The Foundations of Personality by Abraham Myerson (sites to read books for free TXT) 📖
- Author: Abraham Myerson
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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
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