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

kind.

F. might almost stand for mankind in his reactions to death. He

seemed to me almost too good to be true as a demonstration of a

pet thesis of mine, namely, that the fear of death is behind an

enormous amount of men’s deeds and beliefs. His reaction was of

the compensatory type, where the fear arouses counter-emotions,

counter-activities. F.‘s is a noble response to fear, just as the

cowardly reaction is the ignoble response.

I shall not depict the coward. There are some in whose lives the

fear of death, injury, illness or loss is in constant operation

to prevent activity, to lower energy and effort. One finds the

coward very commonly in the clinics for nervous diseases, and in

some cases the formidable term of psychasthenia is merely

camouflage for the more direct English word. There is a type of

the timid, who will not stand up for their rights, who receive

meekly, as if it were their due, the buffets of fortune. This

type is well exemplified in F. B., who passes through life

cheated by every rogue and walked on by any strong-willed person

that comes along. As a boy he was bullied by nearly all his

playmates, did the chores, was selected for the “booh” parts in

games and never dared resent it, though he was fully conscious

that he was being put upon. When he went to work in a factory he

was the one selected for all those practical jokes in which minor

cruelty manifests itself. His parents also bullied him, so that

he was compelled to turn over most of his earnings to them and

was allowed to keep so little that he was shabby, half-starved

and without any of the luxuries for which even his timid soul

longed.

F. B. was mortally afraid of girls; they seemed to him to be

terrible and beautiful creatures, very scornful and

awe-inspiring. They made him feel inferior in a way that sent him

edging from their presence, and though he sometimes surged with

passion he avoided any contact with them.

As a good workman he received good pay, for he chanced, by the

merest luck, to fall into the hands of a kind employer, who

profited by his kindness, for F. B. gave more than a dollar of

value for each dollar he received. Timid, he gave to the employer

a great loyalty, which was in part based on his awe of any

aggressive personality.

In society this man was tongue-tied, embarrassed and overawed by

the well-dressed and prosperous-looking. His sense of inferiority

was in no way compensated for, and to avoid pain he became a sort

of recluse, doing his work and returning to his shell, so to

speak, each night.

When he was thirty-six his mother died, his father having died

earlier. This left him rather well to do, for his thrifty parents

had well utilized his earnings. At once a thoughtful woman of his

acquaintance, distantly related by marriage, set out to capture

him, and by forcing the issue led him to the altar. Needless to

say, she ruled the household, and F. B.‘s only consolation lay in

the crop of children that soon appeared in the house, for

timidity is no barrier to parenthood. This consolation rather

tends to disappear as the children grow older, for they become

his masters. Such men as F. B. have a collar around their necks

to which any one may fit a chain.

Does F. B. rejoice in inferiority, in the masochistic sense

spoken of before? Is his humility a sign of inversion, in the

Freudian sense, a sort of homosexuality? Possibly, and there are

very crude and coarse phrases of the common man indicating a

sexual feeling in all victory and defeat. But I am inclined to

call this a sort of monothymia, a mood of fear and negative self-feeling coloring all the reactions.

I have previously cited the case of the man obsessed by fear in

all the relations of life,—shrinking, self-acknowledged

inferiority—who lost it with “a few drinks under my belt.”

“Dutch courage” drove from many a man the inferiority and the

fear that plagued his soul. True, it drove him into a worse

situation, but for a few moments he tasted something of the life

that heroes and the great have. If we can ever find something

that will not degrade as it exalts, all the world will rush to

use it.

Of the monothymic types the choleric or angry are about as common

as those predisposed to fear. The anger emotion is aroused by a

thwarting of the instincts and purposes, and in the main the

strongly egoistic are those most given to explosive or chronic

anger. The angry feeling, however, must be controlled, else

failure or social dislike awaits the choleric. When a man wins

success he frequently allows himself the luxury of indulging his

anger because he feels his power cannot be challenged. The

Duchess in “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” with her choleric

“off with his head” whenever any one contradicted her, is a

caricature, and a very apt one, of this type of person. We think

of the bull-necked Henry the Eighth—“bluff King Hal”—as the

choleric type, though here we also assume a certain cyclothymia,

great good nature alternating with fierce anger.

I have in mind G. as a type of the angry person. G. cannot bear

to have any one contradict him. Either he swallows his

resentment, if he is in the presence of one he cannot afford to

antagonize, or else he starts to abuse the victim verbally. He is

sarcastic or violent according to circumstances; rarely is he

pleasant in manner or speech. Though he is honest and said to be

well-meaning, his ego explodes in the presence of other

self-assertive egos. When a man truckles to him he is angry at

his insincerity; when the other disputes his statements, or even

offers other views, he finds himself confronted by one who has

taken deep offense. As a result G. has no real friends, and this

has added fuel to his anger. Often he has made up his mind to

“control” himself, to keep down his scorn and rage, but rarely

has he been able to maintain a proper attitude for any length of

time.

In the last analysis a high self-valuation is part of the chronic

choleric make-up, a conceit of overweening proportions. The man

who realizes his own proneness to err, and who keeps in mind the

relative unimportance of his aims and powers, is not apt to

explode in the face of opposition or contradiction. G. is as a

rule absolutely sure of his belief, tastes and importance, though

he is crude in knowledge, coarse in tastes and of no particular

importance except to himself. He is the “I am Sir Oracle; when I

ope my lips let no dog bark.”

Anger is often associated with brutality or deeds of violence.

There is cold-blooded brutality, but by far the most of it has

anger behind it. I know one man who in his youth was

hot-tempered, i. e., quick to anger and quick to repent, a

charming man who gradually learned control and passed into late

middle life serene and amiable.

One day he was driving his car when it became obstructed by two

young rowdies driving another car. With him was his wife. When he

expostulated with the men, one of them turned with a sneer and

said something insulting at which the other laughed. The next

thing my friend knew he was in the other car, striking heavy

blows at the pair (he is a very powerful man.), and it was only

the opportune arrival of a policeman that prevented a murder.

“Whatever came over me I hardly understand,” said he afterwards

sadly. “I used to have rages like that as a boy, but I have been

very well controlled for over thirty years. I was a raging demon

for a while, and it appalls me to think that in me there lurks

such a devil of anger.”

Akin to anger, akin to fear, is suspicion. There is a sullen

non-social personality type whose reactions are characterized by

suspicion. He never willingly gives his trust to any one, and

when he hands over his destinies to any one, as all must do now

and then, he is consumed with dread, doubt and latent hostility.

Every one is familiar with men like H. He is full of distrust for

his fellow men. Himself a man of low ideals, he ascribes to every

one the same attitude. “What’s in it for you?” is his first

thought concerning anybody with whom he deals.

He has a little store and eyes each customer who comes in as if

they come to rob him. As a result his trade is largely emergency,

transient trade, those who come because they have nowhere else to

go or else do not know him. The salesmen, who supply the articles

he sells have long since cut him off their list for desirable

goods, and his only callers are those salesmen who are working up

new lines and are under orders to try every one. H. has moments

and days when he believes the whole world is against him, and on

such occasions he locks his store and refuses to see any one. But

at his best he cannot yield his ego to full free intercourse with

others. It seems as though there were a hard shell surrounding

him, and the world as it flowed around never brought love and

trust through to him.

H. is not insane in the ordinary sense, but he is one of those

paranoid persons we spoke of previously. Turn to L., a true case

of mental disease, a paranoid whose career strangely resembles

some of the great historic paranoids, for it must be remembered

that man has been imposed upon by those who deceived themselves,

who fully believed the strange and incredible things they

succeeded in making credible to others.

The fantastic paranoid is made up of the same materials as the

rest of us, except that his ego feeling is without insight, and

his suspicion grows and grows until it reaches the delusion of

persecution. L. was a bright boy, always conceited and given to

non-social acts. Thus he never would play with the other boys

unless he were given the leading role, and he could not bear to

hear others praised or to praise them! Parenthetically the role

that jealousy plays in the conduct of men and women needs

exposition, and I recommend that some Ph. D. merit his degree by

a thesis on this subject. When he was a little older he got the

notion that hats were bad for the hair, and being proud of his

own thick black mop, he went without a hat for over a year,

despite the tears and protestations of his family and the

ridicule of his friends. There is no one so ready to die for a

cause, good or bad, as the paranoid.

He entered the medical school, and to this day there is none of

his classmates who has forgotten him. Proud, even haughty, with

only one or two intimates, he studied hard and did very good

work. Now and then he astonished the class by taking direct issue

with some professor, disputing a theory or a fact with the air of

an authority and proposing some other idea, logically developed

but foolishly based, as if his training were sufficient. It is

characteristic of all paranoid philosophy and schemes that they

despise real experimentation, that they start with some postulate

that has no basis in work done and go on with a minute

hyper-logic that deceives the unsophisticated.

Though L. was “bright,” there were better