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