Psychology by Robert S. Woodworth (intellectual books to read .TXT) 📖

it is in such social relations that personality most clearly stands out. His size affects the individual's behavior in subtle ways, since the big fellow dominates others easily just by virtue of his size, and so tends to be good-humored, while the little fellow is apt to be strenuous and self-assertive. Muscular development and "looks" also have their effect on personality.

Another factor might, by a sort of play on words, be called chemique. This corresponds to what is often called temperament, a very obscure matter psychologically. We speak of one as having an excitable temperament, a jovial or a sour temperament. "Disposition" is another word used in connection with such traits. The ancients attempted to relate the "four temperaments" to the four great "humors" or fluids of the body. Thus the "sanguine" individual was one with a surplus of blood, the "choleric" had a surplus of bile, the "phlegmatic" a surplus of phlegm, and the "melancholic" a surplus of black bile or spleen; and any individual's temperament resulted from the balance of these four. Sometimes a fifth temperament, the nervous, was admitted, dependent on the "nerve fluid".

This particular chemical derivation of temperament is, of course, out of date, being based on very imperfect knowledge of physiology; but it still remains possible that chemical substances carried around in the body fluids have much to do with the sort of trait that we think of under {554} the head of temperament. Only that to-day, with some knowledge regarding the internal secretions of the "endocrine glands", we should be inclined to connect temperament with them, rather than with blood, bile, etc. Take, for example, the secretion of the adrenal glands, that we found to be poured out during fear and anger and to have so much to do with the bodily condition of readiness for violent action and probably also with the "stirred-up" emotional state. What is more likely than that individuals differ in the strength of their adrenal secretion or in the readiness with which the glands are aroused to pour it out into the circulation? The excitable individual might be one with over-active adrenals. And in the same way the strenuous individual might be one with an unusually active thyroid gland, since there certainly seems to be some connection between this gland and the tendency to great activity. There are several other glands that possibly affect behavior in somewhat similar ways, so that it is not improbable, though still rather hypothetical, that chemical substances, produced in these glands, and carried by the blood to the brain and muscles, have much to do with the elusive traits that we class under temperament and personality.

Once more, consider the instincts in relation to personality. Undoubtedly these instinctive tendencies differ in strength in different individuals. One is more gregarious than another, and this is an important element in his personality. One is more assertive and masterful than another, one is more "motherly" than another, more responsive by tender and protective behavior to the presence of children or others who need help. One is more prone to laugh than another, and the "sense of humor" is admitted to be an important element in personality. And so on through the list; so that personality can be partially analyzed in terms of instinct.

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Has intelligence anything to do with personality? It certainly has, in many ways. One who is slow in learning adapts himself poorly to other persons and remains out of touch with his social environment. "Tact" depends partly on instinctive liking for society, no doubt, but partly on the ability to perceive what others want, and on the imagination to put yourself in their place. High principles require the ability to reason things out and see them in perspective. Statistical studies of the rulers of Europe, for a period of several centuries, show that on the whole those with higher intelligence were also of better character and personality. Criminals, taken as a whole, average rather low in intelligence; and it may even be doubted whether the clever, scheming rascal, who defrauds widows of their money, or trains feeble-minded boys to pick pockets for him, has, after all, the brains of the man who can easily see how such schemes could be worked but decides against them himself because he sees something better worth doing.

A sense of inferiority, either physical or mental, is apt to affect the personality unfavorably. It does not necessarily produce humble behavior; far from that, it often leads to a nervous assertiveness. An apparently disdainful individual is often really shy and unsure of himself. Put a man where he can see he is equal to his job and at the same time is accomplishing something worth while, and you often see considerable improvement in his personality.

The Self

In a broad, objective sense, the self is the individual, but in a more subjective sense the self is what the individual knows about himself, how he conceives himself, how he feels about himself, what he plans and wishes for himself. It is reasonable to suppose that the newly born infant does not {556} distinguish himself from other objects. Perhaps his foot, as he sees it, seems simply an object among others, like a toy; but he soon learns to connect the visual appearance with the cutaneous and kinesthetic sensations from the foot, and these sensations, along with the organic, always retain in large measure the subjective quality of belonging to the self, whereas sights, sounds, odors and tastes seem to belong to objects distinct from the self.

If we ask how the child comes to make the distinction between the self and the not-self, we have to call to mind the assertiveness that manifests itself very early in the child's behavior--how he resists being pushed and pulled about, struggles against being held, and in many ways, more and more complex as he develops, shows that he has a "will of his own". It is in resisting and overcoming external things that he comes to distinguish himself from them.

Not only external things, but other persons particularly, have to be encountered and resisted by the child; and often, too, he has to submit to them, after a struggle. Probably he distinguishes between himself and other people even more sharply than between himself and inanimate things. Ask any one to tell you what he knows about himself, and he will begin to tell you how he differs from others. Thus the individual's conception of himself is largely a product of his social experience.

The self is first known as wish or will, and probably that always remains the core of any one's conception of himself. That is to say, I think of myself first of all as wishing, aiming, purposing, resisting, striving, competing. But I may come to know myself more objectively. By dint of experience I know something of my limitations. I know I am not muscular enough to do this, nor mathematical enough to do that, nor artistic enough to do the other. In this progressive age, some children even know their own IQ. We {557} have frequent occasion to measure ourselves against others, or against tasks, and lay some of the lessons to heart. Though most of us are probably inclined to overrate ourselves, many will be found to give a pretty exact estimate of themselves. It is surprising that this should be so, in view of the tendency to believe what one wishes, and of the deep-seated desire for superiority or at least against inferiority. It shows that, after all, there is a good deal of fidelity to fact in our make-up.

The word "self-assertion", which has been used more or less throughout the book as a name for the native tendency to resist, persist, master, dominate, display oneself and seek social recognition, can now be seen to be not entirely a good word for the purpose. It seems to imply that the self-assertive individual is necessarily conscious of the self. From what has just been said, it can be seen that this would be putting the cart before the horse. The self-assertive impulse precedes, consciousness of self follows and depends on self-assertion. A true estimate of oneself and one's limitations arises from self-assertion plus experience of failure and the necessity of giving up and submitting.

Self-assertion is not identical with selfishness. Selfishness aims to get, self-assertion to do. Selfish behavior is, however, often dictated by self-assertion, as when a person wishes to get and have, in order to be able to show by his possessions what a great man he is. But sometimes self-assertion squelches selfishness, leading a person to renounce present gain without hope of later gain in compensation, just because he sees in such renunciation the best chance for mastery and proving himself "the captain of his soul".

The "expansion of the self" is an interesting and significant phenomenon. The individual comes to call things, persons, social groups, ideas and principles by the name {558} "mine". Now what is mine is part of me. My self-feeling attaches to my dog; I am proud of that dog, brag of his exploits, am cast down if I see him outclassed; and it is the same way with my house, my son, my town, my country. We spoke of this sort of thing before, under the name of "sublimation of the self-assertive impulse", and we said then that the sublimation was made possible by the combination of this impulse with some other interest. My dog is not entirely myself; he is a dog, and I am interested in him as a dog; I am interested in other dogs, and like to watch their antics. But this particular dog means more than another to me because he is mine; I have expanded myself to include him. In general, the self is expanded to take in objects that are interesting in themselves, but which become doubly interesting by being appropriated and identified in some measure with oneself.

Integration and Disintegration of the Personality

Though the individual is always in one sense a unit, there is a sense in which he needs to achieve unity. His various native tendencies and interests do not always pull together, and in fact some necessarily pull against others. So that we sometimes say of a person that he is behaving so differently from usual that we should not know he was the same person. We may speak of one person as being well integrated, meaning that he is always himself, his various tendencies being so coördinated as to work reasonably well together; whereas of another we speak as poorly integrated, unstable, an uncertain quantity. Integration is achieved partly by selection from among conflicting impulses, partly by coördination, partly by judicious treatment of those impulses that are denied; as was partly explained in the last chapter.

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The self, expanding socially, may expand in more than one direction, with the result that the individual has in a sense two or more selves, one for his business, one for his home; and it may happen that the instincts and interests dominating the individual in these two relations are quite different, so that a man who is hard and grasping in business is kind and generous to his wife and children. "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" gives an extreme picture of such lack of integration, a picture rather fanciful than drawn from real life.

But we do find in real life cases of dissociation of the personality, also called cases of double or multiple personality. The individual passes from one state to another, behaving very differently in the two states, and usually unable to remember in the primary or more lasting state what he has done in the secondary state. In the secondary state he remembers what he did in the primary state, but is apt to speak of it as if done by another person. In many cases, the primary state seems limited and hampered, as if the individual were not his complete self, while the secondary