persist and are easily dissipated by encouragement or good

fortune. She is readily angered and “raises a row” with great

facility and without restraint. For this reason her relatives and

friends become panic-stricken when she becomes angry, for they

know that she does not hesitate to make an embarrassing scene. In

the efforts to conciliate her they are apt to give her her own

way, as a result of which she is the proverbial spoiled child,

capitalizing her weakness.

Our Jewess uses her emotions for effect, which means that she has

become theatrical. Though there is reality in her emotional

display, time and the advantages she has gained have brought

enough finish and restraint to her manifestations to gain the

designation artistic. True, it is a crude artistry, for

intelligence does not sufficiently guide it, and her art is used

sometimes indiscriminately and inopportunely. As she grows older

the value of her tears is less, and she is becoming that prime

nuisance, the elderly scold.

Among the emotional types well recognized by the neurologist is

that known as the cyclothymic. In the individuals of this group

there is a periodicity to mood (rather than to emotions). There

is a definitely pathological trend to the cyclothymic, and in its

most marked form one sees the recurring depressions and

excitement of Manic Depressive Insanity.

Aside from these pathological forms, there are persons who show

curious periodic changes in mood. They become depressed for no

especial reason, are “blue” for day after day and then quickly

return to their normal. Sometimes these blue spells alternate

with periods of exaltation and happiness, but in my experience

this is far less common than periodic blue spells, a kind of

recurrent anhedonia.

L. D. is ordinarily what is known as a vivacious person. Bright,

talkative, keen in her discriminations, she has all her life been

at the mercy of strange alterations in mood, alterations which

come and go without what seems to others adequate reason.

As a child L. D. was sick a great deal. She showed an unusual

susceptibility to infection, and it was not until she was nine

years of age that she attended school regularly. Her illnesses

made it impossible to discipline her, and so she has always been

a bit “spoiled,” though her kind and generous nature makes her a

charming person. But more important than the fact that she could

not be disciplined is the lowering of energy that these

sicknesses produced, a lowering marked mainly by a liability to

fatigue and depression.

Let there come a sickness, and this woman’s stock of hopeful mood

goes and there results a loss of interest in life, a loss of zest

and joyousness.

A digression,—and a return to the theme of the first chapter of

this book. The dependence of the mental life on bodily structure,

equally true in the both sexes, is exquisitely demonstrated in

woman. In many women there occurs an extraordinary increase of

sex desire just before the menstrual period and in some to the

point where it causes great internal conflict. Others show

moderate depression and even confusion at this time, and to the

majority of women some mood and thought change is taken for

granted. At the menopause mental difficulties to the point of

insanity are witnessed, and in some cases the change is

permanent. Back of mood is the entire organic life of the

organism, and back of the nature of our thoughts and deeds is

mood.

A peculiarity of fatigue is remarkably well shown by this person.

When she is tired or convalescent a depressing thought sticks,

becomes an obsession, a fixed idea, to the plague of her life.

Thus when she was nursing her first baby the night feedings

exhausted her. One night, half asleep and half awake, with the

vigorous little animal pulling away at her breast, she watched

the pulsing fontanelle on the top of the baby’s head, and the

thought came to her how dreadfully easy it would be to injure the

brain beneath. Her heart pounced in fear, she almost fainted at

the thought, and yet it “stuck” and came back to her with each

random association. I need not detail how the idea recurred a

dozen times a day and brought the fear that she was going insane.

She stopped nursing the baby at night, got a good rest, and the

idea disappeared. She was “able to shake off” when rested that

which was a hideous obsession when fatigued.

Indeed, one might speak of persons of this type as hypothymic as

well as cyclothymic. The hypothymic are those whose stock of

courage and hope is easily exhausted, who become easily

discouraged. They are borrowers of energy and vigor, they need

sturdier folk around them; often they are said to be sensitive,

and while this is sometimes true, it is more often the case that

they are more affected. That is, two persons may notice the same

thing or suffer the same sickness, but the so-called sensitive

has a reserve of courage and energy that disappears, whereas the

other has enough left in stock so that he does not feel any

change.

The extraordinary complexity of human character is well

illustrated by C. D. She is hypothymic or cyclothymic to the

little affairs of life and to the minor illnesses. Yet when her

family fortunes were greatly imperilled by a financial crisis,

she stood up against the strain far better than did her husband,

a man sturdy and buoyant in most of the affairs of life. His ego

was more concerned with financial fortune than was hers, and

against this ill she was the philosopher and not he.

We may well contrast L. D. with her husband. He belongs to the

sturdy in emotions and morals,—the stable. Dark days and bright

days, sickness and health, fatigue and rest seem to impair his

courage, hope and general cheerfulness of mood but little. He has

a high organic balance and a well-built-up philosophy. I started

to say of him that he is an optimist, but this is not true. He is

cheerful, but he does not sing, “Tra la la, all the things that

are, are good.” He says, “There are bad things, but I must carry

on and fight the good fight.” His is a philosophy of courage and

endurance, but not of optimistic twaddle. He is too wide-brained

to speak of life as “all good” when he knows of inherited

disease, cruelty, preventable poverty, gross neglect and

unmerited misfortune. Yet he lends hope and comfort to the

afflicted, and he has an unvarying comfort for his cyclothymic

mate.

He has built up his ego around a business, one in which there was

sunk not only his own fortune but that of a host of friends. When

this was so threatened as to seem inevitably lost, his ego was

deeply wounded, he lost courage and hope and then needed the

strength of his wife. This she gave, and when the tide of affairs

turned, his own courage was ready and unimpaired. We are like

trees,—the hard, strong, knotty parts of our fiber are

distributed in irregular fashion, and he who seems strongest has

a weak place somewhere. Attack that, and his resistance, courage

and hope disappear.

While there are the types of mood and emotional make-up, there

are curious monothymic types, people who habitually tend to react

with one emotion or mood.

The fear type. It must again be emphasized that we cannot

separate emotion, mood, instinct, intelligence in our analysis.

And so we shall speak of individuals of this or that type when

what we mean is that they reacted habitually and remarkably in

one direction. Thus with the man F., who has quick imagination,

and whose ability to forecast is inextricably mixed with a

liability to fear. It is true that some do not fear because they

do not foresee, and that placidity and calmness are less often

due to courage than to lack of imagination.

F. feared animals excessively as a child and injury to himself as

a boy, so that he played few rough games. To a large extent his

parents fostered this fear in him by carefully guarding and

watching him, by putting him through that neurasthenic regimen so

brilliantly described by Arthur Guiterman in his story of the

aseptic pup. Yet he had a brother as carefully brought up as

himself who became a rough-and-tumble lad, with as little

likelihood to fear as any boy. So that we may only assume that

F.‘s training fostered fear in him; it did not cause it.

At the age of thirteen the fear of death entered F.‘s life, the

occasion being the death of an uncle. The mourning, the quick

fleeting sight of the dead man in the black box, the interment of

the once vigorous, joyous man in the earth struck terror into the

heart of the boy. From that time much of his life was controlled

by his struggles with the fear of death, and his history is his

reaction to that fear. At fourteen he astonished his

free-thinking family by becoming a devout Christian, by praying,

attending church regularly and by becoming so moral in his

conduct as to warrant the belief that there was something wrong

with him. Indeed, had a psychiatrist examined him at this time,

there is no doubt he would have diagnosed his condition as a

beginning Dementia Precox. But he was not; he simply was

compensating for his fear of death.

At sixteen he entered an academy where he was forced to go into

athletics. The fear of injury and death plagued him so that he

broke down, but this breakdown did not last long, and he

reentered athletics and did fairly well. Indeed, in order to

break himself of fear, he became outwardly a rather daring

gymnast, hoping that what he had so often read of the sickly and

puny becoming strong and vigorous through training would be true

of him. As soon as he reached a stage in school where compulsory

training was dropped, he discontinued athletics, with much inward

relief. In fact, pride, fear of being considered a coward, was

mainly responsible for his efforts in this direction.

In college he fell under the influence of Omar Khayam and the

epicurean reaction to death. He feverishly entered pleasure and

swung easily from religious fervor to a complete agnosticism. He

became a first-nighter, knew all the chorus girls it was

possible for him to become acquainted with, learned to drink but

never learned to enjoy it. In fact, after each sensual indulgence

his reaction against himself led him to a despair which might

have terminated in suicide were it not that he feared death more

than the reproaches of his conscience. Then he fell under the

influence of a group of men and women in his college town,

philanthropists and social reformers, whose enthusiasm and energy

seemed to him miraculous, and as he grew to know them he realized

with a something like ecstasy and yet governed by intelligence,

that in such work was a compensation for death that might satisfy

both his emotions and his intelligence. Again to the surprise of

his parents, and in the face of their prediction that he would

soon “tire” of this fad, he entered into their activities and

proved himself a devoted worker. Too devoted, for now and then he

needs medical attention, and it was in one of these

“neurasthenic” periods that I met him. I learned that the spur

that kept him going, that made him energetic, was the fear that

death would overtake him before he achieved anything worth while;

that he hated to die and was appalled by the thought of death,

but that he could forget all this in work of