POLITICAL ADMINISTRATORS
Some administrators are full of ideas and others are seldom attracted
by novelty. Some do their best work under a rather indulgent chief;
others fall to pieces unless there is strong pressure from above.
There are administrators who derive their influence over subordinates
from the authority of their positions rather than from the authority
of their personalities. There are some who may be depended upon for
the conscientious performance of detailed tasks, while others neglect
details and think in terms of general policy.
Viewed developmentally, it appears that one group of administrators is
remarkably akin to the agitators, differing only in the fact that they
are bound to particular individuals more closely, and thus displace
their affects upon less generalized objects. This gives a certain
independence to the administrator from the compulsion to “get a rise
out of” large numbers of the population. It ties him more securely,
however, to the members of his own environment, whose relations he
seeks to co-ordinate. The administrator is a co-ordinator of effort in
continuing activity.
The group which is allied to the agitators includes those who show
imagination and promoting drive. The history of H belongs in this
class, and has the incidental interest of showing how H behaved in war
time.
While it is accurate to say that H is diplomatic and seemingly open
and frank in dealing with his superiors, it should be added that
in situations which involve the fate of his own projects, he is
noticeably overtense, and likely to evaluate himself much higher than
others. He becomes slightly accusatory if his demands are rejected. The
elderly executive with whom H did his best work sometimes complained
that a conference with H was as fatiguing as a whole day’s work. The
older man felt that H might be entirely broken up if his projects were
rudely rejected, and he also believed the young man to be too valuable
to damage. H recognizes that he has often found himself shirking when
his superiors let him alone, and wonders why this attitude, which is
contrary to his own interests, should take hold of him. H displays a
tendency to behave arrogantly toward subordinates, and when he was in
the army it was obvious that he could maintain discipline only through
the formal authority vested in him.
H is an only child. His father was a big, overpowering person, who
was a strict disciplinarian. The parents were very prudish in sexual
matters, and one of his embarrassing memories is the confusion and
vexation of his mother when he asked her about babies. Left to his own
resources, and stimulated by a variety of incidents to explore sexual
problems on his own initiative, the boy became involved in a set of
episodes and reveries which he tried to keep from the family, and thus
met every family situation with some anxiety lest his sins should
find him out. H grew into a hyperactive and seemingly light-hearted
youngster, who obeyed his parents implicitly and met strangers with
ingratiating charm. H was constantly occupied with the task of adopting
a manner toward authority which would conceal his secret preoccupations.
About the age of four, H surprised his parents in a sexual embrace,
and vividly recalled his own mixture of burning curiosity and
embarrassment. Some of his early dream fragments indicate that he
repressed a powerful hostility toward his father, who he thought was
hurting his mother, and likewise repressed hatred of his mother, who he
felt was disloyal to him.
His experiences continued through a long chain of incidents. There was
mutual exposure of sexual parts between him and a playmate of his own
age. A deeply repressed episode was a seduction in which he played the
principal part. He was meanwhile completely successful in playing the
rôle of model boy.
When H was ten years of age, however, there transpired an incident
which for a time branded him in the neighborhood as a nasty little
renegade, and which had many subsequent repercussions. He touched the
exposed sexual parts of a neighbor girl, who was somewhat his junior.
The sister and brother of the girl were interested spectators. The
children told the cooks, and the news finally got around to the mother
of the girl. She took it calmly enough, but thought she ought to tell
the boy’s mother. H’s mother passed the story to his father, which was
the worst thing that could happen, from H’s point of view. His father
administered a sharp dressing-down, and forbade him to play outside
the yard for a fortnight. H’s father was very angry, and lectured him
about his sins every night for a while. Presently the father went over
to see the neighbor, and seems to have taken the line that the girl
was as much to blame as his son if not more so. This tactless behavior
completely alienated the neighbor.
Now this neighbor happened to edit an important newspaper, and ever
afterward this newspaper lost no opportunity to assail the efficiency
of the department in the city government headed by H’s father. These
attacks continued over many years, and H’s father occasionally threw
it up to him that he had been responsible for the original quarrel.
As it was, the boy was ostracized in the neighborhood for a year or
more, and was not invited to go to parties, although he could play
with the children. But H was self-conscious, and sought companionship
farther away. The brother of the girl thought that he ought to turn
against H, and there were some fights.
At fourteen H began to go to high school. He kept away from the
swimming pool during the first year or two because he was much
embarrassed by the lack of hair around his genitals. This supposed
retardation, about which he worried a great deal, lasted but a short
time, when a new set of worries came up. He now believed that his penis
was abnormally large, and that his testicles were too low-hanging and
perhaps deformed. In college he was nicknamed “Cocky,” on account of
his jauntiness, but he secretly suspected that this was an allusion to
his penis.
A chum taught him how to masturbate, and he continued to do so for
about six months, when his emissions became so frequent that his mother
told his father. For once, H’s father handled the situation with good
sense, and after a kindly interview in which the father explained that
it was not a good idea to indulge excessively, H quit. But even this
matter was not terminated, for the disturbing reverie remained that
perhaps his excessive masturbation had permanently impaired his manhood.
H had a lively curiosity about his mother’s body of which he was
intensely ashamed. He recalls loitering in his mother’s room while she
made ready to change her clothes, hoping that she would forget to send
him out. He found himself speculating about the shape of her body, and
was several times on the verge of spying through the keyhole. But his
impulse was inhibited when he remembered the story told by his father
in which a “peeper” was spoken of with the greatest contempt. H dreamed
of sexual intercourse with his mother on several occasions, nearly
always during periods of unusual strain. These dreams were deeply
buried and came out into the clear with great difficulty.
His sexual curiosity extended to animals, and he stimulated the sexual
parts of his dog. This further associated sex with the bestial and
unclean, and convinced him of his own guilt for so much as wondering
about it.
H’s first sexual intercourse cost him much worry. It occurred during
his second year in high school. He had been sent with the family
automobile to drive home a guest, and noticed a girl of about his own
age who was gay and flirtatious. On the way home he picked up the girl
with two boys whom he knew slightly. All of them had sexual intercourse
with the girl. He was terribly worried that he might reach home too
late. His strict father had laid down the rule that if he got home
at any hour of the night, he was to wake up the family and give an
account of himself. In his haste he neglected to inspect the car and
his father found some hairpins in the tonneau. H denied that he knew
anything about them. The incident, however, was not closed. He saw an
item in the newspaper about several men who were arrested for rape, and
wondered whether he had committed a horrible crime himself with his
companions. Before long the girl became pregnant and was brought before
the juvenile court. She named another gang of boys, and this gang
accused H and his two companions of being to blame. He was horrified at
the prospect of going into court and dragging his family to disgrace.
H was afraid that his partners in wrongdoing would confess, but he
denied everything to his father, and his father’s political influence
kept him from being haled into court. But for at least a year the black
cloud of possible exposure hung on the horizon of his mind.
All during his high-school days he had occasional sex intercourse, but
every episode was marred by some disagreeable features. While there
were such experiences with girls of low social standing, he had many
friendships with girls of good social position whom he idealized as
above sexuality. He attended a private school which was patronized
almost exclusively by children from very wealthy families, and H, who
was handsome, well dressed, quick, and agreeable, found his friends
among them. He was often in their homes and admired the signs of wealth
and culture. He became sensitive of the cultural limitations of his own
parents, and was afraid to entertain his school friends at home, but
fortunately from his point of view his father was willing to furnish
enough money to make it possible to hold up his end of the social
bargain at exclusive clubs and restaurants.
In college H continued to draw a sharp line between those who could
be petted, but who were too rich and refined to be approached for
intercourse, and those who could be petted, and who were poor enough to
be asked for intercourse. He continued to associate with a smart and
wealthy set, and finally concentrated his attention on the daughter of
a rich business man whom he wanted to marry. His left-handed affairs
continued at irregular intervals, and he felt remorseful when he had
the perversions performed on him.
Enough has been reported to convey an impression of H’s inner state.
His unsatisfied sexual curiosity had been whetted by his prudish
parents. His father defended his own ascendancy in the home by
ordering the boy about a great deal, and H responded to authority by a
system of reactions which became characteristic of him. He was tactful,
deferential, and acquiescent, qualified by inner resentment and rare
gestures of defiance. The father was not a friend but a barrier to be
circumvented, and the father’s hegemony was protected by the sense of
guilty inferiority which he had created in his son. Family differences,
such as arose when the father objected to housekeeping details, or when
the boy wanted more freedom to use the car, always showed the same
balance of forces--mother and son versus the father. The mother did not
defend herself by robust contradiction but by weak complaints. There
were only two instances in which the boy flared up enough to resist his
father openly.
If H had been more successful in winning applause outside the family,
it is quite possible that his position would have been made much easier
inside it. His social charm brought him into the most influential
circles, and this gratified his parents, but his father was a man of
action who felt that while wealthy friends were an asset, his son
ought to show more positive achievements. Though he never nagged H,
the father’s sternness, suspiciousness and absence of praise made a
deep impression on the boy, and gave him a sense of insecurity and
inadequacy. Although H scored no great successes, he went along without
academic catastrophe until college. He was suspended at the end of
his Freshman year for poor work, but came back after six months,
during which he pretended to his father that he was still in school.
The suspension was partly due to the advice given to the dean by his
fraternity brothers, who had found him very hard to manage, and wanted
to “bring him to his senses.” H was having a fling, since he was away
from home for the first time, and away from the intimidating father.
Presently he steadied down enough to get along.
Reminiscences of his guilty sexual experiments, deeply charged with
guilt-feeling, were continually bobbing up to interfere with his
progress. Once he was assigned to debate in high-school public-speaking
class. His opponent proved to be the brother of the girl with whom
he had the notorious incident several years before. The brother was
a prominent school leader who had no doubt forgotten the affair, but
it continued to weigh on H. He always had felt uncomfortable in the
other boy’s presence, and on this occasion, being poorly prepared, the
situation became so unbearable that he fainted.
He began to study agriculture at college, but soon found that he
had made a mistake. His family owned a ranch which he often visited
during vacations, and very much enjoyed. Farming was an avocation of
his father, and H had the idea that ranching was a genteel occupation
without much work, and with much ordering of other people about.
He vaguely thought of himself as a country gentleman of cultivated
leisure. The war saved H from agriculture. He took up aviation, without
losing “credits,” partly because the snobbish mother of his favorite
girl was bowled over by the uniform, and partly because he thought it
would be better to go into the war, if he had to go, as an officer than
as a private. His father’s influence secured a deferred classification
for him in the draft, and H, though feeling quite small about it, said
to himself that it was better for people to die who were without his
own advantages and achievements.
His career as an officer in the camp brought out the traits to which
reference has previously been made. His engaging deference toward
his superiors won them all, but he had trouble with the men. His own
insecurity led to an arrogant pose on his part that offended every
man in the company. He also discovered that the moment discipline was
relaxed he became very careless in performing his own duties.
The same constellation of traits reappeared in his administrative
career, modified by the fact that he learned to assume a less
provocative attitude toward his subordinates. He made a very good
record, and proposed a number of changes that were adopted for the
improvement of the service.
Looking back over H’s history, the striking thing is his prolonged
worry about his adjustment to specific persons. H was never able to
make the hurdle into abstract interests. Even his administrative ideas
were closely tied to the immediate context of the service. H’s life was
very much dominated by his relationship to definite people, and this
meant a prolonged carry-over of early attitudes to these individuals.
Unlike B, who could rightly feel that his father and brother and aunt
were treating him unjustly, H was all too aware that he “deserved” more
than he got. His success as an impostor was rudely interrupted in some
early episodes.
Another “marginal” history shows what happens to some men with
agitating aspirations who are not able to disentangle themselves
from a place inside an organization and to give themselves up wholly
to agitational work. Mr. I is a type occasionally met with inside
administrative staffs who makes a serious problem for himself and
others. He radiates plans that he neglects to execute, and he is
supercilious and defiant toward superiors. He lacks the drive, however,
to move over into agitational work entirely by identifying himself
with a sufficiently dramatic cause. Sometimes this is due, as in I’s
own case, to powerful early identifications with particular projects,
and with administrative work as such. When such a person can be pried
loose from certain of these early fixations, he often proves capable of
fulfilling the expectations which he is able to arouse.
The father of I was a man whose extraordinary talents won him great
distinction, but who never quite managed to come through as brilliantly
as people had a right to expect from one so richly endowed. I’s father
could talk five or six languages and read many more. He was educated in
England, France, and Italy, and after serving as a professor of modern
languages, his interest in educational problems led him to become the
head of a famous preparatory school, and later of a public school. He
spent most of his time reading, and during the last decade of his life
drank heavily, but without impairing the quality of his work. Someone
who knew him pronounced the man “a self-centered intellectual who
died without a friend.” The mother of I was an adopted daughter of a
member of the British aristocracy, and was brought up in distinguished
social and intellectual circles. The mother was exceptionally active
in all sorts of humanitarian enterprises but lavished much time and
love on the boy, who was “dreadfully spoiled,” and accepted everybody’s
judgment that he was a budding genius.
True to anticipations, the boy shot through school like a meteor,
ranking first in his subjects, and taking every available honor with
ease. In college he branched out into social and political life on a
large scale, and joined about twenty organizations, managing to have
himself put on every important committee.
Like his father, the son took up public-school work. Becoming
interested in psychology, he did some graduate work, and quickly
published a book that received very favorable comment among those
best qualified to judge it. The idea of educational reform fired his
imagination, and he lectured far and wide, engaging in agitations to
secure legislation which would authorize a number of experimental
schools.
The part of his history which is especially interesting to the student
of administration is this: He was continually at outs with his
superiors and colleagues. His first teaching position began with a
feud, and lasted but a little while. He was invited to resign his next
post. He was asked to resign the next position. He was asked to resign
the next position. These entries appear monotonously through his record.
Everybody conceded the brilliance and fertility of his mind, and did
homage to the originality of his plans. He began work but failed to
carry it far, seeming to think that work planned was work done. His
methods were always aggressive. Seized of an administrative idea, he
went to his superiors. When they criticized the scheme, or rejected his
suggestion, he often took the bit in his teeth and tried to run the
ship in his own way.
More than once financial irregularities have been discovered in
connection with his work. He has given out checks when no funds were
available, and run unduly large expense accounts. Whenever he has been
in financial jams, he has turned to other people for aid as a matter of
course, seeming to feel that he has a claim on the world for support.
He has always been childishly dependent on his wife for praise. He
resented his wife’s motherhood, but has been overindulgent with the
two children, who, his wife says, have no respect for him. He likes to
be the center of attention, and is a clever showman, and a great deal
of a bluffer. He is usually not high tempered but affectionate. He is
inclined to be accusatory toward his wife--“a vixen”--but his wife
appears to be a keen person, who was enough impressed by his precocious
brilliance to marry and to pamper him, but who in later years has
delivered herself of pointed comments on his character.
It seems that he has gone through several periods of alternating
exhilaration and despondency. The exhilarations came when he had a
position and when life became a little monotonous or a little hard.
At least one of these swings was sufficiently pronounced to lead to a
period of retirement in a sanitarium. During this time he was asked
what kind of work he liked best, and replied, “Reforming the world--my
first choice; second, exploiting the world.”
The strength of his narcissism is self-evident, and the feminine marks
in his character are numerous. He expects to be nurtured and supported
by the world as a matter of right. He demands constant “mothering”
from his wife, and coddles the children. His father-hatred, which was
thoroughly repressed in the family, comes out in his difficulty with
father-surrogates, and in his determination to change the educational
system at points where the father took it for granted or overtly
defended it. The selection of the pedagogical rôle is itself indicative
of the strength of his father-identification. What seems to have
happened in his development is a fixation of interests in a relatively
narrow sphere in which the affects are so powerful and at the same time
so contradictory that difficulties are assured. He finds it impossible
to shake off his managerial aspirations sufficiently to devote all
his time to the propagation of ideas. Although his affects are
displaced upon abstract problems, they are not displaced upon objects
sufficiently removed from his father, and the displacement does not
succeed in making it possible for him to achieve an impersonal attitude
toward his superiors and colleagues in educational administration. The
exaggerated praise heaped upon him as a boy had much to do with the
narcissism. His incapacity to follow through is no doubt related to his
early conflicts over genital activity. The chief point of significant
contrast with A is that the narcissistic component interfered more
seriously with H’s development, since it led him to insist upon playing
an administrative rôle. A’s environment was less prostrate before him,
and he was able to avoid assuming administrative obligations where he
would be cramped and subordinated.
The history of J, which has been reported by Alexander,[42] shows what
lies behind a powerful administrator’s thirst for responsibility, and
reveals how changes in the working relations inside an organization may
disorganize the individual.
J was a driving executive whose superiors deferred to his judgment
and accepted his plans. His abounding energy sought an outlet through
the assumption of heavier and heavier responsibilities inside the
organization. Finally, a change in the chief executive brought J under
the immediate control of a man who handled him with cool assurance,
holding him firmly but considerately to his own formal sphere of
action. Confronted for the first time in his life by a more powerful
personality who knew how to regulate him, J took the wife of another
man for his mistress, and in spite of the remonstrances of those who
knew him, he held tenaciously to both the mistress and the wife.
An analysis showed that J was characterized from early childhood by a
notable split in his personality. Side by side with his aggressive,
masculine drive there existed a strongly repressed, though powerful,
feminine tendency. His personality is to be rendered intelligible only
as a compromise formation between those two incompatible motives. The
repression of the passive component produced a regressive fixation upon
the wife, who was compelled to play a markedly maternal rôle, and to
humor his every whim. He resented it if his every wish was not defined
and fulfilled before he had to go to the trouble of putting it into
words. J has delicate aesthetic sensibilities, and is a cultivated
amateur in the arts.
In sharpest imaginable contrast to his behavior at home was his
insatiable thirst for authority and responsibility in his professional
life. One of his dreams acutely symbolized him as a giant automobile of
untold horse-power, whose body was a light French coach of the rococo
period.
As Alexander comments, J’s life-problem was to indulge his passive
demands without doing violence to his masculine ideal. But this was
not accomplished without strain. He could earn periods of indulgence
in aesthetics by exaggerated aggressiveness in his work, but as his
feminine tendencies were gratified, his masculine ideal was endangered,
and he would be driven back to high-pressure management. The
psychological significance of his work was symbolized in the following
dream: He was penetrating a thick sheet of cardboard with a needle,
and continually asking for new sheets to bore through. He succeeded
in going through several thicknesses. The cardboard represented his
occupational problems, and the needle his penis. His professional
activity was largely a sublimation of his aggressive, active sexuality.
The equilibrium between his aggressiveness in work and his passivity
in marital life was upset by the new chief executive, who skilfully
hemmed in his activity. Alexander remarks that it is impossible for
a man who has struggled all his life against very strong unconscious
homosexuality to serve under a strong man. The dominating personality
arouses the latent attitude, and the subordinate must resort to special
means of maintaining his repression. In the case of B, which we have
previously considered, the means of restoring some sort of equilibrium
was escape (by resigning), but when that became very difficult, he fled
into a world of fantasy (a psychosis). J met the crisis by breaking
through the sublimation of his heterosexuality, and taking a mistress
as an outlet for his thwarted drives. Further than that, he vindicated
his masculinity in a very dramatic way. He not only took a mistress,
but he took the wife of another.
From now on, he was dependent on both women to preserve the equilibrium
of his personality. Previously the equilibrium had been maintained
between wife and work; now it depended on wife, mistress, and work, for
the aggressive, masculine component required the mistress to make up
for the limitations imposed upon his working sphere.
Alexander reports that in the course of a long analysis this remarkable
split in the personality was traced back to early childhood. “At the
age of four he was already the same person.” At the age of four he
continued to drink milk out of a bottle, stubbornly resisting every
effort to break him of the practice. But--and it was with an emphatic
“but” that J produced the reminiscence--at the same time the boy was
especially adventurous and independent, riding all by himself out on
the highway. Here was the same antithesis that later expressed itself
in his peculiar relation to wife and work. The child won the right to
indulge his infantile, oral tendencies in one particular by exaggerated
boldness in other respects. This solution was the prototype for his
later life.
The rôle of the bottle was later taken by his wife, whom he often
treated like an inanimate object whose only function was to
minister to his needs, while his work, and later his mistress, were
the successors to the bicycle, by means of which he was able to
prove his independence and his masculinity to himself and the world.
The castration fear, which was aroused by the means adopted to break up
his infantile masturbation, favored the oral fixation, and came into
conflict with his strong masculine genital drive, laying the basis for
this notable character split.
* * * * *
The records so far discussed have had to do with inventive or driving
administrators. A type often met with in the public service is the
conscientious, overscrupulous official, whose touchiness, fondness
for detail, delight in routine, and passion for accuracy at once
preserve the integrity of the service and alienate the affections
of anybody who has to do business with the government. K was such a
man. For some years he was in the forestry service, where part of his
duties was to mark the trees that might be cut by private lumbermen.
The lumbermen naturally argued that the straight, sound trees should
be cut and the damaged ones left for seed. K took a variety of other
factors into account, and spent days measuring and estimating position,
growth rates, and shade area, exasperating the lumbermen with his
everlasting and often superfluous scrupulousness. He keenly felt his
responsibilities as a public servant, and disliked the very appearance
of succumbing to private pressure. At one time K resigned the service
in disgust because of “uncivil” treatment by a superior, but his
“touchiness” was much more deeply rooted in his nature than he had any
idea.
The record of K is not only the story of a pedantic official but of
an ardent patriot. One of the highest forms of patriotism is supposed
to be volunteering for posts of conspicuous danger in war. K pulled
all the wires within reach to get a place on the front line, and only
the point-blank refusal of his superiors to allow him to squander his
technical ability prevented him from achieving his desire. From a
close examination of his intimate history we learn how one variety of
superpatriot comes to be.
K was the youngest of four children. His next brother was eight years
his senior, his sister was five years older than this brother, and his
oldest brother was eighteen years ahead of him.
He never remembered a time when his mother and father, who were
divorced when he was eight, were on good terms with each other. They
seldom spoke, except to quarrel. This family background was reflected
in the mental life of the growing child. K was notoriously nervous and
timid. From a very early day he began to be preoccupied with why he
was different from everybody else in the world. His sense of isolation
and strangeness led him to believe that perhaps he was the only real
person in the world and that everybody else was an illusion. He would
sometimes come up wonderingly to touch his mother, and then himself,
to see if she, too, were real. He speculated on how he could get away
from the human shadows around him, and became convinced that he could
fly. Several times he laboriously climbed up on the seat of a kitchen
chair, spread his arms like a bird, and leaped into space. Every time
he crashed to the floor, his frightened mother rescued him, but he
always felt surprised and rather aggrieved that he should fall, and
secretly believed that he could fly after all. This type of reaction
characteristically appears where emotional conflicts in the home create
an acute problem of emotional orientation for the child.
As a small boy he was sent by his mother to follow his father when he
left the house, and to report where he went. K developed a strong sense
of guilt for this, and after the divorce was afraid that his father
would return and take revenge on him in some unknown and horrible way.
His father did occasionally reappear, and once invited the boy to spend
the night with him, but K was too frightened to accept.
The family often lived in the country, and the self-consciousness of
K in the presence of strangers was heightened by frequent removals
into new and often isolated places. One of the towns near which he
lived when about nine was on a frontier. Gun-play was frequent, and
K remembers having seen the corpses of men who had been shot down in
street brawls. There were ominous-looking fellows around town, and the
boy gave them a wide berth.
The death of his mother when he was twelve robbed K of his main
emotional support in a dangerous world. She died after two years of
suffering from an infected limb. She would also spit into bits of
papers and burn them in the stove. K wondered why she did this, and
later developed a reverie the importance of which will soon appear.
The older members of the family were left with K on their hands, and
they decided to club together and put all thought of marrying out of
their heads until he was able to stand alone. The boy did not then
realize the sacrifices they made for him, but he later discovered that
his older brother put off marrying the girl of his choice until she
broke off the engagement and married someone else. It was not until
about the time that he graduated from high school and the home was
broken up that he became aware of what he owed them, and ever after he
was plagued by the thought of his unworthiness, and his incapacity to
repay his brothers and sister for their care. Up to that time he had
experienced no particular sense of gratitude, and although his older
brother once or twice referred to his dependent position, his private
feelings were mainly of resentment against the restrictions imposed
upon him.
And these restrictions were not inconsiderable. The family ran a
greenhouse, and the drudgery involved in such an occupation was
incessant. There were slips to transplant, beds to weed, and loads
to pull and carry. There were long hours of boredom over routine
occupations. K was expected to dash home from school at the earliest
possible moment, and to lend a hand with the endless chores about the
place.
Occasionally he succeeded in evading his duties. He stopped to play on
the way home from deliveries, and he stayed at school on some pretext
or other to join the drill squad. But he was always haunted by fear
and guilt. His older brother was a strict disciplinarian, and beat
him several times. His sister occasionally let him have some spending
money, but as a rule he was tightly cramped financially. When his
gang organized into a drill squad, and chose their uniforms, he was
humiliated when the necessary dollars were not forthcoming from home.
K was worried by what appeared to be a lack of physical stamina and
endurance. This idea (which had no basis in fact) in part grew out of
his efforts to do what his brothers did. They occasionally broad-jumped
or pulled weights, and of course K made a poor showing beside them. But
for the unconscious hostility against them, such unequal results would
not have disturbed him. His morbid worries about his strength led him
to submit to a great deal of bullying by town toughs.
His adolescent years were marred by perpetual anxieties about his
social adequacy. He had been the victim of an explosion which left his
face marked with powder stains, and this repugnant tattooing, which
disappeared very gradually, embarrassed him for years.
K’s older brothers and sister sometimes took him with them to parties
because there was nobody to leave him with, and an annoying sense of
being in the way added to his growing sense of social inadequacy.
During high-school days he fell in love with the daughter of the most
influential man in the locality, but as her social standards became
more exacting, his lack of money, leisure, and prestige made it
impossible for him to travel with her set. One of the most humiliating
episodes in his life was the one which broke up their relations. K had
arranged to meet her at a dancing class. Another girl called up to see
if he would take her, but he said he wasn’t going. His oldest brother
had listened in on the telephone extension, and was astonished to see
K appear all dressed up and on the way out. He launched forth on a
tirade, declaring that K gallivanted around throwing money away and
shirking his job, though he was absolutely dependent on others for his
daily bread. K was cut to the quick, and went back to his room churning
with too many emotions to call up and offer explanations to the girl.
K had taken it for granted ever since he was a small boy that he would
go to college. He traced back his determination to an incident when
he was driving across the plains one magnificent starry night. He sat
in the bottom of the rig, rapt in contemplation of the sparkling sky,
while his mother chatted with her neighbor. Suddenly he asked how he
could find out about the stars, and she replied that people could study
all about them in college. He then and there resolved to go to college,
and never had a moment’s doubt about it, although the members of his
immediate family went no farther than the common school.
In spite of his inferiority feelings, K was not cut off from some
measure of recognition in high school. His dependable and sympathetic
qualities impressed themselves upon those who came into close daily
contact with him, and he was made an officer of his high-school class.
He was respectful toward his teachers and good in his studies.
College was an entirely different affair. His personal worries
multiplied during the transition period. Lacking funds, he sought
a scholarship. The only one tenable from his district to the state
university was in ceramic engineering, and after looking up “ceramic”
in the dictionary, he applied and was selected for admission. The work
proved to have no particular interest for him, and his social life was
even less satisfying. He was met at the college town by the members
of a church group who lived together in a dormitory (some friend had
written them), and he, though never devout, stopped with them during
the first term. This marked him as a non-fraternity man. He waited
tables in a fraternity house, and as bad luck would have it, a former
teacher wrote highly recommending him to the consideration of this
particular fraternity. When a committee broke the news to him, he was
utterly confused and made such a lamentable impression that it was not
possible to extend him the bid. One of his odd jobs was beating carpets
at a sorority house, and this turned out to be the sorority that had
pledged the girl with whom he had been (and still felt) in love.
For relaxation K was forced into the domain of the kitchen maids.
A servant girl struck up a friendship with him, and he had sexual
relations with her. He had tried intercourse once during high-school
days, and had a premature emission, a practice which often bothered him
later, providing a permanent source of humiliation.
Transferring to another college, he began his work in forestry, in
which he had acquired some interest during hikes with a friendly
high-school teacher. Handicapped by lack of money and worried by a
mounting sense of social inadequacy, his life was no more successful
than before. In high-school days he envied a talkative lad who
astonished the company by glibly recounting anecdotes about Napoleon.
One of his relatives whom he had known as a boy left an ideal of social
charm which never was attained.
K’s inner uncertainties finally reached a point which led him to
resolve that he ought to discover once for all whether forestry
would prove to be a proper vocation. He left college and joined the
government service. This was to be the great test of his ability to
master himself.
So keen was his preoccupation with self-mastery that he resented
every effort to influence him, and acted with unnecessary strictness
in dealing with private lumbermen. He was often deprived of human
relationships during his days in the field, and gradually his mind
became more and more enmeshed in morbid reflections about himself.
His mind simply refused to concentrate on the technical volumes which
he had brought with him to improve the solitude. Reveries which had
been slowly germinating on the periphery of his attention now began to
foliate. K had always wondered why his mother burned those little bits
of paper. It dawned on him one day that she might really have died of
tuberculosis, and that he must therefore be predisposed toward that
disease. Early in his high-school days, he had begun deep-breathing
exercises, though he had never freely admitted to himself or anybody
else what lay behind it. He always gave the usual account of his
mother’s death to insurance examiners, smothering his doubts in
affirmation.
This was his state of mind when America entered the war. He found
himself saying that since he was going to die anyhow from a loathsome
disease, he might as well die at once and get it over with. Enlisting
without delay, he sought to reach an exposed position as rapidly as
he could. But the government had different ideas, and assigned him to
a branch of the service where his technical skill would prove useful.
In his disappointment, all the old feelings of inadequacy returned.
Interviewed by an officer he floundered and stumbled, neglecting
to report essential facts about his training and experience. The
accidental intervention of an acquaintance straightened out the matter,
and secured the authority to which his record entitled him. At first
he was very much embarrassed in the company of lumberjacks, but his
behavior never showed his confusion. His actual record was, as usual,
excellent, and his conscientious efficiency won the indorsement of
everybody who knew him.
K married a rather dominating school-teacher whom he had known for some
time. When things went badly, as they often did, he was partially
impotent, and also showed the phenomenon which has been christened
“Sunday neurosis.” Every Sunday afternoon when he was at home he would
find himself assailed by deep depression, and would weep quietly to
himself.[43] In spite of these neurotic troubles, K was able to make
an important place for himself inside a bureaucracy, when he came back
from the army.
From one point of view, K’s character may be summed up by saying that
his overscrupulous performance of duty was an elaborate effort to
demonstrate his potency, and that his longing for danger came at a
time when he was willing to surrender the struggle. K’s morbid moods
and persistent feelings of inadequacy are self-imposed penalties for
his hostilities against the environment. He possessed very powerful
aggressive drives which were partly expressed in the adoption of a
self-ideal which was far more ambitious than anything deemed feasible
by the family. His narcissism was such that he was prevented from
viewing himself as an object, and from modifying his demands upon the
world for recognition, and upon himself for production, until these
demands bore a closer relationship to his own skills and opportunities.
The basis for his obsessive scrupulousness was laid during early
childhood, when he was torn between father and mother-loyalties, and
acted out within his own nature the clashes that occurred between
them. His strong mother-identification is shown by his belief that he
suffered from her diseases, and would die from tuberculosis as she had
died. He preferred death to a reduction in his demands upon himself
and the world. Such a reaction has in it the primitive demand of the
child to treat the world as controllable at will by the omnipotent
fantasy. His genital difficulties testify to the intensity of the
castration conflict, and show the passive-oral regression. K deeply
resented having to adjust to the world at all. His capacity for hard
work was achieved against high resistance, and in part had the value of
a penance. Thus when workless days came around, he was always ill at
ease, and sometimes showed the spells of weeping on Sunday afternoons.
To work was to prove his potency, and to supply a ritual substitute
for and defense against his antisocial impulses. He was unable to
emancipate himself very far from the reactions of the people in his
immediate environment.
* * * * *
As a class the administrators differ from the agitators by the
displacement of their affects upon less remote and abstract objects.
In the case of one important group this failure to achieve abstract
objects is due to excessive preoccupation with specific individuals in
the family circle, and to the correlative difficulty of defining the
rôle of the self. Putting agitator A at one end of the scale, we may
place administrator K or H near the other. Agitator B was less able
to displace than A, as shown by the more personal character of the
reforms which interested him. K or H were so concerned about definite
people, and about their own failures in relation to many of them, that
emancipation was unattainable.
As a hypothetical construction from these “marginal” cases, we may
suggest that another group of administrators is recruited from among
those who have passed smoothly through their developmental crises. They
have not overrepressed powerful hostilities, but either sublimated
these drives, or expressed them boldly in the intimate circle. They
display an impersonal interest in the task of organization itself,
and assert themselves with firmness, though not with overemphasis,
in professional and in intimate life. Their lack of interest in
abstractions is due to the fact that they have never needed them as
a means of dealing with their emotional problems. They can take or
leave general ideas without using them to arouse widespread affective
responses from the public. Tied neither to abstractions nor to
particular people, they are able to deal with both in a context of
human relations, impersonally conceived. Their affects flow freely;
they are not affectless, but affectively adjusted. Very original and
overdriving administrators seem to show a fundamental pattern which
coincides with that of the agitators; the differences in specific
development are principally due to the cultural patterns available for
identification at critical phases of growth.