CHAPTER XVII. SOME CHARACTER TYPES

There is one kind of energy discharger that we may call the

hyperkinetic, controlled practical type. This group is

characterized by great and constant activity, well controlled by

purpose, with eagerness and enthusiasm manifested in each act but

not excessively.

1. A. is one of these people. In school he specialized in

athletics and was a fine all-round player in almost every sport.

When he left high school to go to work he at once entered

business. His employers soon found him to be a tireless worker,

steady and purposeful in everything. In addition to carrying on

his duties by day, A. studied nights, carefully choosing his

subjects so that they related directly to his business. Despite

the fact that his work was hard and his studies exacting, A. had

energy enough left to join social organizations and to take a

leading part in their affairs. He became quickly known as one of

those busy people who always are ready to take on more work.

Naturally this led to his becoming a leader, first in his social

relations and second in his business. Always practical in his

judgments and actions, A. fell in love with the daughter of a

rich family and married her, with the full approval of her

relatives, who were keen enough to see that his energy, power and

control were destined for success.

The leading traits that A. manifests hinge around his high energy

and control. He is honest and conventional, devoted to the ideals

of his group and admires learning, but he is not in any sense a

scholar. He is a poor speaker, in the ordinary sense of that

term, but curiously effective, nevertheless, because his earnest

energy and sturdy common sense win approval as "not a theorist."

But mainly he wins because he is tireless in energy and

enthusiasm and yet has yoked these qualities to ordinary

purposes. The average man he meets understands him thoroughly,

sympathizes with him completely and accepts him as a leader after

his own heart.

So A. has become rich and respected. As times goes on, as he is

brought more and more into contact with large affairs outside of

business; as a trustee of hospitals and a director of charitable

organizations, he broadens out but not into an "unsafe" attitude.

He pities the unfortunate but is not truly sympathetic, in that

it rarely occurs to him that success and failure are relative,

that an accident might have shipwrecked his fortunes and that his

good qualities are as innate as his complexion. For this man

prides himself on his strong will and courage, whereas he merely

has within him a fine engine in whose construction he had no

part.

2. The hyperkinetic, controlled, impractical person. B. is, in

the fundamentals of energy and control, singularly like A., but

because of the nature of his interests and purposes their lives

have completely diverged so that no one would ordinarily

recognize the kinship in type. B. is and always has been a

worker, enthusiastic and enduring, and he has stuck to his last

with a fidelity that is remarkable. He is very likable in the

ordinary sense,--pleasant to look at, cheerful, ready to joke,

laugh or to help the other fellow. Nevertheless, he has only a

few friends and is a distinctly disappointed man at heart,

because his interests are in the ordinary sense, impractical.

B. early became interested in physiology. From the very start he

found in the workings of the human body a fascination that

concentrated his efforts. Poor, he worked hard enough to obtain

scholarships and fellowships in one university after another

until finally he became a Ph. D. Here was a great error from the

practical standpoint; for had he become an M. D., he would have

had a profession that offered an independent financial future.

But, in his zeal, he did not wish to take on the extended program

of the physician, and he saw clearly that he might become a

better scientist as a Ph. D. He became a teacher in one school

after another, did a good deal of research work, but has not been

fortunate enough to make any epoch-making discoveries. He is one

of those splendid, painstaking, energetic men found in every

university who turn out good pieces of work of which only a few

know anything, and from which in the course of time some genius

or lucky scientist culls a few facts upon which to build up a

great theory or a new doctrine. He married one of his own

students, a fine woman but unluckily not very strong, and so

there fell on him many a domestic duty that a thousand extra

dollars a year would have turned over to a maid.

Thus B. is an obscure but respected member of the faculty of a

small university. He teaches well, though he dislikes it, and he

is happy at the times when he works hard at some physiological

problem. He loves his family and has vowed that his son will be a

business man. He feels inferior as he contemplates his obscure

existence, with its precarious financial state, its drudgery and

most of all the gradual disappearance of his ideals. He is frank

to himself alone, wishes he had made money, but is apt to sneer

at the world of the "fat and successful" as less than his

intellectual equal. He compares his own rewards with that of the

successful man knowing less and with a narrower outlook.

Thus, through success, A. is broadening and becoming something of

an idealist. B. is narrowing and through failure is losing his

ideals. This is not an uncommon effect of success and failure.

Where success leads to arrogance and conceit it narrows, but

where the character withstands this result the increased

experience and opportunity is of great value to character.

Failure may embitter and thus narrow through envy and lost

energy, but also it may strip away conceit and overestimation and

thus lead to a richer insight into life.

3. The hyperkinetic, uncontrolled or shallow. This type, although

quick and apparently energetic, is deficient in a fundamental of

the personality, in the organizing energy. This deficiency may

extend into all phases of the mental life or in only a few

phases. Thus we see people whose thinking is rapid, energetic,

but they cannot "stick" to one line of thought long enough to

reach a goal. Others are similarly situated in regard to

purposes; they are enthusiastic, easily stirred into activity,

but rarely do their purposes remain fixed long enough for

success. As a rule this class is inconstant in affections, though

warm and sympathetic. They gush but never organize their

philanthropic efforts, so that they rarely do any real good.

Often the most lovable of people, they are at the same time the

despair of those who know them best.

M. is a woman who makes a fine first impression, is very pretty,

with nice manners and a quick, flattering interest in every one

she meets. She is usually classed as intelligent because she is

vivacious, that is, her mind follows the trend of things quickly,

and she marshals whatever she knows very readily. As one who

knows her well says, "She shows all her goods the first time. You

really do not know how slender her stock in trade is until you

see the same goods and tricks every time you meet her." Needless

to say her critic is a woman.

M. is interested in something new each week. The "new" usually

fascinates her, and she becomes so extraordinarily busy that she

hardly has time to eat or sleep. She is always put on committees

if the organization heads do not know her, but if they do, she is

carefully slated for something of no importance. After a short

time her interest has shifted to something else. Thus she passes

from work in behalf of blind babies to raising funds for a home

for indigent actors; from energy spent in philanthropy to energy

spent in learning the latest dances. Her enthusiasm never cools

off, though its goal always changes.

Fortunately she is married to a rich man who views her with

affection and a shrug of his shoulders. Her children know her;

now and then, she becomes extraordinarily interested in their

welfare, much to their disgust and rebellion, for they have long

since sized her up.

She has often been on the verge of a love affair with some man

who is professionally interested in something into which she has

leaped for a short time. She raves about him, follows him,

flatters and adores him, and then, before the poor fellow knows

where he is at, she is out of love and off somewhere else. This

mutability of affection has undoubtedly saved her from disaster.

Were she not rich, M. would be one of the social problems that

the social workers cannot understand or handle, e. g., there is a

type who never sticks to anything, not because he is bored

quickly, or is inefficient, but because he is at the mercy of the

new and irrelevant. Without sufficient means he throws up his job

and tries to get the new work he longs to do. Sometimes he fails

to get it, and then he becomes an unemployed problem.

This type of uncontrolled energy reaches its height in the

manical or manic phase of the disease already described as manic

depressive insanity. The "manic personality," which need not

become insane, is characterized by high energy, vivacious

emotions, rapid flow of thought and irrelevant associations.

4. The mesokinetic--medium or average in their energy (feeling

and power)--run the range of the vast groups we call the average.

This type is spurred on by necessity, custom and habit to steady

work and steady living. Possessed of practical wisdom, their

world is narrow, their affections only called out for their

kindred and immediate friends. Their interests are largely away

from their work and as a rule do not include the past or future

of the race. Usually conservative, they accept the moral

standards as absolute and are quick to resent changes in custom.

They follow leaders cheerfully, are capable of intense loyalty to

that cause which they believe to stand for their interests. Yet

each individual of the mass of men, though he never rises above

mediocrity, presents to his intimates a grouping of qualities and

peculiarities that gives him a distinct personality.

C. is one of those individuals whose mediocre energy has stood

between him and so-called success. At present he is forty and

occupies about the same position that he did at twenty. As a boy

he was fond of play but never excelled in any sport and never

occupied a place of leadership. He had the usual pugnacious code

of boys, but because he was friendly and good-natured rarely got

into a fight. He liked to read and was rather above the average

in intelligence, but he never tackled the difficult reading,

confining himself to the "interesting" novel and easy

information. He left high school when he was sixteen and

immediately on leaving he dropped all study. He entered an office

as errand boy and was recognized as faithful and industrious, but

he showed no especial initiative or energy. In the course of time

he was promoted from one position to another until he became a

shipper at the age of twenty. Since this time he has remained at

this post without change, except that when he got married and on

a few occasions afterward, when the cost of living rose, his

salary was raised.

C. is married, and his wife often "nags" him because he does not

get ahead. She tells him that he has no energy and fight in him,

that if he would he could do better. Sometimes he takes refuge in

the statement that he has no pull, that those who have been

promoted over his head are favorites for some reason or another,

and he rarely recognizes the superiority of his immediate

superiors, though he is loyal enough to the boss. He lives in

that "quiet despair" that Thoreau so aptly describes as the life

of the average man, and he seeks escape from it in smoking, in

belonging to a variety of fraternal organizations, in the movies

and the detective story. He is a "good" father and husband, which

means that he turns over all his earnings, is faithful and kind.

Except that he admonishes and punishes his children when they are

"bad," he takes no constructive share in their training and

leaves that to the mother, the church and the school. He and his

wife are attached to one another through habit and mutual need,

but they have some time since outlived passion and intense

affection. She has sized him up as a failure and knows herself

doomed to struggle against poverty, and he knows that she

understands him. This mutual "understanding" keeps them at arm's

length except in the face of danger or disaster, when they cling

to each other for comfort and support. This is the history of

many a marriage that on its surface is quiet and peaceful.

The hypokinetic types. We cannot separate energy display from

enthusiasm, courage, intelligence, persistent purpose, etc. If I

have made myself clear in the preceding pages of this book, you

will realize that no character of man works alone, but all

feeling, thought and action is a resultant of forces.

Nevertheless, there are those in whom the fire of life burns high

and others in whom it burns low, and either group may be of

totally different qualities otherwise.

There are people of low energy discharge, and these it seems to

me are of two main kinds,--the one where nothing seems to arouse

or create powerful motives and purposes, and the other in whom

the main defect is a rapidly arising exhaustion. The first I call

the simple hypokinetic group and the other the irritable

hypokinetic group.

The simple hypokinetic person may be one of any grade of

intelligence but more commonly is of low intelligence. In any

school for the feeble-minded one finds the apathetic imbecile,

who can be kept at work by goading and stimulation of one kind or

another, who does not tire especially, but who never works beyond

a low level of speed and enthusiasm.

5. A more interesting type is T. He may be called the intelligent

hypokinetic, the high-grade failure. As a baby he learned to walk

late, though he talked early and well. He played in a leisurely

sort of way, running only when he had to and content as a rule to

be in the house. He was not seclusive, seeming to enjoy the

company of other children, but rarely made any efforts to seek

them out. He was quick to learn but showed only a moderate

curiosity, and he rarely made any investigations on his own

account. It was noticed that he seldom asked "why" in the usual

manner of intelligent children.

He did fairly well in school; he had a wonderful memory and

seemed to see very quickly into intricate problems. It was always

a great surprise of his teachers that he was so bright, as one

said, in comparison to his standing. Once or twice a zealous

teacher sought to stimulate him into more effort and study, but

though he responded for a short time, gradually he slipped back

into his own easy pace. He went through high school, and on the

basis of a splendid memory and a keen intelligence, which by this

time were easily recognized, he was sent to college. He took no

part in athletics and little part in the communal college

activities. He had so good a command of facts and with this so

cynical a point of view that he became quite a college character

and was pointed out as a fellow who could lead his class if he

would. As a matter of fact, nothing could spur him to real

competitive effort.

We may pass briefly over his life. After he left college, he

drifted from one position to another. Usually in some hack

literary line. Were it not for a small income he would have

starved. After a few years he become very fat and gross looking,

and then came a kindly pneumonia which carried him off.

We must not mistake the stolid for the hypokinetic. There was a

classmate of mine in the medical school, a large, quiet fellow,

D. M., who got by everything, as the boys said, by the skin of

his teeth. He worked without enthusiasm or zeal, studied

infrequently and managed to pass along to his second year, at

about the bottom of the class. In that year we took up

bacteriology, the "bug-bear" as one punster put it, of the

school. Just what it was about the subject that aroused D. M. I

never knew, but a remarkable transformation took place. The man

changed over, studied hard, read outside literature and actually

asked for the privilege of working in the laboratory Sundays and

holidays so that he might learn more. When this was known to the

rest of the class, there were bets placed that he would not

"last," but quite to the surprise of everybody D. M. gained in

momentum as he went along. As a matter of fact, his interest on

the subject grew, and he is now a bacteriologist of good

standing. In fact, his lack of interest in other matters has

helped him, since he has no distracting tastes or pleasures.

Thus there are persons of specialized interest and energy, and it

may well be that there is for most of the hypokinetic a line of

work that would act to energize them. The problem, therefore, in

each case is to find the latent ability and interest and to

regard no case as really hopeless. I say this despite the fact

that I believe some cases are hopeless. The pessimistic attitude

on the part of parent or teacher kills effort; the optimistic

attitude fosters energetic effort.

6. The irritable hypokinetic. Irritability[1] of a pathological

type as a phase of lowered energy is well known to every

physiologist and in the practical everyday world is seen in the

tired and sick. There are people who from the very start of life

show lowered endurance, who respond to certain stimuli in an

excessive manner and are easily exhausted. This type the

neurologist calls the congenital neurasthenic, and it may be we

are dealing here with some defect in the elimination of fatigue

products. This, however, is only a guess, and the disease factor,

if there is any, is entirely unknown. I do not pretend that the

person I am to describe is entirely representative of this group.

Indeed, no dozen cases would show all the symptoms and

peculiarities of the irritable hypokinetic group.

[1] One must take care not to mistake the irritability which is

the characteristic of all living tissue for the irritability here

considered.

E. is a man at present thirty years of age. In person he is of

average height, rather slender, with delicate features, somewhat

bald, quick in action and speech. He flushes easily and thus

often has high color, especially when fatigued or excited. This

"vasomotor irritability," as the physicians call it, is quite

common in this group of people, and in fact in all neurasthenia,

whether acquired or congenital. Though I have described E. as

belonging to the slender type of person, it is necessary to say

that stout, rugged-looking people are often irritable and

hypokinetic.

As a child E. "never could stand excitement or strain," as his

mother says. What is meant is this: that he became overexcited

under almost any circumstances and became profoundly fatigued

afterwards. As we have seen, the intense diffusion of excitement

throughout the whole body is a sign of the childish and inferior

organism; as maturity approaches and throughout childhood

excitability decreases and is better localized. When a noise is

heard an infant jumps, and so do people like E., but the better

controlled merely turn their head and eyes to see what the source

of the noise may be. This lack of control of excitement extended

in E.'s case to play, entertainment, novelty of any kind, crowds

and especially to the disagreeable excitement of quarrels,

fights, terrifying experiences, etc. Under anger he trembled,

grew pale, and his shouts and screams were beyond control; under

fear he became actually sick, vomited and showed a liability to

syncope of an alarming kind. E. was not the selfish type of the

neurasthenic; he was gentle and kind and ready to share with

everybody, a lovable boy of an intensely sociable nature.

Nevertheless, his high excitability and his quick fatigue made it

necessary to shelter him, for any effort at toughening merely

brought about a "breakdown."

Here we must reemphasize the fundamental importance of the

fatigue reactions. The normal fatigue reaction is to feel weary,

to desire rest and to be able to rest and sleep. The abnormal

reaction, one directly opposed to the well-being of the

individual, is to feel exhausted, to become restless and to find

it difficult to sleep. There are children who thrive on

excitement and exertion; they sleep sounder for it, they

recuperate readily and gain in strength and endurance with every

ordinary burden put upon them. There are others to whom anything

but the least excitement and exertion acts as a poison, making

them restless and exhausted. Not all children who show this

perverse fatigue reaction grow up with it. It may be only a

temporary phase of their lives, but while it lasts it is very

troublesome.

In E.'s case the overexcitable hypokinetic stage lasted until

about the ninth year, and then there was a great improvement,

though he still was of the same general type. He became a fairly

good runner for a short distance, learned to swim, though he

stood the cold water poorly, was clever and graceful as a dancer

and was quite popular. At sixteen he left school to enter

business, because of the straitened means of his family. He

entered into adolescent period later and suffered greatly from

his sixteenth to nineteenth year from, fatigue, hypochondriacal

fears, and had to have a good deal of medical attention at this

time. Sex questions perplexed him, for he became quite passionate

and at the same time had much moral repugnance to illicit

relations. His sexual curiosity was intense, and he read all

manner of books on the subject, went to the burlesque shows on

the sly and almost became obsessed on sex matters.

At this stage he made only a mediocre showing in his business

career, though his evident honesty secured him promotion to a

clerk's position. After his nineteenth year he seemed to gain

again in energy and endurance and was fairly well until his

twenty-eighth year, though he had to nurse his endurance at all

times, developed very regular habits of sleep, diet, etc., and in

this manner got along. Once he had an opportunity to join an

organization which would have paid him a better salary, but the

hours were irregular, and it would have demanded much exertion

and excitement, so he passed it by.

In 1917 he joined the army, partly because of patriotic motives,

partly because he was convinced that army life might develop his

endurance and energy. He was sent to an army post in the South

and within two months of his entrance had "broken down." He was

sleepless, restless, was irritable and "jumpy," had lost appetite

and the feeling of endurance. Life seemed intolerable, though he

had no desire to do away with himself, for he had no quarrel with

life itself but was disgusted with his inferiority. He was

hospitalized, but this did little good and he was afterwards

discharged as medically unfit.

This, of course, hurt his pride, but essentially he was greatly

relieved. He made but slow improvement until through the

munificence of Uncle Sam he was given a new start in life through

the Vocational Reeducation Board. Like many other city men, he

has dreamed of the "chicken farm" as the ideal occupation free

from too much work and yet lucrative. This, of course, is a

mistaken notion, but while learning the work he is happy and is

slowly regaining his energy. What time will bring forth no one

can tell, but this is certain: throughout his life he will have

to rely on good habits, carefully adjusted to his energy, in

order to protect himself from the bankruptcy that so easily comes

on him. A philosophy of life which will help to control his

irritability is necessary, and the intelligent of the hypokinetic

irritable acquire the habits and the philosophy necessary for

their welfare.

Any neurologist could cite any number of such cases with varying

traits of character, high intelligence or feeble-minded,

controlled in morals or uncontrolled, happily or unhappily

situated, whose central difficulty is an irritable and easily

exhausted store of energy. They are easily excited and excitement

burns them out; that is the long and short of their situation.

Sex, love, hatred, anger, strain, fear in all its forms,

illness,--all these and many other emotions and happenings may

break them down. Such people, and those who care for them, must

not make the mistake of thinking that rough handling,

strenuosity, will cure what is apparently a fixed character.

There is an irritable, high-energy type--irritable

hyperkinetic--that is well contrasted with the foregoing. This

explosive personality works by fits and starts but does not wear

out, merely, as it were, settles down to his ordinary pace when

he rests up. He is like a six-day bicycle racer who plugs along

but every now and then sprints like mad for a few laps and then

comes back to a pace that would kill the average rider. I shall

not trouble to cite such a case, but I can think of at least one

man of good attainments who is of this explosive hyperkinetic

type. He responds to every demand with a burst of energy, and his

quota of ordinary activities is simply appalling.

Neglecting the further types of energy display for the simple

reason that this quality shades off into every conceivable type

and is also a part of every nature, we turn to the types of

emotional mood display. With these it is necessary to consider

excitability as well, and the most interesting beings are here

our objects of study.

I wish first to emphasize my belief that where there is a great

natural variation in excitability and emotionality in

individuals, there is not nearly so much in races as we think,

and that social heredity is tradition and cultural level plays

the more important role in this. My friend and colleague, Dr. A.

Warren Stearns, has made a study which shows that while the

immigrant Italian is excitable and quick to anger and of

revengeful reactions, his American-born descendent has so far

controlled and changed this type of reaction that he does not

especially figure in police records, in murders or assaults. My

own studies of the second and especially the third generation Jew

show there is an almost complete approach to the "American" type

in emotional display, in what is known as poise. This third

generation Jewish-American has dropped all the mannerisms of

excitability in gesture and voice, and his adherence to good form

includes that attitude of nonchalant humor so characteristic of

the American.

1. The generally excitable, overemotional type. This type is more

common in the Latin, Hebrew and Celtic races. In some respects it

corresponds to the hypokinetic irritable, but it is not

necessarily hypokinetic. The artistic type of person, so called,

is of this group, but is, of course, talented as well. Talent

need not be present, and there are persons of no artistic ability

whatever who show a generalized, excitable-emotional temperament.

All young children show the main traits of this type, and there

is something essentially simple about all these folk, no matter

how civilized or sophisticated they get to be.

A. L., a woman of fifty, belongs to this group. She is a Jewess

and now a widow. All of her life her character and temperament

have been the same, and though her experiences have been varied

she has not in any essential altered. This last is rather

characteristic of the group, for experience has but little effect

on their emotional reactions.

A. L. cries very easily and readily, but her tears are easily

dried and her joy is grotesquely childlike. She is readily

frightened, worries without restraint and finds a melancholy

satisfaction in the worst. At the same time, her fears do not

persist and are easily dissipated by encouragement or good

fortune. She is readily angered and "raises a row" with great

facility and without restraint. For this reason her relatives and

friends become panic-stricken when she becomes angry, for they

know that she does not hesitate to make an embarrassing scene. In

the efforts to conciliate her they are apt to give her her own

way, as a result of which she is the proverbial spoiled child,

capitalizing her weakness.

Our Jewess uses her emotions for effect, which means that she has

become theatrical. Though there is reality in her emotional

display, time and the advantages she has gained have brought

enough finish and restraint to her manifestations to gain the

designation artistic. True, it is a crude artistry, for

intelligence does not sufficiently guide it, and her art is used

sometimes indiscriminately and inopportunely. As she grows older

the value of her tears is less, and she is becoming that prime

nuisance, the elderly scold.

Among the emotional types well recognized by the neurologist is

that known as the cyclothymic. In the individuals of this group

there is a periodicity to mood (rather than to emotions). There

is a definitely pathological trend to the cyclothymic, and in its

most marked form one sees the recurring depressions and

excitement of Manic Depressive Insanity.

Aside from these pathological forms, there are persons who show

curious periodic changes in mood. They become depressed for no

especial reason, are "blue" for day after day and then quickly

return to their normal. Sometimes these blue spells alternate

with periods of exaltation and happiness, but in my experience

this is far less common than periodic blue spells, a kind of

recurrent anhedonia.

L. D. is ordinarily what is known as a vivacious person. Bright,

talkative, keen in her discriminations, she has all her life been

at the mercy of strange alterations in mood, alterations which

come and go without what seems to others adequate reason.

As a child L. D. was sick a great deal. She showed an unusual

susceptibility to infection, and it was not until she was nine

years of age that she attended school regularly. Her illnesses

made it impossible to discipline her, and so she has always been

a bit "spoiled," though her kind and generous nature makes her a

charming person. But more important than the fact that she could

not be disciplined is the lowering of energy that these

sicknesses produced, a lowering marked mainly by a liability to

fatigue and depression.

Let there come a sickness, and this woman's stock of hopeful mood

goes and there results a loss of interest in life, a loss of zest

and joyousness.

A digression,--and a return to the theme of the first chapter of

this book. The dependence of the mental life on bodily structure,

equally true in the both sexes, is exquisitely demonstrated in

woman. In many women there occurs an extraordinary increase of

sex desire just before the menstrual period and in some to the

point where it causes great internal conflict. Others show

moderate depression and even confusion at this time, and to the

majority of women some mood and thought change is taken for

granted. At the menopause mental difficulties to the point of

insanity are witnessed, and in some cases the change is

permanent. Back of mood is the entire organic life of the

organism, and back of the nature of our thoughts and deeds is

mood.

A peculiarity of fatigue is remarkably well shown by this person.

When she is tired or convalescent a depressing thought sticks,

becomes an obsession, a fixed idea, to the plague of her life.

Thus when she was nursing her first baby the night feedings

exhausted her. One night, half asleep and half awake, with the

vigorous little animal pulling away at her breast, she watched

the pulsing fontanelle on the top of the baby's head, and the

thought came to her how dreadfully easy it would be to injure the

brain beneath. Her heart pounced in fear, she almost fainted at

the thought, and yet it "stuck" and came back to her with each

random association. I need not detail how the idea recurred a

dozen times a day and brought the fear that she was going insane.

She stopped nursing the baby at night, got a good rest, and the

idea disappeared. She was "able to shake off" when rested that

which was a hideous obsession when fatigued.

Indeed, one might speak of persons of this type as hypothymic as

well as cyclothymic. The hypothymic are those whose stock of

courage and hope is easily exhausted, who become easily

discouraged. They are borrowers of energy and vigor, they need

sturdier folk around them; often they are said to be sensitive,

and while this is sometimes true, it is more often the case that

they are more affected. That is, two persons may notice the same

thing or suffer the same sickness, but the so-called sensitive

has a reserve of courage and energy that disappears, whereas the

other has enough left in stock so that he does not feel any

change.

The extraordinary complexity of human character is well

illustrated by C. D. She is hypothymic or cyclothymic to the

little affairs of life and to the minor illnesses. Yet when her

family fortunes were greatly imperilled by a financial crisis,

she stood up against the strain far better than did her husband,

a man sturdy and buoyant in most of the affairs of life. His ego

was more concerned with financial fortune than was hers, and

against this ill she was the philosopher and not he.

We may well contrast L. D. with her husband. He belongs to the

sturdy in emotions and morals,--the stable. Dark days and bright

days, sickness and health, fatigue and rest seem to impair his

courage, hope and general cheerfulness of mood but little. He has

a high organic balance and a well-built-up philosophy. I started

to say of him that he is an optimist, but this is not true. He is

cheerful, but he does not sing, "Tra la la, all the things that

are, are good." He says, "There are bad things, but I must carry

on and fight the good fight." His is a philosophy of courage and

endurance, but not of optimistic twaddle. He is too wide-brained

to speak of life as "all good" when he knows of inherited

disease, cruelty, preventable poverty, gross neglect and

unmerited misfortune. Yet he lends hope and comfort to the

afflicted, and he has an unvarying comfort for his cyclothymic

mate.

He has built up his ego around a business, one in which there was

sunk not only his own fortune but that of a host of friends. When

this was so threatened as to seem inevitably lost, his ego was

deeply wounded, he lost courage and hope and then needed the

strength of his wife. This she gave, and when the tide of affairs

turned, his own courage was ready and unimpaired. We are like

trees,--the hard, strong, knotty parts of our fiber are

distributed in irregular fashion, and he who seems strongest has

a weak place somewhere. Attack that, and his resistance, courage

and hope disappear.

While there are the types of mood and emotional make-up, there

are curious monothymic types, people who habitually tend to react

with one emotion or mood.

The fear type. It must again be emphasized that we cannot

separate emotion, mood, instinct, intelligence in our analysis.

And so we shall speak of individuals of this or that type when

what we mean is that they reacted habitually and remarkably in

one direction. Thus with the man F., who has quick imagination,

and whose ability to forecast is inextricably mixed with a

liability to fear. It is true that some do not fear because they

do not foresee, and that placidity and calmness are less often

due to courage than to lack of imagination.

F. feared animals excessively as a child and injury to himself as

a boy, so that he played few rough games. To a large extent his

parents fostered this fear in him by carefully guarding and

watching him, by putting him through that neurasthenic regimen so

brilliantly described by Arthur Guiterman in his story of the

aseptic pup. Yet he had a brother as carefully brought up as

himself who became a rough-and-tumble lad, with as little

likelihood to fear as any boy. So that we may only assume that

F.'s training fostered fear in him; it did not cause it.

At the age of thirteen the fear of death entered F.'s life, the

occasion being the death of an uncle. The mourning, the quick

fleeting sight of the dead man in the black box, the interment of

the once vigorous, joyous man in the earth struck terror into the

heart of the boy. From that time much of his life was controlled

by his struggles with the fear of death, and his history is his

reaction to that fear. At fourteen he astonished his

free-thinking family by becoming a devout Christian, by praying,

attending church regularly and by becoming so moral in his

conduct as to warrant the belief that there was something wrong

with him. Indeed, had a psychiatrist examined him at this time,

there is no doubt he would have diagnosed his condition as a

beginning Dementia Precox. But he was not; he simply was

compensating for his fear of death.

At sixteen he entered an academy where he was forced to go into

athletics. The fear of injury and death plagued him so that he

broke down, but this breakdown did not last long, and he

reentered athletics and did fairly well. Indeed, in order to

break himself of fear, he became outwardly a rather daring

gymnast, hoping that what he had so often read of the sickly and

puny becoming strong and vigorous through training would be true

of him. As soon as he reached a stage in school where compulsory

training was dropped, he discontinued athletics, with much inward

relief. In fact, pride, fear of being considered a coward, was

mainly responsible for his efforts in this direction.

In college he fell under the influence of Omar Khayam and the

epicurean reaction to death. He feverishly entered pleasure and

swung easily from religious fervor to a complete agnosticism. He

became a first-nighter, knew all the chorus girls it was

possible for him to become acquainted with, learned to drink but

never learned to enjoy it. In fact, after each sensual indulgence

his reaction against himself led him to a despair which might

have terminated in suicide were it not that he feared death more

than the reproaches of his conscience. Then he fell under the

influence of a group of men and women in his college town,

philanthropists and social reformers, whose enthusiasm and energy

seemed to him miraculous, and as he grew to know them he realized

with a something like ecstasy and yet governed by intelligence,

that in such work was a compensation for death that might satisfy

both his emotions and his intelligence. Again to the surprise of

his parents, and in the face of their prediction that he would

soon "tire" of this fad, he entered into their activities and

proved himself a devoted worker. Too devoted, for now and then he

needs medical attention, and it was in one of these

"neurasthenic" periods that I met him. I learned that the spur

that kept him going, that made him energetic, was the fear that

death would overtake him before he achieved anything worth while;

that he hated to die and was appalled by the thought of death,

but that he could forget all this in work of a socially useful

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 men in his class, and

they received the honors. L. was deeply offended at this and

claimed to his own friends that the professors were down on him,

especially a certain professor of medicine, who, so L. intimated,

was afraid that L.'s theories would displace his own and so was

interested to keep him down. This feeling was intensified when he

came up for the examinations to a certain famous hospital and was

turned down. The real reason for this failure was his

unpopularity with his fellow students, for they let it be known

to the examiners that L. would undoubtedly be hard to get along

with, and it was part of the policy of the hospital to consider

the personality of an applicant as well as his ability.

L. obtained a hospital place in a small city and did very good

work, and though his peculiarities were noticed they excited only

a hidden current of amused criticism, while his abilities aroused

a good deal of praise. Stimulated by this, he started practice in

the same city as a surgeon and quickly rose to the leading

position. His indefatigable industry, his absolute self-

confidence and his skill gave him prestige almost at once. His

conceit rose to the highest degree, and his mannerisms commenced

to become offensive to others. He came into collision with the

local medical society because he openly criticized the older men

in practice as "ignoramuses, asses, charlatans, etc.," and indeed

was sued by one of them in the courts. The suit was won by the

plaintiff, the award was five thousand dollars and L. entered an

appeal.

From this on his career turned. In order to contest the case, and

because he began to believe that the courts and lawyers were in

league against him, he studied law and was admitted to the bar.

He had meanwhile married a rich woman who was wholly taken in by

his keen logical exposition of his "wrongs," his imposing manner

of speech and action; and perhaps she really fell in love with

the able, aggressive and handsome man. She financed his law

school studies, for it was necessary for him to give up most of

his practice meanwhile.

As soon as he could appear before the Bar he did so in his own

behalf, for this case had now reached the proportions where it

had spread out into half a dozen cases. He refused to pay his

lawyers, and they sued. One of them dropped the statement that L.

was "crazy," and he brought a suit against the lawyer. Moreover,

he began to believe, because of the adverse judgments, that the

courts were against him, and he wrote article after article in

the radical journals on the corruptness of the courts and entered

a strenuous campaign to provide for the public election and

recall of judges.

These activities brought him in close relations with a group of

unbalanced people operating under the high-sounding name League

of Freedom. These people, led by a man, J., eagerly welcomed L.,

largely because his wife was still financing his ventures. Here

comes a curious fact, and one prominent in the history of man,

for this group, led by two unbalanced men, actually engineered a

real reform, for they brought about a codification of the laws of

their State, a simple codification that made it possible to know

what the laws on any matter really are. This may be stated: the

average balanced person is apt to weigh consequences to himself,

but the paranoid does not; and so, when accident or

circumstances[1] enlist him in a good cause, he is a fighter

without fear and is enormously valuable.

[1] See Lombroso's "Man of Genius" for many such cases.

This success brought L.'s paranoia to the pinnacle of unreason.

He attacked the courts boldly, openly and publicly accused the

judges of corruption, said they were in conspiracy with the Bar

and the medical societies to do him up, added to this list of his

enemies the Irish and the Catholic Church, because the

prosecuting attorney in one county and the judge in that court

were Irish and Catholic, and then turned against his wife because

she now began to doubt his sanity. He brought suits in every

superior court in the State, and at the time he was committed to

an Insane Hospital he had forty trials on, had innumerable

manuscripts of his contemplated reforms, in which were included

the doing away with Insane Hospitals, the examination of all

persons in the State for venereal disease and their cure by a new

remedy of his own, the reform of the judiciary, etc., etc. He

accused his wife of infidelity, felt that he was being followed

by spies and police, claimed that dictagraphs were installed

everywhere to spy on him and had a classical delusional state. He

was committed, but later he escaped from the hospital and is now

at large. The State officials are making no effort to find him,

mainly because they are glad to get rid of him.

While the cases like L. are not common, the "mildly" paranoid

personality is common. Everywhere one finds the man or woman

whose abilities are not recognized, who is discriminated against,

who finds an enemy in every one who does not kotow and who

interprets as hostile every action not directly conciliating or

friendly. In every group of people there is one whose paranoid

temperament must be reckoned with, who is distrustful, conceited

and disruptive. Often they are high-minded, perhaps devoted to an

ideal, and if they convince others of their wrongs they increase

the social disharmonies by creating new social wars, large or

small according to their influence, intelligence and other

circumstances.

The type of the trusting need not be here illustrated by any case

history. Dickens has given us an immortal figure in the genial,

generous and impulsive Mr. Pickwick, and Cervantes satirized

knighthood by depicting the trusting, credulous Don Quixote. We

laugh at these figures, but we love them; they preserve for us

the sweetness of childhood and hurt only themselves and their

own. Trust in one's fellows is not common, because the world is

organized on egoism more than on fellowship. Where fellowship

becomes a code, as in the relations of men associated together

for some great purpose, then a noble trust appears.

So I pass over those whose mood runs all one way the hopeful, the

despondent, the pessimist and the optimist--to other types. We

shall then consider the two great directions of interest,

introspection and extrospection, and those whose lives are

characterized by one or the other direction.

1. The introspective personality is no more of a unit than any

other type. Intelligence, energy and a host of other matters play

their part in the sum total of the character here as elsewhere.

H. I. is what might be called the intellectual introspective

personality. From the very earliest days he became interested in

himself as a thinker. "How do my words mean anything?" he asked

of his perplexed father at the investigative age of five. "Where

do my thoughts go to when I do not think them?" was the problem

he floored a learned uncle with a year later. This type of

curiosity is not uncommon in children; in fact, it is the

conventionality and laziness of the elders that stops children in

their study of the fundamentals. H. was not stopped, for the zeal

of his interest was heightened as time went on.

He played with other boys but early found their conclusions and

discussions primitive. He became an ardent bookworm, reading

incessantly or rather at such times when his parents permitted,

for they were simple folk who were rather alarmed at their boy's

interests and zeal. No noticeable difference from other boys was

noted aside from precocity in study, yet even at the age of ten

life was running in two great currents for this boy. The one

current was the outer world with its ever varied happenings, the

other was the inner world of thoughts and moods, deeply,

fascinatingly interesting. It seemed to H. I. that there were

"two I's, one of which sat just over my head and looking down on

the other I, watching its strivings, its emotions, its thoughts

with a detached and yet palpitating interest. When I watched the

other boys at play I wondered whether they too had this dual

existence, whether they chewed the cud of life over and over

again as I did."

Came puberty with the great sex passions. The vibrating life

within him suddenly became tinged with new interests. One day at

a party a vixen of a girl threw herself boldly in his arms and

tried to push him into a chair. The bodily contact and the swift

bodily reaction threw him into a panic, for the passion that was

aroused was so powerful that he seemed to himself stripped of all

thought and reflection and impelled to actions against which he

rebelled. For he was fully acquainted, at second hand, with sex;

he knew boys and girls who had made excursions into its most

intimate practices and despised them.

This episode gave his introspective trends a new direction. From

now on sex was the theme his fancy embroidered. Curiously enough,

he became more austere than ever, shunned girls and especially

the heroine of his adventure, and even avoided the company of

boys who spoke habitually and "vulgarly" of sex. His mind built

up sex phantasies, sex adventures in which he was the hero and in

which girls he knew and those he imagined were the heroines, but

at the same time, standing aloof as it were, another part of him

seemed to watch his own reactions until "I nearly went crazy." He

became obsessed by a feeling of unreality and adopted a Berkleyan

philosophy of idealism: nothing seemed to exist except his own

consciousness, and that seemed of doubtful existence. He took

long walks by himself, read philosophy and science with avidity,

yet turned by preference to these dreams of sex adventure,

palpitating, alluring, and yet so unreal to his critical self. To

others he was merely a bit moody and detached, though friendly

and kind.

He went to college, and his interest in sex became secondary

almost immediately. His student days were passed at Harvard at a

time when Royce, Palmer, Santayanna, and James ruled in its

philosophy, and H. I. became fascinated by these men and their

subject. His mind was again drawn into introspection, but in an

organized manner. He asked himself continually, "What are the

purposes of life; why do we love; does man will or is he an

automaton who watches the hands go around and thinks he moves

them?" Where before his feeling of unreality was largely

emotional, now it received an intellectual sanction, and he swung

from hither to yon in a never-ending cycle. He became wearied

beyond measure by his thoughts; he envied the beasts of the

field, the laborer in the ditch and all to whom life and living

were realities not in the least to be examined and questioned.

Deliberately he decided to shift his interests,--to buy an

automobile and learn about it; to play cards; to have his love

affair; to taste emotion and pleasure and to seek no intellectual

sanction for them.

He disappeared from college for a year and came back tanned,

ruddy and at rest. He had found a capacity for interest and

emotion outside of himself. He had experienced phases of life

about which he would not talk at first, but in later years he

admitted that he had been a "man of the world." He regretted much

that had happened, but on the whole he rejoiced in an equanimity,

in a capacity for objective interest, that he had never had

before. His introspective trend was still very strong, but it

lent subtlety and wisdom to his life, rather than weakness. Now

and then he became harassed by a feeling of unreality, by a

questioning skepticism that nullified happiness, and he felt

himself divided by his intellect. These he shook off by dropping

his work, by hunting, fishing and accepting simple goals of

activity. Later on he married, and became a scholar of some note.

I think he now relishes life as well as any really thoughtful man

of middle life can.

There is a personality type, the emotional introspective, whose

interest in life is directed toward their own sensations and

emotions. They do not view people or things as having a value in

themselves and for themselves; they deliberately view them as

sources of a personal pleasurable sensation. I do not mean the

crude egoist who asks of anything or anybody, "What good is it

(or he) for me?" but I mean that connoisseur in emotions,

casually blase and bored, who seeks new sensations. This is an

introspective deviation of a serious kind, for the connoisseur in

emotions rarely is happy and usually is most deeply miserable.

Bourget in his remarkable psychological novel, "A Love Crime,"

has admirably drawn one of these characters. The exquisite

Armand, seeking pleasure constantly, is divided into the

sensualist who seduces and ruins and the introspectionist who

watches the proceeding with disgust and disillusion. It is not an

outraged conscience that is at work but the inability to feel

without analyzing the feeling "Ah, for a single passion that

might apply my entire sensibility to another being, like wet

paper against a window pane." This is the eternal tragedy of

sophistication,--that there results an anhedonia in large part

manifested by a restless introspection. The mind is drawn away

from the outside world, and everything is seen out of proportion.

The hypochondriac directs his attention to his health and is in

part a monothymic of the fear type. Moliere's "Le Malade

Imaginaire" is a classical study of this person, and I do not,

presume to better it. Modern popularizing of disease has

distinctly increased the numbers of the hypochondriacs, or at any

rate has made their fears more scientific. Brain tumor, gastric

ulcer, appendicitis, tuberculosis, heart disease, cancer,

syphilis,--often have I seen a hypochondriac run the gamut of

all these deadly diseases and still retain his health. The faddy

habits they form are the sustenance of those who start the varied

forms of vegetarianism, chewing cults, fresh-air fiends,

wet-grass fanatics, back-to-nature societies, and the mild

lunacies of our (and every) age.

One such hypochondriac, J., after suffering from every disease in

the advertising pages of the daily newspapers, developed a system

of habits that finally became a disease in itself. He rose at

6.30 each morning, stood naked in the middle of the room, took

six deep breaths, rolled around on the floor and kicked his arms

and legs about for fifteen minutes, took a drink of cold water,

had a shower bath and a rub-down, shaved, attended to "certain

bodily functions" (his term, not mine), ate a breakfast

consisting of gluten bread, two slices, one and one-half glasses

of milk, a soft-boiled egg (three and one-half minutes) and an

orange; walked to work, taking exactly twenty minutes to do it;

opened the windows wide in his office (fighting with the other

clerks who preferred comfort to fresh air), ate a health luncheon

at noon consisting of Postum, nuts, health bread, and two squares

of milk chocolate; walked home at six, taking exactly 20 minutes

to do it; washed, lay on the couch fifteen minutes with mind

fixed on infinity (a Hindoo trick, so he heard), ate dinner,

which never varied much from rice, cream, potatoes, milk and,

heritage of saner days, a small piece of pie! All the day he

watched each pain and ache, noted whether he belched or spit more

than usual, and at night went to sleep at 10.30. Needless to say

he had no friends, was known as "that nut" and really broke down

from too arduous an introspective existence.

The term self-denial has been used from earliest times to

indicate what we have called inhibition. But self-denial is

fundamentally a wrong term, since it implies that the self is

that which lusts and shirks, and that which controls desire and

holds the individual to a consistent and ethical line of conduct

is not the self. In fact, the self is based on inhibition and

control, and when there is failure in these regards there is

self-failure.

Interesting is the under-inhibited person. I mean by this term

the one who consistently and in most relationship shows an

inability to control the primitive instincts, impulses and

desires. J. F. may stand as a type that becomes the "black sheep"

and in many cases the "criminal." He comes of what is known as a

"good family," which in his case means that the parents are

well-to-do, of good reputation and rather above the average in

intelligence. The brothers and sisters have all done well, are

settled in their ways and are not to be distinguished from the

people of their social set in manners or morals.

It was impossible to discipline J. As a very young child he

resisted his mother's efforts to train him into tidiness or

restraint. He stole whatever he desired, and though he was

alternately punished and pleaded with, though he seemed to desire

to please his parents, he continued to steal whenever there was

opportunity. At six he entered a neighbor's house, and while

there took a purse that was lying on a table, rifled it of its

contents and disappeared for nearly a day, when he was found in a

down-town district, having gorged himself with candy and cake.

From then on his peculations increased, and his conduct became

the scandal of his family, for he stole even from the maids

employed in the house, as well as from guests. In each case the

stealing was apparently motivated to give a good time to himself

and also to certain chums he made here and there in the city. He

would lie to evade punishment, but finally would yield, confess

his guilt, express deepest repentance and accept his punishment

with the sincerity of one fully conscious of deserving it.

In school he did poorly. He was bright enough. In fact, he was

somewhat above the average in memory and comprehension and may be

described as keen, but it was difficult for him to keep his

attention consistently on any subject, and the discipline of

school irked him. He ran away several times to avoid school, and

each time, until he was about fourteen, came back after a few

days,--bedraggled, hungry and repentant. The freedom of the

streets appealed to him as offering a life varied enough to suit

his nature, and with excitement and adventure always in the air.

So he mingled with all kinds of boys and men and at the age of

fourteen shocked his parents by being arrested as one of a gang

that was engaged in robbing drunken men in the slum quarters of

the city. It took all kinds of influence to get him released on

probation, but this was accomplished and then the boy disappeared

from home.

He was gone three years and despite all search had completely

disappeared. His people had given up all hope of seeing him again

(although certain members of his family were not at all saddened

by the prospect) when they received a communication from the

police of a distant city with a photograph of the boy, asking if

it was true that he was their son. It seems that J. had drifted

from place to place, now working as newsboy, stable hand, errand

boy, messenger, theater-usher, until he had reached this city.

There he was wandering on the streets, hungry and ragged, when a

philanthropic old gentleman noticed him. J. has the good fortune

to be very innocent looking, and no matter what his crimes, his

face might belong to a cherub. A friend once stated that if J.

appeared at Heaven's gate, St. Peter would surely take him to be

an angel come back from a stroll and let him in. The

philanthropist stopped, the boy and inquired into his history. J.

told him a very affecting story of being an orphan whom a cruel

guardian had robbed of his heritage and exaggerated his

sufferings until the indignant old fellow threatened to have the

police prosecute his betrayer. With a show of great magnanimity,

J. refused to disclose his real name, and the philanthropist took

him home. He had him clothed and fed, and then, taken by the

boy's engaging manners and bright ways, decided to educate and

adopt him. He was dissuaded from the latter by a friend, but he

sent J. to a private school of good grade. To the surprise of the

old man, J. was continually getting into mischief, and finally he

was accused of stealing. Unable to believe the school

authorities, the old gentleman took the boy home and quizzed him.

He gave an unsatisfactory account of himself and that night

disappeared with a considerable sum of money. The police were

notified, and a week later he was found in a house of the

type--so euphemistically called--of "ill fame." There he was

spending the money lavishly on the inmates and was indulging his

every desire. One of the women, a police stool-pigeon, identified

him as the boy who was wanted by the law, and he was arrested.

Despite the efforts of the parents and the philanthropist, the

boy was given a prison sentence and is still serving it.

Characteristic of this group of personalities are these traits:

(1) an impatience with the arduous, an incapacity or

unwillingness to wait for results in the ordinary way; (2) a

decided dread of monotony, a longing for excitement; (3) an

inability to form permanent purposes and to inhibit the

distracting desires; (4) a desire to win others' good opinion and

sympathy,--therefore he always lavished his money on those whom

that kind of "good fellowship" wins and told pathetic stories to

those whose sentimentality made them easy victims; (5) a weak

kind of egoism, seeking easy ways to pleasure and position,

restless under discipline, always repentant after wrong-doing,

fluent in speech but lacking the courage to face the difficulties

of life.

This under-inhibited type may suddenly reform and apparently

entirely emerge from difficulties. I have in mind a conspicuous

case, a young woman now happily married and the mother of fine

children. When she was thirteen or fourteen the petty pilferings

of her childhood took on a serious character. She began to steal

from the person of strangers and from the homes of friends. She

romanced in the most convincing fashion, told strangers the most

remarkable stories, usually of such a nature as to make her

interesting and an object of sympathy, but which tended to

blacken the reputation of her family. She lost place after place

at work, was sent to a hospital to become a nurse and demoralized

her associates by her lies and her thefts. She was a very sweet

girl in every other way, kindly, generous, self-sacrificing,

studious even, and her character-contradiction made people

reluctant to believe she was not insane. She was discharged from

the hospital, stayed at home for a few months,--and then came the

miracle. She obtained a place in a large business house and

worked there for seven years or up till the time of her marriage.

She was steadily promoted and was accounted the most reliable and

honest employee of the establishment. She handled money and

goods, was absolutely truthful and her earnest efficiency was

noteworthy. Her private life was in complete harmony with this

business career. She helped her parents, who are poor, dressed

modestly, studied nights and yet showed the same fondness for

dancing and good times that the normal girl does. She met a

promising young business man who fell immediately in love with

this demure looking young woman, and they were later married.

Once I asked her how the reform came about. "I don't know

myself," she answered frankly. "I never was happy--when I was the

other way. I always vowed reform, but when there was money around

I'd think and think about it until it was mine. Then I'd spend it

in a silly way to get rid of it fast. I craved good things, and

you know how poor we were. Then I lied just to have people like

me and pity me, even though I called myself a fool while doing

it. Often, often I tried to reform and for a week or two would be

real good. Then perhaps I'd see some money, and I'd try to think

of something else. But that money would come to my mind, and I'd

get hot and dizzy thinking about it. Perhaps I'd say, 'I'll just

look at it,' and finally I'd go and take it--and feel so relieved

and spend it. After I left the hospital it seemed to me that I

could never smile again. I cried all night long; I wanted to die.

I could see one girl who thought I was so good and nice, and her

face as she looked at me when I left! Her eyes were wide open,

and her mouth was so stern, and she looked as if she wanted to

speak but she turned around and walked away. One day I woke up

after a restless night at home, and it seemed to me that I had

strength, that something had turned around in my nature, and

since that day I have never even wanted to steal. I haven't had

to try to be good; it came as natural as eating and sleeping."

The sexually under-inhibited are those whose sex control is

deficient. This may be either from over-passionate nature, bad

example, deficient mentality, vanity and desire for good times,

as in certain girls, etc. To discuss these types would be to

write another book, and so I forbear. But this I wish to

emphasize: that neither age, sex protestation of indifference and

control, occupation or social status, alters the fact that the

history of the sex feelings, impulses and struggles is essential

to a knowledge of character. Without detailing sex types, these

are some that are important.

1. The uninhibited impulsive, passionate (the bulk of the

prostitutes).

2. The controlled, passionate. Very common.

3. The frigid. Not so rare as believed.

4. The extremely passionate (nymphomania, satyriasis). Rare.

Always in trouble.

5. The sensualist, a deliberate seeker of sex pleasure, often

indulging in perversion. Common type.

6. The perverted types,--autoerotic (masturbator), homosexual,

masochists, sadists, fetishist, etc. More common than the

ordinary person dreams.

7. The periodic, to whom sex life is incidental to certain

periods and situations. Common among women, less common among

men.

8. The sublimators, whose sexual activity has somehow been

harnessed to other great activities. Fairly frequent among these

who either through choice or necessity are to remain continent.

9. The anhedonic or exhausted. Found in the sensualists and often

reacted to by the formation of religious and ethical codes, which

eliminate sex,--Tolstoy, the hermits, certain Russian sects, etc.

There is under-inhibition of a good kind. There are

generous-hearted people always ready to give of themselves to

anything or anybody that needs help. Often "fooled" by the

unworthy, they resolve to be calm, judicial and selfish, and

then,--their generous social natures over-ride caution, and again

they plunge into kindness and philanthropy.

F. L. is one of these. As child, boy and young man he was

free-hearted to an extraordinary degree. Ragamuffin, stray dog or

cat, tramp, down and outer of every kind or description, these

enlisted his sympathy and help despite the expostulation and

remonstrance of a series of conventional good people, his mother

and father, his best friends and his outraged wife. The latter

never knew, she used to say, what he would bring home for dinner.

"He always forgot to bring home the steak, but he never forgot to

lug along some derelict." More than once he was robbed, often he

was imposed upon. Once he met an interesting vagabond who spoke

several languages, quoted the Bible with ease and accuracy, and

so fired the heart of our simple man that he bought him clothes

and brought him home to stay. His wife threw up her hands in

despair. "But, my dear," said F. L., "he's a scholar who has

fallen on evil days." "Ah," she answered, "I fear it will be an

evil day for us when you took him home." She had a good chance to

say, "I told you so," when the rogue eloped with the best of

their silver.

Not only is F. L. impulsive and uninhibited in his generosity,

but his "pitch in and help" quality is about as well manifested

in other matters. If he sees a man or boy struggling with a load,

he immediately forgets that he is over fifty and well dressed and

steps right in to help. He saw an ash and garbage man--this is

his wife's star story--struggling to lift a much befouled can

into his wagon. F. L. left his wife and some friends without a

word and with a cheery word threw the can into the wagon.

Unfortunately some of the contents splashed, and F. L. suffered

both in dignity and appearance as a consequence. He had to go

home by back alleys and had to endure the mirth of his friends

for a long time. But it did not change his reactions in the

least, although he was really vexed with himself and endeavored

to be conventional and self-controlled for a while. The point is

that F. L. attempts inhibition of generous impulses and fails as

ignominiously as a drunkard struggling with the desire to drink.

Of course he is of the salt of the earth. Upon such uninhibited

fellowship feeling as his rests the ethical progress of the

world. A dozen inventors contribute less to their fellow men than

does he. For their contributions may be used to destroy or

enslave their fellows, and it is a commonplace that science has

outstripped morals. But his contributions spread kindly feeling

and the notion of the brotherhood of man.

The over-inhibited, those whose every impulse and desire is

subjected to a scrutiny and a blocking, often come to the

attention of the neuropsychiatrist. But there are many "normal"

people who fall into this group, and whose conduct throughout

life is marked by a scrupulosity that is painful to behold. The

over-inhibition may take specific directions, as in the thrifty

who check their desires in the wish to save money, or the

industrious who hold up their pleasures and recreations in the

fear that they are wasting time. A sub-group of the

over-inhibited I call the over-conscientious, and it is one of

these whose history is epitomized here.

K. has always had "ingrowing scruples," as his exasperated mother

once said. As a small child he never obeyed the impulse to take a

piece of cake without looking around to see if his mother and

father approved. He would not play unreservedly, in the

whole-hearted impulsive way of children, but always held back in

his enjoyment as if he feared that perhaps he was not doing just

right. When he started to go to school his fear of doing the

wrong thing made him appear rather slow, though in reality he was

bright. The other children called him a "sissy," mistaking his

conscientiousness for cowardice. This grieved him very much, and

his father undertook to educate him in "rough" ways, in fighting

and wrestling. He succeeded in this to the extent that K. learned

to fight when he believed that he was being wronged, but he never

seemed to learn the aggressiveness necessary to get even a fair

share of his rights. His mother, a similar type, rather

encouraged him in this virtue, much to the disgust of the father.

Not to spend too long a time over K.'s history, we may pass

quickly over his school years until he entered college. He was a

"grind" if there ever was one, studying day and night. He had

developed well physically and because of his hard work stood near

the top of his class. He took no "pleasures" of any kind,--that

is, he played no cards, went to no dances, never took in a show

and of course was strictly moral. It seems that the main factor

that held him back was the notion he had imbibed early in his

career that pleasure itself was somehow not worthy, that an ideal

of work made a sort of sin of wasting time. Whenever he indulged

himself by rest or relaxation, even in so innocent a way as to go

to a ball game, there was in the back of his mind the idea, "I

might have been studying this or that, or working on such a

subject; I am wasting time," and the pleasure would go. By nature

K. was sociable and friendly and was well liked, but he avoided

friendships and social life because of the unpleasant reproaches

of his work conscience and the rigor of his work inhibitions. He

grew tired, developed a neurasthenic set of symptoms, and thus I

first came in contact with him. Once he understood the nature of

his trouble, which I labeled for him as a "hypertrophied work

conscience," he set himself the task of learning to enjoy, of

throwing off inhibition, of innocent self-indulgence, and my

strong point that he would work the better for pleasure took his

fancy at once. He succeeded in part in his efforts, but of course

will always debate over the right and wrong of each step in his

life.

This one example of a high type of the over-inhibited must do for

the group. There is a related type who in ordinary speech find it

"difficult to make up their minds,"--in other words, are unable

to choose. Bleuler has used the term ambivalent, thus comparing

these individuals to a chemical element having two bonds and

impelled to unite with two substances. The ambivalent

personalities are always brought to a place where they yearn for

two opposing kinds of action or they fear to choose one affinity

of action as against the other. They are in the position of the

unfortunate swain who sang, "How happy I could be with either,

were t'other dear charmer away."

M. is one of these helpless ambivalent folk, always running to

others for advice and perplexed to a frenzy by the choices of

life. "What shall I do?" is his prime question, largely because

he fears to commit himself to any line of action. Once a man

chooses, he shuts a great many doors of opportunity and gambles

with Fate that he has chosen right. M. knows this and lacks self-

confidence, i.e., the belief that he will choose for the best or

be able to carry it through. He lacks the gambling spirit, the

willingness to put his destiny to fortune. Often M. deliberates

or rather oscillates for so long a time that the matter is taken

from his hands. Thus, when he fell in love, the fear of being

refused, of making a mistake, prevented him from action, and the

young woman accepted another, less ambivalent suitor.

M. is in business with his father and is entirely a subordinate,

because he cannot choose. He carries out orders well, is very

amiable and gentle, is liked and at the same time held in a mild

contempt. He has physical courage but has not the hardihood of

soul to take on responsibility for choosing. Sometimes he gets

good ideas, but never dares to put them into execution and shifts

that to others.

He hates himself for this weakness in an essential phase of

personality but is gradually accepting himself as an inferior

person, despite intelligence, training and social connection.

Yet his sister is exactly the opposite type. She makes decisions

with great promptness, never hesitates, is "cocksure" and

aggressive. If M. is ambivalent, his sister B. M. is univalent.

Choice is an easy matter to her, though she is not impulsive. She

rapidly deliberates. She never has made any serious errors in

judgment, but if she makes a mistake she shrugs her shoulders and

says, "It's all in the game." Thus she is a leader in her set,

for if some difficulty is encountered, her mind is quickly at

work and prompt with a solution. If she is not brilliant, and she

is not, she collects the plans of her associates and chooses and

modifies until she is ready with her own plan. Her father sighs

as he watches her and regrets that she is not a man. It does not

occur to him or any of his family, including herself, that she

might do a man's work in the business world.

In pathological cases the inability to choose becomes so marked

as to make it impossible for the patient to choose any line of

conduct. "To do or not to do" extends into every relationship and

every situation. The patient cannot choose as to his dress or his

meals; cannot decide whether to stay in or go out, finds it

difficult to choose to cross the street or to open a door; is

thrown into a pendulum of yea and nay about speaking, etc. This

psychasthenic state, the folie du doute of the French, is

accompanied by fear, restlessness and an oppressive feeling of

unreality. The records of every neurologist contain many such

cases, most of whom recover, but a few go on to severe incurable

mental disease.

I pass on, without regard for logic or completeness, to a

personality type that we may call the anhedonic or simpler a

restless, not easily satisfied, easily disgusted group. Some of

these are cyclothymic, over-emotional, often monothymic but I am

discussing them from the standpoint of their satisfaction with

life and its experiences. The ordinary label of "finicky" well

expresses the type, but of course it neglects the basic

psychology. This I have discussed elsewhere in this book and will

here describe two cases, one a congenital type and the other

acquired.

T. was born dissatisfied, so his mother avers. As a baby he was

"a difficult feeding case" because the very slightest cause, the

least change in the milk, upset him, a fact attested to by

vigorous crying. Babies have a variability in desire and

satisfaction quite as much as their elders.

Apparently T. thrived, despite his start, for as a child he was

sturdy looking. Nevertheless, in toys, games, treats, etc., he

was hard to please and easy to displease. He turned up his nose

if a toy were not perfection, and he had to have his food

prepared according to specification or his appetite vanished.

Moreover, he had a very limited range of things he liked, and as

time went on he extended that list but little. He was very choice

in his clothes--not at all a regular boy--and quite disgusted

with dirt and disorder. "A little old maid" somebody called him,

having in mind of course the traditional maiden lady.

As T. grew his capacity for pleasure-feeling did not increase. On

the contrary his attention to the details necessary for his

pleasure made of him one of those finicky connoisseurs who,

though never really pleased with anything, get a sort of pleasure

in pointing out the crudity of other people's tastes and

pleasures. This attitude of superiority is the one compensation

the finicky have, and since they are often fluent of speech and

tend to write and lecture, they impose their notions of good and

bad upon others, who seek to escape being "common." In T.'s case

his attitude toward food, clothes, companions, sports and work

created a tense disharmony in his family, and one of his brothers

labeled him "The Kill-joy." Secretly envious of other people's

simple enjoyment, T. made strenuous efforts at times to overcome

his repugnances and to enlarge the scope of his pleasures, but

because this forfeited for him the superiority he had reached as

a very "refined" person, he never persisted in this process.

When he was twenty he found himself the theater of many

conflicts. He was weary of life, yet lusted for experiences that

his hyperestheticism would not permit him to take. Sex seemed too

crude, and the girls of his age were "silly." Yet their lure and

his own internal tensions dragged him to one place after another,

hoping that he would find the perfect woman, able to understand

him. At last he did find her, so he thought, in the person of a

young woman of twenty-five, a consummate mistress of the arts of

femininity. She sized him up at once, played on his vanity,

extolled his fine tastes and never exposed a single crudity of

her own, until she brought him to the point where his passion for

her, his conviction that he had found "the perfect woman," led

him to propose marriage. Then came the blow: she laughed at him,

called him a silly boy, gave him a lecture as to what constituted

a fine man, extolling crudity, vigor and virility as the prime

virtues.

His world was shattered, and its shadowy pleasures gone. At first

his parents were inclined to believe that this was a good lesson,

that T. would learn from this adventure and become a more hardy

young man. Instead he became sleepless, restless and without

desire for food or drink; he shunned men and women alike; he

stared hollow-eyed at a world full of noise and motion but

without meaning or joy. Deep was this anhedonia, and all

exhortations to "brace up and be a man" failed. Diversion, travel

and all the usual medical consultations and attentions did no

good.

One day he announced to his family that he was all right, that

soon he would be well. He seemed cheerful, talked with some

animation and dressed himself with unusual care. His parents

rejoiced, but one of his brothers did not like what he called a

"gleam" in T.'s eyes. So he followed him, in a skillful manner.

T. walked around for a while, then found his way to a bridge

crossing a swift deep river. He took off his coat, but before he

could mount the rail his watchful brother was upon him. He made

no struggle and consented to come back home. In his coat was a

letter stating that he saw no use in living, that he was not

taking his life because of disappointment in love but because he

felt that he never could enjoy what others found pleasurable, and

that he was an anomaly, a curse to himself and others.

He was sent away to a sanatorium but left it and came home. He

began to eat and drink again, found he could sleep at night (the

sleepless night had filled him with despair) and soon swung back

into his "normal" state. He passes throughout life a spectator of

the joys of others, wondering why his grip on content and desire

is so slender, but also he thinks himself of a finer clay than

his fellows.

As a complement to this case let me cite that of the ex-soldier

S. He reached the age of twenty-two with a very creditable

history. Born of middle-class parents he went through high school

and ranked in the upper third of his class for scholarship. His

physique was good; he was a joyous, popular young fellow; and

wherever he went was pointed out as the clean young American so

representative of our country. That means he worked hard as

assistant executive in a production plant, was ambitious to get

ahead, took special courses to fit himself, read a good deal

about "success" and how to reach it, dressed well, liked his

fellow men and more than liked women, enjoyed sports, a good

time, the theaters, slept well, ate well and surged with the

passions and longings of his youth. Had any one said to him,

"What is there to live for?" he would have had no answer ready

merely because it would have never occurred to him that any one

could really ask so foolish a question.

Came the war. Full of the ardor of patriotism and the longing for

the great experience, he enlisted. He took the "hardships" of

camp life, the long hikes, the daily drills, the food dished out

in tins, as a lark, and his hearty fellowship identified him with

the army, with its profanity, its rough friendliness, its

grumbling but quick obedience and its intense purpose to "show

'em what the American can do." He went overseas and learned that

French patriotism, like the American brand, did not prevent

profiteering, and that enlistment in a common cause does not

allay or abate racial prejudices and antagonisms. This, however,

did not prey on his mind, for he took his Americanism as superior

without argument and was not especially disappointed because of

French customs and morals. He took part in several battles, made

night attacks, bayonetted his first man with a horror that

however disappeared under the glory of victory.

One day as he and a few comrades were in a front line trench,

"Jerry" placed a high explosive "plump in the middle of it." When

S. recovered consciousness, he found himself half covered with

dirt and debris of all kinds, and when he crawled out and brushed

himself off, he saw that of all his comrades he alone survived,

and that they were mangled and mutilated in a most gruesome way.

"Pieces of my friends everywhere," is his terse account. He lay

in the trench, not daring to move for hours, the bitterest

thoughts assailing him,--anger, hatred and disgust for war, the

Germans, his own countrymen; and he even cursed God. When he did

this he shuddered at his blasphemy, became remorseful and prayed

for forgiveness. A little later he crawled out of the trench and

back to where he was picked up by the medical corps and taken to

a hospital. He was examined, nothing wrong was found and he was

sent back to duty.

From that episode dates as typical an anhedonia as I have ever

seen. Gradually he became sleepless and woke each day more tired

than he went to bed. The food displeased him, and he grumbled

over what were formerly trifles. He wearied easily, and nothing

seemed to move him to enthusiasm or desire. He gave up friendship

after friendship, because the friends annoyed him by their noise

and boisterousness. He dreaded the roar of the guns and the

shriek of shells with what amounted to physical agony. He brooded

alone, and though not melancholy in the positive insane sense,

was melancholy in the disappearance of desire, joy, energy,

interest and enthusiasm.

Fortunately the armistice came at this time. S. was examined and

discharged as well because he made no complaints, for he was

anxious to get home. This was his one great desire. At home, with

a nice bed to sleep in, good food to eat and the pleasant faces

of his own people, his "nerves" would yield, he had no doubt. But

he was mistaken; this was not the case. He became no better, and

though he tried his old "job," he found that he could not find

the energy, enthusiasm or concentration necessary for success. He

was then referred to the United States Public Health Service,

where I saw him, and he became my patient.

My first problem was to restore the power of sleeping. This I

succeeded in doing by means that were entirely "physical." With

that accomplished, the man became hopeful of further results, and

this enabled one to bring about a desire for food, again by

physical means, medicine, in short. The problem of awaking S.'s

interest simmered down to that of finding an outlet for his

ambition. The Federal Vocational Board granted him the right to

take up a business course in a college. Though he found the study

hard at first, he was encouraged to keep on and told to expect

little of himself at first. This is an important point, for if a

man holds himself to a high standard under conditions such as

those of S., then failure brings a discouragement that upsets the

treatment. At any rate this method of readjustment, with its

reliance on medicines to bring sleep and appetite and on training

to bring hope and relief from introspection, worked splendidly.

The fact is that no abstruse complicated psychological analysis

was necessary here or in most cases. A man is "jarred" from

light-hearted health to a grim discouraged state. This

discouragement brings with it sleeplessness and loss of appetite,

and there gradually develops a series of habits which lower

endurance and energy. The habit elements in this condition are

not enough recognized, and also the fact that most of the

disability is physical in its development though psychological at

the start. That is, A. had a severe emotional reaction to a

horrible experience; this brought about insomnia and disordered

nutrition, and these, by lowering the endurance and ability,

brought to being a vicious circle of fatigue and depression, in

which fatigue caused depression and depression increased fatigue.

The treatment must be directed at first to the physical factors,

and with these conquered the acquired forms of anhedonia usually

yield readily.

It would be interesting to consider other types related to the

anhedonic personality. The complainer, the whiner, the nag, all

these are basically people who are hard to satisfy. The artistic

temperament (found rather frequently in the non-artistic) is

hyperesthetic, uncontrolled, irritably egoistic and demands

homage and service from others which exceeds the merit of the

individual; in other words, there is added to the anhedonic

element an unreasonableness that is peculiarly exasperating. I

pass these interesting people by and turn to the opposite of the

anhedonic group, the group that is hearty in tastes and

appetites, easily pleased as a rule and often crude in their

relish of life. There are two main divisions of these hearty

simple people,--those who are untrained and relatively

uneducated, and whose simplicity may disappear under cultivation,

and another type--cultivated, educated, wise--who still retain

unspoiled appetite and hearty enjoyment.

Briefly let me introduce Dr. O., an athlete in his youth and

always a lover of the great outdoors.

O. is Homeric in the simplicity of his tastes. A house is a place

in which to sleep, clothes are to keep one warm, food is to eat

and the manner of its service is an indifferent matter. He enjoys

with almost huge pleasure good things to eat and good things to

drink, but as he puts it, "I am as much at home with corned beef

and cabbage as I am with any epicurean chef d'oeuvre. I like the

feel of silk next my body, but cotton pleases me as much." He is

clean and bathes regularly, but has no repulsion against dirt and

disorder. At home, among the utmost refinements of our

present-day life, he prefers the rough bare essentials of

existence. To him beauty is not exotic, but everywhere present,

and he sees it in a workman clad in overalls and breaking stone

quite as much as in a carefully harmonized landscape. He has no

pose about the beauty of nature as against the beauty of man's

creations, and he thinks that a puffing freight engine, dragging

a load of cars up a grade, is as much a thing to enthuse about as

a graceful deer sniffing the scent of the hunter in some pine

grove.

Imbued with a zeal for living and a desire for experience, O. has

not been as successful as one more cautious and less impetuous

might have been. He loves his profession so well that he would

rather spend a day on an interesting case in the ward of some

hospital than to treat half a dozen rich patients in his

consulting room. His purpose is indeed unified; he seeks to learn

and to impart, but the making of money seems to him a necessary

irrelevance, almost an impertinent intrusion upon the real

purposes of life. He is eager to know people, he shows a naive

curiosity about them, an interest that flatters and charms. All

the phenomena of life--esoteric, commonplace, queer and

conventional--are grist to his mill.

His sexual life has not differed greatly from that of other men.

In his early youth his passions outran his inhibitions, and he

tasted of this type of experience with the same gusto with which

he delved into books. As he reached early manhood he fell in love

and pledged himself to chastity. Though he fell out of love soon

his pledge remained in full force, and though he cursed himself

as a fool he held himself aloof from sex adventure. When he was

twenty-seven he again fell in love, had an impetuous and charming

courtship and married. He loves his wife, and there is in their

intimacy a buoyant yet controlled passion which values love for

its own sake. He enters into his duties as father with the same

zeal and appetite that characterizes his every activity.

O. is no mystic, proclaiming his unity with all existence, in the

fashion of Walt Whitman. Rather he is a man with a huge capacity

for pleasure, not easily disgusted or annoyed, with desires that

reach in every direction yet with controlled purpose to guide his

life. As he passes into middle age he finds his pleasures

narrowing, as all men do, and he finds his appetites and tastes

are becoming more restricted. This is because his purpose becomes

more dominant, his habits are more imperious, his energy less

exuberant. In thought O. is almost a pessimist because his

knowledge of life, his intelligence and his sympathy make it

difficult to understand the need of suffering, of disease and of

conflict. But in emotion he still remains an optimist, glad to be

alive at any price and rejoicing in the life of all things.

Apropos of this contradiction between thought and mood, it is

sometimes found reversed. There are those whose philosophy is

optimistic, who will not see aught but good in the world, yet

whose facial expression and actions exhibit an essential

melancholy.

In every category of character there are specialists, individuals

whose main reactions are built around one great trait. Thus there

are those whose egoism takes the form of pride in family, or in

personal beauty, or some intellectual capacity, or in being

independent of others, who worship self-reliance or

self-importance. There are the individuals whose social instincts

express themselves in loquacity, in a talkativeness that is the

main joy of their lives, though not at all the joy of other

lives. A fascinating series of personalities in this respect come

to my mind--L. B., who talks at people, never with them, since he

seems to take no note of their replies; T. K., who seems to

regard conversation as largely a means of demonstrating her

superiority, for she picks her subjects with the care a general

selects his battlefield; F., who is a born pedagogue and seeks to

instruct whoever listens to him, whose conversation is a lecture

and a monologue; R. O., the reticent, says little but that

pertinent and relevant, cynical and shrewd; and R. V., who says

little and that with timidity and error. So there are specialists

in caution and "common sense," self-controlled, never rash,

calculating, cool and egotistic, narrow and successful. Every one

knows this type, as every one knows the "fool," with his poor

judgment, his unwise confidence in himself and others, his lack

of restraint. There is the tactful man, conciliating, pliant,

seeking his purposes through the good will of others which he

obtains by "oil" and agreeableness, and there is the aggressive

man, preferring to fight, energetic, at times rash, apt to be

domineering, and crashing on to victory or defeat according to

the caliber of his opponents and the nature of the circumstances.

Those whose ego feeling is high, whose desire for superiority

matches up well with their feeling of superiority are often

called the conceited. Really they are conceited only if they show

their feelings, as, for example, does W. Wherever he goes W.

seeks to occupy the center of the stage, brags of his

achievements and his fine qualities. "I am the kind" is his

prefix to his bragging. W. thinks that everything he does or says

is interesting to others, and even that his illnesses are

fascinating to others. If he has a cold he takes a remarkable

pride in detailing every pain and ache and every degree of

temperature, as if the experience were remarkable and somehow

creditable. But W. is very jealous of other's achievements and is

bored to death except when he can talk or perform.

W. does not know how to camouflage his egoism, but F. does. Fully

convinced of his own superiority and with a strong urge at all

times to demonstrate this, he "knows enough" to camouflage, to

disguise and modify its manifestations. In this way he manages to

be popular, just as W. is decidedly unpopular, and many mistake

him for modest. When he wishes to put over his own opinion he

prefaces his statements by "they say," and though whatever

organization he enters he wishes to lead, he manages to give the

impression that he is reluctant to take a prominent part. A man

of ability and good judgment, the narrow range of F.'s

sympathies, his lack of sincere cordial feeling, is hidden by a

really artistic assumption of altruism that deceives all save

those who through long acquaintance know his real character. One

sees through W. on first meeting, he wears no mask or disguise;

but F. defies detection, though their natures are not radically

different except in wisdom and tact.

Half and more of the actions, poses and speech of men and women

is to demonstrate superiority or to avoid inferiority. There are

some who feel inwardly inferior, yet disguise this feeling

successfully. This feeling of inferiority may arise from purely

accidental matters, such as appearance, deformity, tone of voice,

etc., and the individual may either hide, become seclusive or

else brazen it out, so to speak.

A famous Boston physician was a splendid example of a brusque,

overbearing mask used to hide a shrinking, timid, subjectively

inferior personality. Always very near-sighted and unattractive,

he was essentially shy and modest but decided or felt that this

was a rough world and the way to get ahead was to be rough.

Towards the weak and sick he was kindness itself--gentle,

sympathetic and patient--but towards his colleagues he was a

boor. Distant, haughty, quick to demand all the consideration due

him, he was noted far and wide for the caustic way he attacked

others for their opinions and beliefs and the respect he required

for his own. The general opinion of physicians was that he was a

conceited, arrogant, aristocratic man, and he was avoided except

for his medical opinion, which was usually very sound. Those

admitted to the sanctum of this man's real self knew him to be

really modest and self-deprecatory, anxious to do right and

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.