The Foundations of Personality Part 3

A three-year-old, wandering into the kitchen, with mother in the back yard hanging out the clothes, makes the startling discovery that there is a pan of tarts, apple tarts, on the kitchen table, easily within reach, especially if Master Three-Year-Old pulls up a chair. Tarts! The child becomes excited, his mouth waters, and those tarts become the symbol and substance of pleasure,--and within his reach. But in the back of his mind, urging him to stop and consider, is the memory of mother's injunction, "You must always ask for tarts or candy or any goodies before you take them." And there is the pain of punishment and scolding and the vision of father, looking stern and not playing with one. These are distant, faint memories, weak forces,--but they influence conduct so that the little one takes a tart and eats it hurriedly before mother returns and then runs into the dining room or bedroom. Thus, instead of merely obeying an impulse to take the tart, as an uninstructed child would, he has now become a little thief and has had his first real moral struggle.

But it is a grim law that sensual pleasures do not last beyond the period of gratification. If this were not so there could be no morality in the world, and conscience would never reach any importance. Whether we gratify s.e.x appet.i.te or gastric hunger, the pleasure goes at once. True, there may be a short afterglow of good feeling, but rarely is it strongly affective, and very often it is replaced by a positive repulsion for the appet.i.te. On the other hand, to be out of conformity with your group is a permanent pain, and the fear of being found out is an anxiety often too great to be endured. And so our child, with the tart gone, wishes he had not taken it, perhaps not clearly or verbally; he is regretful, let us say. Out of this regret, out of this fear of being found out, out of the pain of nonconformity, arises the conscience feeling which says, "Thou shalt not" or "Thou shalt," according to social teaching.

It may be objected that "Conscience often arrays itself against society, against social teaching, against perhaps all men." It is not my place to trace the growth in mind of the idea of the Absolute Good, or absolute right and wrong, with which a man must align himself. I believe it is the strength of the ego feeling which gives to some the vigor and unyieldingness of their conscience. "I am right," says such a person, "and the rest of the world is wrong. G.o.d is with me, my conscience and future times will agree," thus appealing to the distant tribunal as James pointed out. All the insane hospitals have their sufferers for conscience's sake, paranoid personalities whose egos have expanded to infallibility and whose consciences are correspondingly developed.

Conscience thus represents the power of the permanent purposes and ideals of the individuals, and it wars on the less permanent desires and impulses, because there is in memory the uneasiness and anxiety that resulted from indulgence and the pain of the feeling of inferiority that results when one is hiding a secret weakness or undergoing reproof or punishment. This group of permanent purposes, ideals and aspirations corresponds closely to the censor of the Freudian concept and here is an example where a new name successfully disguises an age-old thought.

In other words, conscience is social in its origin, developing differently in different people according to their teaching, intelligence, will, ego-feeling, instincts, etc. From the standpoint of character a.n.a.lysis there are many types of people in regard to conscience development.

In respect to the reactions to praise and blame the following types are conspicuous:

1. A "weak" group in whom these act as apparently the sole motives.

2. A group energized by love of praise.

3. A group energized mainly by fear of blame.

4. A type that scorns anything but material reward.

5. Another, that "takes advantage" of reward; likes praise but is merely made conceited by it, hates blame but is merely made angry by it, fears punishment and finds its main goad to good conduct in this fear.

6. Then there are those in whom all these motives operate in greater or lesser degree,--the so-called normal person. In reality he has his special inclinations and dreads.

7. The majority of people are influenced mainly by the group with which they have cast their positions, the blame of others being relatively unimportant or arousing anger. For there is this great difference between our reactions to praise and blame: that while the praise of almost any one and for almost any quality is welcome, the blame of only a few is taken "well," and for the rest there is anger, contempt or defiance. The influence of blame varies with the respect, love and especially acknowledged superiority of the blamer. The "boss" has a right to blame and so has father or mother while we are children, but we resent bitterly the blame of a fellow employee; "he has no right to blame," and we rebel against the blame of our parents when we grow up. In fact, the war of the old and new generations starts with the criticism of the elder folk and the resentment of the younger folk.

It will be seen that reaction to praise and blame, etc., will depend upon the irritability of ego feeling, the love of superiority and the dislike for inferiority. This basic situation we must defer discussing, but what is of importance is that the primitive disciplinary weapons we have discussed never lose their cardinal value and remain throughout life and in all societies the prime modes of thought and conduct.

In similar fashion the conscience types might be depicted. From the over-conscientious who rigidly hold themselves to an ideal, who watch every departure from perfection with agony and self-reproach, and who may either reach the highest level or "break down" and become inefficient to the almost conscienceless group, doing only what seems more profitable, are many intermediate types merging one with the other.

There are people whose conscience is localized, as the self-sacrificing father who is a pirate in business, or as the policeman who holds rigidly to conscience in courage and loyalty to his fellows, but who finds no internal reproach when he takes a bribe or perjures himself about a criminal. What we call a code is really a localized conscience, and there are many men whose consciences do not permit seduction of the virgin but who are quite easy in mind about an intrigue with a married woman. So, too, you may be as wily as you please in business but find cheating at cards base and unthinkable. Conscience in the abstract may be a divine ent.i.ty, but in the realities of everyday life it is a medley of motives, purposes and teachings, varying from the grotesque and mischief-working to the sublime and splendid.

CHAPTER III. MEMORY AND HABIT

There are two qualities of nervous tissues (possibly of all living tissue) that are basic in all nervous and mental processes. They are dependent upon the modificability of nerve cells and fibers by stimuli, e. g., a light flashing through the pupil and pa.s.sing along the optical tracts to the occipital cortex produces changes which const.i.tute the basis of visual memory. Experience modifies nervous tissue in definite manner, and SOMETHING remembers. Who remembers? Who is conscious? Believe what you please about that, call it ego, soul, call it consciousness dipped out of a cosmic consciousness; and I have no quarrel with you.

Memory has its mechanics, in the a.s.sociation of ideas, which preoccupied the early English psychologists and philosophers; it is the basis of thought and also of action, and it is a prime mystery. We know its pathology, we think that memories for speech have loci in the brain, the so-called motor memories in Broca's area.[1] We know that a hemorrhage in these areas or in the fibers pa.s.sing from them, or a tumor pressing on them may destroy or temporarily abolish these memories, so that a man may KNOW what he wishes to say, understand speech and be unable to say it, though he may write it (motor aphasia). In sensory aphasia the defect is a loss of the capacity to understand spoken speech, though the patient may be able to say what he himself wishes. (It is fair to say that the definite location of these capacities in definite areas has been challenged by Marie, Moutier and others, but this denial does not deny the organic brain location of speech memories; it merely affirms that they are scattered rather than concentrated in one area.)

[1] Foot of the left or right third frontal convolutions, auditory speech in the supramarginal, etc.

In its widest phases memory alters with the state of the brain.

In childhood impressibility is high, but until the age or four or five the duration of impression is low, and likewise the power of voluntary recall. In youth (eighteen-twenty) all these capacities are perhaps at their highest. As time goes on impressibility seems first of all to be lost, so that it becomes harder and harder to learn new things, to remember new faces, new names.

The typical difficulty of middle age is to remember names, because these have no real relationship or logical value and must be arbitrarily remembered. The typical senile defect is the dropping out of the recent memories, though the past may be preserved in its entirety. With any disease of the brain, temporary or permanent, amnesia or memory loss may and usually is present (e. g., general paresis, tumor, cerebral arteriosclerosis, etc.). As the result of Carbon monoxide poisoning, as after accidental or attempted suicidal gas inhalation, the memory, especially for the most recent events, is impaired and the patient cannot remember the events as they occur; he pa.s.ses from moment to moment unconnected to the recent past, though his remote past is clear. Since memory is the basis of certainty, of the feeling of reality, these unfortunates are afflicted with an uncertainty, a sense of unreality, that is almost agonizing. As the effects of the poison wear off, which even in favorable cases takes months, the impressibility returns but never reaches normality again.

Unquestionably there is an inherent congenital difference in memory capacity. There are people who are prodigies of memory as there are those who are prodigies of physical strength,--and without training. The IMPRESSIBILITY for memories can in no way be increased except through the stimulation of interest and a certain heightening of attention through emotion. For the man or woman concerned with memory the first point of importance is to find some value in the fact or thing to be learned. Before a subject is broached to students the teacher should make clear its practical and theoretic value to the students. Too often that is the last thing done and it is only when the course is finished that its practical meaning is stressed or even indicated. In fact, throughout, teaching the value of the subject should constantly be emphasized, if possible, by ill.u.s.trations from life. There are only a few who love knowledge for its own sake, but there are many who become eager for learning when it is made practical.

The number of a.s.sociations given to a fact determines to a large extent its permanence in memory and the power of recalling it. In my own teaching I always instruct my students in the technique of memorizing, as follows:

1. Listen attentively, making only as many notes as necessary to recall the leading facts. The auditory memories are thus given the first place.

2. Go home and read up the subject in your textbooks, again making notes. Thus is added the visual a.s.sociations.

3. Write out in brief form the substance of the lecture, deriving your knowledge from both the lecture and the book. You thus add another set of a.s.sociations to your memories of the subject.

4. Teach the subject to or discuss it with a fellow student. By this you vitalize the memories you have, you link them firmly together, you lend to them the ardor of usefulness and of victory. You are forced to realize where the gaps, the lacunae of your knowledge come, and are made to fill them in.

Thus the best way to remember a fact is to find a use for it and to link it to your interests and your purposes. Unrelated it has no value; related it becomes in fact a part of you. After that the mechanics of memory necessitate the making of as many pathways to that fact as possible, and this means deliberately to a.s.sociate the fact by sound, by speech and by action. The advertised schemes of memory training are simply a.s.sociation schemes, old as the hills, and having value indeed, but too much is claimed for them. A splendid memory is born, not made; but any memory, except where disease has entered, can be improved by training.

It is because lectures on the whole do not supply enough a.s.sociations or arouse enough interest that the lecture is the poorest method of teaching or learning. Man's mind sticks easily to things, but with difficulty to words about things. To maintain attention for an hour or so, while sitting, is a task, and there develops a tendency either to a hypnoidal state in which the mind follows uncritically, or to a restless uneasiness with wandering mind and fatigue of body. A demonstration, on the other hand, a laboratory experiment with short, personal instruction, a bodily contact with the problem calls into play interest, enthusiasm, curiosity, motor images, the use of the hands, and is THE method of teaching.

There are at present excellent psychological methods of testing out the memory capacity. Every one engaged in any responsible work, or troubled about his memory, should be so tested. While there are other qualities of mind of great importance, memory is basic, and no one can really understand himself who is in doubt about his memory. In such diseases as neurasthenia one of the commonest complaints is the "loss of memory," which greatly troubles the patient. As a matter of fact, what is impaired is interest and attention, and when the patient realizes this he is usually quite relieved. The man who has a poor memory may become very successful if he develops systems of recording, filing, indexing, but his possibilities of knowledge are greatly reduced by his defect.[1]

[1] It is the growth of the subject matter of knowledge that makes necessary the elaborate systems of indexing, etc., now so important. It is as much as man can do to follow the places where the men work, let alone what they are doing. This growth of knowledge is getting to be an extra-human phenomenon. Of this Graham Wallas has written entertainingly.

A second fundamental ability of living tissue, and of particular importance in character, is habit formation. Habit resides in the fact that once living tissue has been traversed by a stimulus and has responded by an act, three things result:

1. The pathway for that stimulus becomes more permeable; becomes, as it were, grooved or like a track laid across the living structure of the nervous system.

2. The responding element is more easily stirred into activity, responds with more vigor and with less effort.

3. Consciousness, at first invoked, recedes more and more, until the habit-action of whatever type tends to become automatic.

There is in this last peculiarity a tendency for the habit to establish itself as independent of the personality, and if an injurious or undesired habit, to set up the worst of the conflicts of life,--a conflict between one's intention and an automaton in the shape of a powerfully entrenched habit.

Habits are economical of thought and energy, generally speaking; that is their main recommendation. A dozen examples present themselves at once as ill.u.s.trative: piano playing, with its intense concentration on each note, with consciousness attending to the action of each muscle, and then practice, habit formation, and the ease and power of execution with the mind free to wander off in the moods suggested by the music, or to busy itself with improvisations, flourishes and the artistic touches. Before true artistry can come, technique must be relegated to habit. So with typewriting, driving an automobile, etc.

More fundamental than these, which are largely skill habits, are the organic habits. One of the triumphs of pediatrics depends upon the realization that the baby's welfare hangs on regular habits of feeding, that he is not to be fed except at stated intervals; as a result processes of digestion are set going in a regular, harmonious manner. In other words, these processes may be said to "get to know" what is expected of them and act accordingly. The mother's time is economized and the strain of nursing is lessened. In adults, regular hours of eating make it possible for the juices of digestion to be secreted as the food is ingested; in other words, an habitual adjustment takes place.

If there were one single health habit that I would have inculcated above all others, it would be the habit of regularly evacuating the bowels. While constipation is not the worst ill in the world, it causes much trouble, annoyance and a considerable degree of ill health, and, in my opinion, a considerable degree of unhappiness. A physician may be pardoned for frank advice: all the matters concerning the bowels, such as coa.r.s.e foods, plenty of water and exercise, are secondary compared to the habit of going to the stool at the same time each day, whether there be desire or not. A child should be trained in this matter as definitely as he is trained to brush his teeth. In fact, I think that the former habit is more important than the latter. The mood of man is remarkably related to the condition of his gastro-intestinal tract and the involuntary muscle of that tract is indirectly under the control of the will through habit formation.

Sleep[1] the mysterious, the death in life which we all seek each night, is likewise regulated by habit. Arising from the need of relief from consciousness and bodily exertion, the mechanism of sleep is still not well understood. Is there a toxic influence at work? is the body poisoned by itself, as it were, as has been postulated; is there a toxin of fatigue, or is there a "vaso-motor" reaction, a shift of the blood supply causing a cerebral anaemia and thus creating the "sleepy" feeling? The capacity to sleep is a factor of great importance and we shall deal with it later under a separate heading as part of the mechanism of success and failure. At present we shall simply point out that each person builds up a set of habits regarding sleep,--as to hour, kind of place, warmth, companionship, ventilation and even the side of the body he shall lie on, and that a change in these preliminary matters is often attended by insomnia. Moreover, a change from the habitual in the general conduct of life--a new city or town, a strange bed, a disturbance in the moods and emotions--may upset the sleep capacity. Those in whom excitement persists, or whose emotions are persistent, become easily burdened with the dreaded insomnia. Sleep is dependent on an exclusion of excitement and exciting influences.

If, however, exciting influences become habitual they lose their power over the organism and then the individual can sleep on a battle field, in a boiler factory, or almost anywhere.

Conversely, many a New Yorker is lulled to sleep by the roar of the great city who, finds that the quiet of the country keeps him awake.

[1] As good a book as any on the subject of sleep is Boris Sidis's little monograph.

Sleeplessness often enough is a habit. Something happens to a man that deeply stirs him, as an insult, or a falling out with a friend, or the loss of money,--something which disturbs what we call his poise or peace of mind. He becomes sleepless because, when he goes to bed and the shock-absorbing objects of daily interest are removed, his thoughts revert back to his difficulty; he becomes again humiliated or grieved or thrown into an emotional turmoil that prevents sleep. After the first night of insomnia a new factor enters,--the fear of sleeplessness and the conviction that one will not sleep. After a time the insult has lost its sting, or the difficulty has been adjusted, there is no more emotional distress, but there is the established sleeplessness, based on habitual emotional reaction to sleep. I know one lady whose fear reached the stage where she could not even bear the thought of night and darkness. It is in these cases that a powerful drug used two or three nights in succession breaks up the sleepless habit and reestablishes the power to sleep.

People differ in their capacity to form habits and in their love of habits. The normal habits, thoroughness, neatness and method come easily to some and are never really acquired by others.

People of an impetuous, explosive or reckless character, keenly alive to every shade of difference in things, find it hard to be methodical, to carry on routine. The impatient person has similar difficulties. Whereas others take readily to the same methods of doing things day by day; and these are usually non-explosive, well inhibited, patient persons, to whom the way a thing is done is as important as the goal itself.

Here comes a very entertaining problem, the question of the value of habits. Good habits save time and energy, tend to eliminate useless labor and make for peace and quiet. But there is a large body of persons who come to value habits for themselves and, indeed, this is true to a certain extent of all of us. Once an accustomed way of doing things is established it becomes not only a path of least resistance, but a sort of fixed point of view, and, if one may mix metaphors a trifle, a sort of trunk for the ego to twine itself around. There is uneasiness in the thought of breaking up habits, an uneasiness that grows the more as we become older and is deepened into agony if the habit is tinged with our status in life, if it has become a sort of measure of our respectability. Thus a good housekeeper falls into the habits of doing things which were originally a mark of her ability, which she holds as sacred and values above her health and energy.

There are people who fiercely resent a new way of doing things; they have woven their most minor habits into their ego feeling and thus make a personal issue of innovations. These are the upholders of the established; they hate change as such; they are efficient but not progressive. In its pathological form this type becomes the "health fiends" who never vary in their diet or in their clothing, who arise at a certain time, take their "plunge"

regardless, take their exercise and their breakfasts alike as a health measure without real enjoyment, etc., who grow weary if they stay up half an hour or so beyond their ordinary bedtime; they are the individuals who fall into health cults, become vegetarians, raw food exponents, etc.