character that the instinct of human sympathy will be highly developed
in them. Jealousy has its roots in selfishness, in an over-development
of what may be called the ego-centric instinct. The jealous child is
pre-eminently a child unduly occupied with thoughts of self. His personal
desires and his personal interests are of paramount importance to him,
just because he has not been taught that the one truly self-satisfying
ideal of life is to find joy in bringing joy to others. To be sure, he
cannot be taught this by direct instruction when he is very small. But
indirectly, through the subtle force of suggestion, he can be taught it
even then, if he is given a good parental example.
His parents themselves, not merely to prevent the budding of the
sentiment of jealousy, but for the sake of the child's moral education
in general, must set him an example of unselfishness. In their relations
with each other, with their friends, with casual visitors to their home,
they must maintain an altruistic, rather than an ego-centric, attitude.
Showing true love for their child, they must--and this is especially
necessary in the case of an only child--cause the child unconsciously
to realise that he is not, and should not be, the sole object of their
thoughts; that they have other interests, other duties in life. Unless he
is constitutionally abnormal, a child brought up in such an atmosphere of
general, self-forgetting kindliness is almost certain to acquire the same
healthy philosophy of life that his parents have--a philosophy inimical to
jealousy in every form.
As an aid to the same end, it is important to begin, at as early a time
as possible, to train the child to occupy his mind actively with games
and studies of educational significance. It is a fact which scarcely
needs demonstration that the child in whom love of study and interest in
subjects of study are developed at an early age will be a child unlikely
to become unhealthily occupied with thoughts of himself. He will have too
many and too strong external interests to have either time or desire for
morbid self-communing.
In fine, you may set this down as certain: the more you inspire in your
children external interests in play and work, doing this partly by direct
teaching and partly by setting them an example of industrious activity,
the less reason you will have to fear that they will fall victims to the
handicap of jealousy or to the nervous maladies resultant from any form of
excessive preoccupation with thoughts of self.
If, however, despite your best efforts, your child does develop jealous
characteristics in marked degree, the safest and wisest thing you can do
is to take him at once to a good specialist in the treatment of mental and
nervous troubles. It may be that the jealousy is only the resultant of
some unsuspected error of his upbringing, but it may also be symptomatic
of some serious disorder requiring careful medical treatment.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 7: In my "Psychology and Parenthood" pp. 223-227, will be found
the details of a typical poltergeist performance.]
[Footnote 8: "Educational Problems," vol. i, p. 363.]
V
SELFISHNESS
"Jealousy," I stated a few pages back, "has its roots in selfishness, in
an over-development of what may be called the ego-centric instinct." Aside
from its role as a developer of jealousy, selfishness is indeed one of
the major handicaps of childhood. Moralists have long urged on parents
the importance of early training to prevent their children from becoming
selfish. They have rightly pictured selfishness as among the greatest of
human blemishes, giving character an ugly twist and making impossible
that harmonious adjustment with other people which is indispensable to
individual happiness and social progress. But it is not merely to be
condemned from the moralist's point of view: it also is to be condemned
from the physician's. Selfishness does much more than injure character:
it may even ruin the health of those afflicted with it. To put the matter
briefly, training against selfishness is imperative in early life, if
only as a safeguard against the functional nervous and mental maladies so
common to-day.
When parents fail to teach their children to control their emotions; when
they foster in them exaggerated notions of their importance by giving
way to the children in everything, being over-solicitous about them,
performing duties for them which the children should early be taught to
perform for themselves, selfishness is an almost inevitable outgrowth.
The children, in addition, may become quite unfitted to cope with the
stresses of existence. And they may further become so psychically
disorganised that, if after a time they no longer find themselves always
having their own way, there may develop nervous symptoms which not merely
are the product of an inner emotional storm, but are strangely designed
to fulfil the nervous one's latent wish to remain the centre of interest
and influence. Or, more bluntly stated, nervous attacks frequently are
sheer manifestations of selfishness. It is selfishness that gives rise to
them, and, though the victim may not be at all conscious of the fact, they
represent an abnormal effort of the personality to attain selfish ends.
This is not theory. It is an established truth, and is demonstrable
from the case-histories of many nervous patients, adults and children
alike. And, with increasing use of the most advanced methods of mental
analysis, the influence of selfishness in causing nervous ailments is
certain to become more widely appreciated than it is at present. Not
that selfishness is the causal factor in all nervous cases. It would be
absurdly false to assert anything of the kind, but the proportion of
cases in which it does figure is astonishingly high. Parents need to know
this; they need to recognise that failure to curb selfishness during the
formative period of childhood may mean nervous wreckage, as well as the
distorting of character. In the case of a child of so-called "nervous
temperament"--a child, that is to say, who begins life with an unstable
nervous organisation by reason of inherited weaknesses--nervous wreckage
is almost certain to be the result of neglect to take precautions against
the growth of selfishness. The full effects of parental neglect in this
regard may not be visible for many years, but frequently they become
disconcertingly evident while the child still is young. A case reported to
me by a well-known American neurologist and psychopathologist is decidedly
to the point in this connection, and may well be given in some detail.
It is the case of a girl of fourteen who was brought to the neurologist
because of nervous symptoms which took the form of periods of anxiety and
depression, alternating with outbreaks of great irritability. The girl,
her mother stated, seemed to have lost interest in everything. At times
she would sit mournfully weeping; at others, fall into a passion for no
apparent reason. More than once she had declared that she wanted to die.
She could not, or would not, give any explanation of this most singular
behaviour.
Making a diagnosis of functional, rather than organic, disease, the
neurologist resorted to dream-analysis to get at the hidden causes of
trouble. At his request, the girl related several dreams, all of which had
the noticeable peculiarity that in them the dreamer herself was, to an
unusual extent, the dominant figure of the dream-action. Another striking
feature of her dreams was that many of them had to do with imaginary
experiences of a painful character befalling either the dreamer's father
or her brother. Mindful of the theory that dreams are directly or
indirectly representative of secret wishes, the neurologist questioned
his little patient about her family life. She frankly admitted that she
disliked her father, and was not overfond of her brother. She disliked
the father--or, as she vehemently said, "hated" him--because he scolded
her. Her coldness towards her brother arose from the fact that her mother
had fallen into the habit of tactlessly holding him up as a model of good
behaviour.
"I love my mother, though," she added, "because she is good to me, and
generally lets me do what I want."
Summoning the mother to a private conference, the physician learned
that, from early childhood, his patient had been very obstinate and
self-willed. Her mother, through mistaken affection, had pampered her. She
had literally made herself a slave to the daughter, even to the extent of
giving up evening engagements that she might sit by her daughter's bed,
gently stroking her head until she fell asleep.
"She cannot sleep unless I do this," said the mother, "and though I have
lately tried to discontinue it, I cannot, because she cries and shrieks
until I come to her."
To the neurologist the situation was now perfectly clear. The daughter's
nervous symptoms were manifestly the not surprising reaction of a
personality untrained in emotional control and unexpectedly confronted by
a novel and painful state of affairs--the mother's half-hearted attempt to
break away from her self-imposed slavery. However, it would hardly do to
tell the mother that her early mismanagement of the child was responsible
for the neurotic condition which had developed, and that this neurotic
condition was, in reality, only a subconsciously originated device to
reassert the daughter's waning authority over her mother. What the
neurologist did say was:
"Madam, if you want your daughter to get well, you must at once stop this
practice of stroking her to sleep. I must ask you to begin to-night. Send
your daughter to her room, leave her in bed, shut and lock the door, and
let her shriek. This may seem hard and cruel, but it is actually a greater
kindness than a continuance of the stroking would be. It is, indeed, a
first and necessary step in her cure."
The mother obeyed. For two nights the house resounded with the girl's
cries. The third night she went to bed and to sleep without a protest.
Then the physician once more sent for the mother.
"You are soon leaving town for the summer, I understand," he said. "What
are you going to do with your daughter?"
"Why, take her with us, of course."
"You must do nothing of the sort. Instead, send her to a girls' camp. She
needs contact with other girls; she needs the discipline such contact will
give her. It is far and away the best medicine she can have. Her recovery
depends solely on her developing a new point of view, a mental outlook
that will extend beyond herself. This is what a good camp for girls can
give her."
The outcome vindicated his words. That fall the nervously depressed girl
came back from a summer in camp radiantly happy and with a vastly altered
disposition. Since then her parents have had no trouble with her.
Please, however, understand clearly that she was really a sick girl
when her mother took her to my neurological friend. It was not simply a
question of dealing with a "naughty" girl. The depression, the tears, the
attacks of irritability were not deliberately put on to excite sympathy
and to play on the mother's affections. This assuredly was their basic
purpose, but they were the product of subconscious, not conscious, mental
action. They were the resultant of an emotional stress, the responsibility
for which rested not with the girl herself but with her mother's unwise
treatment of her. If she had become neurotic, it was because her mother
had made her so. What she needed, and all she needed, was psychic
re-education, and this she obtained through the neurologist's common-sense
method of cure.
The fact that such cases are indicative, not of mere naughtiness, but
of the action of an inner force operating independently of the victim's
conscious volition, will become more apparent when I add that sometimes
the symptoms causing medical aid to be invoked are physical instead of
mental. In one typical case of this sort a neurologist was summoned to
examine a small boy who had been attacked by a peculiar weakness of the
legs. To all appearance, he was in perfect bodily health, but when he
attempted to walk his legs gave way, and he would fall, unless quickly
supported. The most careful testing failed to reveal any organic cause
for this condition, and a diagnosis of juvenile hysteria was made. It was
learned that the boy's trouble began soon after he had met in the street a
badly crippled, semi-paralysed man, whose appearance had evidently made a
deep impression on his mind, as he spoke of it, when he got home, in terms
partly of astonishment and partly of fear. There could be no doubt that
the sight of this man had acted as a "suggestion" to cause the development
of a somewhat similar condition in the boy himself. The question remained,
why should the mere seeing of a crippled man have sufficient suggestive
force to bring on an hysterical crippling? For undoubtedly the boy must
have had not a few equally distressing experiences long before this one.
On investigation it turned out that at the time he saw the cripple he
was under considerable mental strain. A petted, spoiled child, he had
rebelled against being sent to school. He would much rather stay home and
play by himself or with his mother. His parents' desires in the matter
were as nothing to him: it was what he wanted that was the important
thing. For once, though, the parents insisted on being obeyed by their
thoroughly selfish boy. He had to go to school, and go to school he did,
until the hysterical paralysis set in. This paralysis, of course, was
somewhat inconvenient, since it limited his opportunities for play, but
it at least had the advantage of keeping him from attending the school
that he detested. The boy himself was not in the slightest conscious of
the part thus played by selfish wishing in the development of his diseased
condition. He was really frightened at finding himself unable to stand
and walk. Nevertheless, so strong was his antipathy against school that
it was some time before the suggestion of paralysis was broken down by
appropriate psychotherapeutic treatment.
Other cases even more extraordinary are recorded in medical annals.
One "spoiled child," a little girl not five years old, had a series of
convulsive attacks, following the unexpected refusal of her parents to
grant a request that involved risk to her if they granted it. After
the convulsions she was paralysed in her lower limbs, and the parents,
terrified, called in an eminent specialist in nervous diseases.
Fortunately, the specialist recognised almost at once that it was a case
of hysterical paralysis, brought on by lack of discipline and lack of
training in emotional control, and he obtained the parents' permission to
isolate the little girl and treat her as he deemed best. His treatment was
harsh, but exceedingly effective. For two days he starved the child, then
put a bowl of bread and milk some distance from her bed. The suggestion of
food was too strong for the suggestion of paralysis. Without further ado,
she skipped nimbly out of bed and secured the bowl. But the specialist
did not reproach her for being a naughty girl. His reproaches were for
the parents, to whom he gave some greatly needed advice as to her future
upbringing.
Hysterical pains, contractures, swellings, even hysterical blindness,
have been observed in children who, after having been unduly indulged,
feel that their father or mother, as the case may be, is no longer as
attentive to and lenient with them as they would like. More frequently,
under such conditions, the symptoms of nervousness are chiefly mental,
or, if physical, are confined to muscular twitchings, slight involuntary
movements of the face, head, hands, and similar manifestations. Unhappily,
the true significance of these is often overlooked. They are thought to be
defects which the child will "outgrow," and in many cases they certainly
are outgrown, to all appearance. But, if the moral weaknesses underlying
them--the self-centredness, the deficiency in emotional control--are not
in the meantime corrected, at any crisis in adult life there is likely
to result a nervous breakdown or a serious attack of hysteria. Indeed,
in not a few cases of adult hysteria, the causal agency of selfishness
is unmistakably in evidence to those accustomed to interpreting nervous
symptoms. There are plenty of men and women whose chronic neuroticism is
motivated by a subconscious craving to be the centre of attraction, or to
be perpetually dominant in the family life. There are other unfortunates
who, when their will is seriously crossed, take refuge, like the boys and
girls just mentioned, in various forms of nervous disease. The curious
experience of a New England physician, Doctor A. Myerson, for some time
connected with the Boston Psychopathic Hospital, is by no means as unique
as might be thought.
This physician was summoned to attend a woman suffering from what was
supposed to be a cerebral hemorrhage. She no longer was able to move her
right arm, right leg, or the right side of her face, and had entirely
lost the power of speech. For many months previous to the onset of this
deplorable condition she had been troubled at irregular intervals by
headaches, nausea, and fainting spells. The patient herself and her
friends had little doubt that she was in so serious a condition that
recovery could not be expected. But Doctor Myerson, making use of the
most up-to-date methods of neurological diagnosis, soon was able to
reach a reassuring verdict. It was a case, he found, not of organic,
but of functional paralysis--in fine, a case of hysteria. And, in the
end, by employing what is technically known as the method of "indirect
suggestion," he actually re-educated the paralyzed woman both to walk and
to talk.
Meantime, he made a searching inquiry to ascertain just why she had been
stricken by hysterical paralysis. He discovered, for one thing, that the
patient's fainting and vomiting spells and her headaches had usually
followed bitter quarrels with her husband--and usually had the effect of
placing victory on her side. There was one point, nevertheless, on which
the husband was immovable. He was a poor man and could not grant his
wife's insistent demand to move to a more expensive neighbourhood. He
would not have granted it if he could, for in the particular neighbourhood
to which she wished to move she had friends whom he regarded as
undesirable. It appeared that the attack of paralysis and speechlessness
had been preceded by an exceptionally bitter quarrel over this question
of moving--"a quarrel which," to quote from Doctor Myerson's report, "had
lasted for a whole day and into the night of the attack."
Thus, the attack itself could be correctly interpreted as the supreme
effort of a self-centred, neurotic personality to gain a desired end.
But, while making this interpretation, Doctor Myerson was quick to add,
in his report on the case, that the attack had not by any means been
brought on through the patient's "conscious purpose or volition." It was
all an affair of her subconsciousness, working in a blind, abnormal,
irrational way to help attain the object of her conscious desire. That
her subconsciousness should work so abnormally and so disastrously was
chiefly due, beyond any doubt, to the absence of adequate training in
self-control and emotional restraint.
But it is not only as a strange, irrational mode of fulfilling a wish
that hysteria and other nervous disorders may become manifest in selfish
people. Without this element of wishing entering in at all, nervousness
is particularly likely to attack the selfish. Many nervous conditions are
directly brought on by conscious or subconscious fixing of the thoughts
on the bodily processes. We are so constituted that our internal organs
work best when we pay no attention to them--or, more strictly, when we
pay no attention to the physical sensations to which they give rise while
working. If, for any reason, our attention is turned to and held on these
sensations, they at once become exaggerated, and the organs giving rise to
them tend to function badly. In this way any bodily organ may be disturbed
in its action, and general symptoms of nervousness result through nothing
but over-attention.
An eminent New York physician, Doctor J. J. Walsh, who has given special
thought to this aspect of the problem of nervousness, states the case more
fully, as follows:
"If something has particularly attracted a patient's attention to some
part of his anatomy, and if his attention is concentrated on it and
allowed to dwell long on it, his feelings may be so exaggerated as to
tempt him to think that they are connected with some definite pathological
condition, and he may even translate them into serious portents of organic
disease. If a patient once begins to waste nervous energy on himself
because of solicitude with regard to these symptoms, then it will not be
long before feelings of tiredness, incapacity for work, at times insomnia
and certain disturbances of memory, are likely to be noted. Then the
neurasthenic picture seems to be complete.
"This is the process so picturesquely called 'short-circuiting,' by which
nervous energy exhausts itself upon the individual himself instead of in
the accomplishment of external work. Many of the worst cases of so-called
neurasthenia have their origin in this process. It is true that this set
of events is much more likely to occur among people of lowered nervous
vitality, but, under certain conditions, it may develop in those who are
otherwise in good health up to the moment when the attention happened
to be particularly called to certain feelings. The physician can start
these patients off anew, after improving their physical condition, if
he can only bring them to see how much their concentration of mind upon
themselves is the cause of their symptoms."[9]
Now, of all people likely to be thus afflicted, the selfish man or woman
is by all means the likeliest, simply because his or her every mode
of thinking revolves about self. It is the selfish man's wishes, his
pleasures, his grievances, his reverses, that are of supreme importance
to him. When, moreover, his early upbringing has been such as to leave
him sadly short in emotional control, any passing disturbance in the
workings of his internal organs may easily hold disastrous consequences
for him. He worries over little ailments--as, for example, a slight attack
of indigestion--to which people of less self-centred nature would give
little or no thought. And, by his persistent worrying and his persistent
over-attention to the way his stomach works, it may not be long before he
has become a victim of chronic nervous dyspepsia.
Of course, unselfish people who are lacking in emotional control, or carry
about with them the unassimilated memory of childhood emotional shocks,
may likewise become nervous invalids of one sort or another. But they
are much less likely to do this than selfish people are, if only because
the unselfish are not so eternally occupied with themselves. They have
externalised their thoughts; they have neither time nor inclination to
think about trivial aches and pains. Unless overwhelmed by an unexpected
emotional shock--for instance, by the sudden death of a beloved relative
or by the shock of some great fright--they are likely to go through
life comfortably and normally enough. On the other hand, the selfish
person is always in danger of becoming morbidly introspective, with
resultant damage to the functioning of his nervous system.