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

almost obsessed by the belief that he knew but little compared to

others.

One day there walked into my office a lady, head of a large

enterprise, who had been pointed out to me some time previously

as the very personification of self-assurance and superiority. A

dignified woman of middle age, whose reserve and correct manners

impressed one at once; she bore out in career and casual

conversation this impression of one whose confidence and belief

in herself were not misplaced, in other words, a harmoniously

developed egotist. What she came to consult me about, was—her

feeling of inferiority!

All of her life, said she, she had been overawed by others. As a

girl her mother ruled her, and her younger sister, more charming

and more vivacious, was the pet of the family. Brought up in a

strict church, she developed a firmness of speech and conduct

that inhibited the frankness and friendliness of her social

contacts. Because of this, and her overserious attitudes

generally, girls of her own age rather avoided her, and she

became painfully self-conscious in their company as well as in

the company of men. She wanted to “let go” but could not, and in

time felt that there was something lacking in her, that people

laughed at her behind her back and that no one really liked her.

Her reaction to this was to determine that she would not show her

real feelings, that she would deal with the world on a basis of

“business only” and cut out friendship from her life. Her

intelligence and her devotion to her work brought her success,

and she would have gone her way without regard for her

“inferiority complex” had not chance thrown in her way a young

woman colleague who saw through her elder’s pose and became her

friend. My patient drank in this friendship with an avidity the

greater for her long loneliness, and she was very happy until the

younger woman fell in love with a man and began to neglect her

colleague.

This broke Miss B.‘s spirit. “Had I not known friendship I might

have gone on, but now I feel that every one must see what a fool

I am and what a fool I have been. I am more shy than ever, I feel

as if every one were really stronger than I am, and that some day

everybody will see through my pose,—and then where will I be?”

Hide-and-go-seek is one of the great games of adults as well as

of children. We hide our own defects and seek the defects of

others in order to avoid inferiority and to feel competitive

superiority. But there is a deep contradiction in our natures: we

seek to display ourselves as we are to those who we feel love us,

and we hide our real self from the enemy or the stranger. The

protective marking of birds and insects “amateurish compared to

the protective marking we apply to ourselves.

I forbear from depicting further character types. People are not

as easily classified as automobiles, and the combinations

possible exceed computation. Character growth, in each individual

human being, is a growth in likeness to others and a growth in

unlikeness, as well. As we move from childhood to youth, and

thence to middle and old age, qualities appear and recede, and

the personality passes along to unity and harmony or else there

is disintegration. He who believes as I do that the Grecian sage

was immortally right when he enjoined man to know himself will

agree that though understanding character is a difficult

discipline it is the principal science of life. We are only

starting such a science; we need to approach our subject with

candor and without prejudice. Though our subject brings us in

direct contact with the deepest of problems, the meaning of life,

the nature of the Ego and the source of consciousness, these we

must ignore as out of our knowledge. Limiting ourselves to a

humble effort to know our fellow men and our own selves, we shall

find that our efforts not only add to our knowledge but add

unmeasurably to our sympathy with and our love for our fellows.

End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Foundations of Personality