CHAPTER IX
THE BACKGROUNDS OF PERSONALITY
The question of moods and sublimations once raised introduces the problem of the relation of neuroses, nervous disorders without an organic disease basis, and mental abnormalities, to the endocrine system. Obviously, in view of all the influences exerted by the ductless glands upon every organ and function of the body and mind, and their intermediary, the vegetative nervous system, a relation must exist. Observations accumulated, some of which have been referred to in the preceding chapters, prove the complete, though complex, reality of such a deduction.
The history of attitudes toward nerve and mental disorders is a remarkable illustration of the vicissitudes of ignorance playing with words. The Greeks, swayed and dazzled as they were by the magic of words which they discovered, yet never permitted themselves to be fooled by them. As an explanation for the phenomena of hysteria in women, that benign mental disorder par excellence, they had the theory of a wandering about of the womb in the organism as a cause. That provided an image of something material happening as an explanation. With the triumphs of anatomy after the Renaissance, that naïve view had to be discarded. In its place the humoral theory held sway, with its good humors and its bad humors, and their bilious, lymphatic, nervous and sanguine admixtures. But that, too, went the way of all flesh. During the first half of the nineteenth century, a popular phrase, "nerves," paraphrased by practitioners of medicine as neuroses, then came into vogue as the efficient cause of these troubles. "Nerves" indeed today have filtered everywhere into the common consciousness.
Because of the irritant effects of light, food and social conditions, America has come to swarm with neurotics of every type, especially the sexual. A rich field was created for cults of treatment, which spring up like weeds periodically all over the country. We have seen how the American, Beard, was inspired by the idea that "nerves" represented a loss of tone, a flabbiness, weakness and softness of the nerves, to coin the word neurasthenia. Nerve exhaustion he believed was the cause of the nerve weakness. Weir Mitchell, another American, introduced the rest cure combined with overfeeding as a treatment for it.
An analytical French neurologist, Charcot, was not to be satisfied by words of Latin-Greek derivation. Insisting upon the significance of the individual mental workings of each case, he and his pupil Janet began to unravel a tangle which has led to the present revolution in psychology. For Freud, Jung and Adler took up the story where Janet left off.
Janet elaborated the ideas of a subconscious and an unconscious, a dissociation of the components of the mind, and a splitting of the personality. Lumping the phenomena of amnesia, somnambulism, hypnotism, anesthesia, obsession and hysteria into the grand group of mental dissociations and disintegrations, he achieved a unification never considered possible before him. Suggestion as a mode of cure was also emphasized and elaborated by him to an undreamed-of degree.
Freud, in 1895, studying a case of hysteria with Breuer, had attempted cure by the method of free association, attempting to get the hysteric to pour out her mental life. Not succeeding, and his interest aroused by her continual references to her dreams, he discovered that by means of those dreams he could tap the subconscious and unconscious in regions hitherto inaccessible. For in the dreams, ideas, persons, and experiences appeared that never came upon the stage of the conscious. From that finding he developed the concept of repression, i.e., the relegation of a painful experience into the unconscious, and kept imprisoned there by the censor. Also how there it became the complex, which, like a stage manager, never appeared before the footlights of the conscious, but determined its content just the same by inhibition or stimulation of any character or scene to be enacted upon it.
A complete critique of Freudianism cannot be attempted here. But in relation to the endocrine system as controllers of nerve function in health and disease, a valid criticism can be made. Firstly, the Freudian jargon, its technicalities and explanations, are metaphors. Some may regard them as justifiable descriptions of mental processes. But it certainly can be urged against them that they provide us with no idea concerning what is happening in the cells of the body and brain as explanation for the event, normal or abnormal, supposedly explained. Words like sublimation or transference are figures of speech and nothing else. Secondly, they ignore totally the powers of the vegetative apparatus, the viscera, muscles and secreting glands together, as originators and determiners of the wish and its adventures.
How utterly different, from the point of view of the physiologist, the two explanations are as pictures, can be seen from a single example. The idea of repression, to the Freudian, means the pushing down into the subconscious of some experience. Pushing down is a process controlled by the laws of physics: it involves the concepts of matter and force. Hence, the expression, as a description of a psychic episode, is a metaphor pure and simple. From the standpoint of the process of repression as pictured by the student of the vegetative apparatus, the term signifies a real bottling up of energy. For the repression means actual compression of muscle, the muscle contained in the viscera. And the repression means a real interference with the release of energy, which remains bound up, tugging for room for expression as much as a spring tightly coiled in a box. In the production of that tension an endocrine has often been decisive. The endocrine nature of the individual may decide whether a subconscious, i.e., visceral or vegetative tension, is to come into being, live or die, in the face of a given situation. If thereby, a permanent disturbance of the equilibrium between the components is brought about, a neurosis, expression of an unsatisfied vegetative tension, follows.
It has been hailed as a brand new discovery by those following the latest in psychology that the subconscious and the unconscious constitute a more essential component of the personality than the conscious. As a matter of fact, common practice has recognized the fact, if not the mechanism and its significance, for ages. It is not what people say or do—it is how they say it: that is how the true reactions of personality are recognized instinctively even by animals. Tone and gesture (when not acted or posed) are accepted as symbols and symptoms of states of the inmost sancta sanctorum that words and wit never give entrance to, nay disguise and block. Tone and gesture as revelations of the Inner-Me, the True-Me or Intra-Me if you will, are so potent because they are direct expressions of the vegetative apparatus. The curl of a lip, the flicker of an eye-lash, the twitch of a shoulder are the overflow of energy cramped in the increased intravisceral pressure, determined by increased outflow of endocrine secretion. Wittingly or unwittingly we interpret the little signs as messages from the deepest self, which they truly are.
NERVOUS BREAKDOWNS AND SHELL SHOCK
In civil life, the complex of symptoms Beard jumbled together as neurasthenia, when associated with a loss of self-control, so that the sufferer is incapacitated for the duties of everyday life, has become the popular "nervous breakdown." A sanitarium appears to be one of the necessary components of the condition. It is the last act, the climax of "nerves."
During the War of 1914-1918, thousands of cases of functional disorders of the nervous came to be grouped under "Shell Shock." The psychic phenomena in the wake of concussion of the brain due to explosives suggested the term, and its application to affections of self-control, or dissociations of the personality, with paralysis, blindness, speechlessness, loss of hearing and so on. The War neurosis (including those arising in home service) is still a topical subject because thousands of mentally disabled soldiers are alive.
In view of what has been said concerning the endocrine mechanism of the instincts and the vegetative apparatus, it could be predicted that a number of these nerve casualties of peace and war would be caused by an upset of the equilibrium between the glands of internal secretion. A study of war neuroses by the great Italian student of the endocrines, Pende, confirms this assumption. As emphasized, the internal secretions are like tuning keys, and tighten or loosen the strings of the organism-instrument, the nerves. War for the soldier, or the civilian combatant as well, sets the strings vibrating, and with them the glands controlled by them. Excessive stimulation or depression of an endocrine will disturb the whole chain of hormones, and the vegetative system, and their echoes in the psyche. The nervous disorders of war that have been lumped as shell shock or war shock may be looked upon as uncompensated; airings of the endocrine vegetative mechanism, as dislocations of parts and processes that are reflected outwardly as ailment or disease.
AN ENDOCRINE NEUROSIS
An exquisite example of an endocrine neurosis, that is a disorder of nerves and brain dependent upon an upset of the equilibrium between the internal secretions due to a trying experience, was furnished recently by the reactions of three naval officers lost in the snow wilds of Canada through a balloon adventure. The cases aroused a good deal of interest at the time, and the details were reported by the newspapers as if they were the episodes of a serial mystery story.
The three officers started out late one fine evening from Rockaway Air Station in a balloon for a practice trip. Atmospheric conditions suddenly changed, they became lost in the clouds, and finally landed somewhere in the Canadian wilderness. The commander of the balloon crew, Lieut. A., 23 years old, was the youngest of the three; the oldest, Lieut. B., being 45, and the third man in the thirties, Lieut. C.
According to the testimony given at the Court of Inquiry held afterwards, two hours after they abandoned the balloon and started struggling through the snow, B. became tired and complained of his fatigue. B.'s fatigue increased, and two days later became so great that the party had to stop for an hour and build a fire in order to permit him to rest. However, an hour proved too little: and in another half hour he was falling and fainting.
Letters written by C. to his wife and gotten hold of by reporters declared that B. at this juncture passed into a semi-sane state, in which he accused himself of a number of sins, and volunteered to commit suicide, so that the others would not be burdened by his weakness. Also, that they might use his body to fortify themselves. A. discussed with C. the advisability of taking B.'s knife away from him. Living on their carrier pigeons, they continued on, moved by a desperate hope of finding someone. B. had several fainting spells after drinking water traced by moose tracks.
Luck favored them, and they encountered an Indian who guided them to a place called Moose Factory. Here they wrote the letters home which reached their wives and the daily press before they themselves returned to civilization. A great hue and cry was raised by the newspapers about their plight. Newspaper correspondents vied with each other for the honor of being the first to meet them and get their story.
They arrived at a collection of houses named Mattice. A. and C. proceeded ahead and found instructions for them not to talk. C. went back to B., who was in a shack with the correspondents full of the story of the letters. B. became enraged and struck C. who retained his self-control.
Differences were patched up, and the three returned together to New York. There the medical examination of the three showed that the four days in the wilderness had left its deepest effects upon the physique and mind of B. In a few days he developed an attack of tonsillitis, with fever, and a mental disturbance described by the medical officer as exhaustion psychosis. He believed this condition to be the result of severe exhaustion, prolonged anxiety, worry, and extreme exposure. Extreme restlessness and irritability, confusion of thought and an undefined perplexity, all the prominent symptoms of exhaustion psychosis, making him hyperactive and inclined to acts of violence, were in evidence.
The physique, character and reactions of Lieut. B. are what interest us in the case. The pictures of him published, and the structure of his skull, face and teeth, his hair and other physical traits point to his being an adrenal-centered type, of the unstable variety, so far as his internal secretion make-up is concerned. As we shall see in the next chapter on the different kinds of endocrine personalities, the unstable adrenocentric (convenient name for the class) is characterized by rapid exhaustibility because under conditions of stress and strain, the reserve of the gland is consumed. The adrenal glands, we noted in a preceding chapter, are concerned with the maintenance of muscle and nerve tone in emergencies. They are the glands which, during crises especially, control the production and supply of energy to the various organs and tissues called upon to function to the utmost in emergencies. When the adrenals fail, as they do readily in these labile adrenocentrics, it is as if the adrenals were cut out of the body. And it has been repeatedly shown that extirpation of the adrenals is immediately followed by degeneration and breakdown of the brain cells.
These facts explain the reactions of Lieut. B. The acute call upon his adrenals made by his dangerous situation probably soon exhausted them of their content of reserve secretions. Overwhelming fatigue with loss of muscle tone followed. The changes in the brain caused him to talk as he did in the wilderness. Returned to safety, the news that his reputation was under fire because of C.'s letter brought out another adrenal characteristic: the excessive instinct of pugnacity, easily stimulated, with its emotion of anger and the tendency to violence. What is spoken of as a quick temper is an adrenocentric trait. Returned to New York, an infection, tonsillitis, attacked him. Infections in adrenocentrics use up the content of the adrenals as rapidly as physical exhaustion or emotion. So the tonsillitis, which in another type of individual would have been combatted continuously by the adrenals and so passed by as a mere sore throat, presented him with a high temperature, and the brain disturbance described by the medical officer as exhaustion-psychosis, with again a tendency to violence. In short, the history of his adventure is the history of his adrenals under stress and strain. It illustrates the mechanism of a typical endocrine neurosis.
THE UNCONSCIOUS AND THE VISCERA
In the chapter on the glands of internal secretion as an interlocking directorate, certain generalities were stated as the laws of the government of the organism's life by them in association with the vegetative apparatus. It was put forward as a fundamental revision of the theory, hitherto accepted, of the limitation of mind to the brain cells. We think and feel not alone with the brain, but with our muscles, our viscera, our vegetative nerves, and last but not least our endocrine organs. In short, we think and feel with each and every part of ourselves.
Among these pristine factors determining the content of consciousness, the endocrines are most important, because they alone to start with, of all the other factors, are different in each and every individual. They are what render him unique at birth, even though he looks the counterpart of millions of other babies born at the same time. They constitute his inner destiny. As he grows, the external factors, social experiences, climate, accidents, and disease modify and condition the reactions and complexity of the endocrine system. As these modifications and associations are of the greatest import for the final elaboration of the personality, composing as they do the elements of the unconscious which confers the unique stamp of normal, abnormal, supernormal, or subnormal, it is worth while now to review the most general of the determining laws. Man is an energy phenomenon, both conscious and unconscious, with the energy emanating from the endocrine-vegetative mechanisms. So it becomes possible for us, by their aid, to analyze the conscious, the subconscious and the unconscious with the terms long current in the analyses of physics.
1. Man is an energy machine which, though it is constantly losing energy as a whole; consists of parts constantly accumulating energy (as a result of inherent chemical reactions accelerated by the absorption of food). This process of local accumulation of energy associated with general loss of energy may be observed even in the ameba, in the form of stored reserve food material. Evolution created a system of organs, the viscera, as specialists in energy conservation, utilization or transformation.
For intercommunication and interaction between the viscera two systems were elaborated: a younger system of direct contacts, the nerves, and nerve cells, through which influences could be conducted for the stimulation, acceleration, retardation or inhibition of an energy process in them; and the older, the endocrine gland association, for the production of chemical substances to act as messengers to be sent from one viscus to another, and also to the nerves, through the blood or lymph which bathe all the cells. They could affect only one or certain organs, because by selection only the chosen organ or organs knew the code, as it were. The chemical system is much the older system, and preceded the nerve system by aeons of time. The whole system, viscera, visceral nerves and the endocrines gradually united into a complete autonomous organism within the organism, and as such functions as the vegetative apparatus.
EVOLUTION OF THE ENDOCRINES
2. In the course of evolution, variations occurred in all three components of the apparatus, the viscera, the nerves, and the endocrines. Now variations in the viscera and the nerves are essentially grossly physical and quantitative. That is, there may be a bigger stomach or a smaller stomach, larger nerve fibres or smaller. And as Life always has worked with a large margin of safety, and always played for safety first as regards quantity, these variations have not become of much significance for the history and destiny of the animal.
But variations among the endocrines made a tremendous difference. To have very much thyroid and very little pituitary, much adrenal and not enough parathyroid meant a great deal to the Organism as a whole, as well as to the vegetative apparatus. For states of tension and relaxation, activity and inactivity in the nerves and viscera would be determined by these variations in the ratio between the variants. The vegetative apparatus in its virginity, say in the new-born infant, may be said to have its development primarily determined by the reaction potentials of the endocrine part of it, that is the latent power of each gland to secrete at a minimum or a maximum, and the balance between them.
EDUCATION OF THE VEGETATIVE SYSTEM
3. Training or education involves, beside other effects, a training of the endocrines, and hence of the entire vegetative apparatus, to respond in a particular way to a particular stimulus. Experience is like the introduction of new push-buttons, levers, and wheels into the mechanism. All learning which calls out or arrests the functioning of an instinct, must, from what we have learned of the chemical dynamics of instincts as reactions between hormones, nerves and viscera, affect the vegetative system. When there is a conflict between two or more instincts, between pressures of energy flowing in different directions, there may be compromise and normality, or a grinding of the gears and abnormality.
Where does the brain come in, in all this? As the servant of the vegetative apparatus. To call it the master tissue is manifestly absurd, when it can only be the diplomatic constitutional monarch of the system. It can, in fact, act only as the great central station for associative memory, as only one of the factors implicated in education.
The most powerful educative agents of the vegetative apparatus of a human being are the other humans around him. And they comprise the most powerful of the external effectors of education, for better, for worse. The training and education of the endocrine-vegetative system is the basis of all social rules (Habit, Custom, Convention, Law, Conscience). An unresolved discord, a continued conflict among the parts of the vegetative system, in spite of such education, is the foundation of the unhappiness of the acute or chronic misfits and maladjusted, the neurotic and the psychotic.
THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF THE UNCONSCIOUS
4. Another vastly important law that governs the content of the conscious and the unconscious, and resultant behaviour is the fact that the nerves and nerve cells of the vegetative apparatus, the nerves leading to the viscera and the endocrine glands, like the solar plexus, are affected by stimuli of lower value than those which arouse the brain cells. In the metaphorical language of the old psychology, the threshold value, that is the strength or loudness of stimulus sufficient to make itself felt or heard, is less for the vegetative apparatus than for the brain. So we begin to glimpse why an emotion seems to be experienced before the visceral changes that really preceded it, but pressed their way into consciousness later. This gives us a clue to the unconscious as the more sensitive and deeper part of the mind.
More than that, it supplies us with a physical basis for the unconscious which will explain much of the observed laws of its workings. It provides a reason for the apparent swiftness, spontaneity, and unreasonableness of what is called intuition. And it may show us a source for a good deal of the material of dreams and dream states.
We have said that we think and we remember, not alone with the brain, but with the muscles, the viscera and the endocrines. So do we forget not alone with the brain, but with the muscles, the viscera, the endocrines and their nerves. The utmost importance of muscle attitudes in remembering has been established in the experimental laboratory.
It is one of the great services Freud rendered to psychology (and one, by the way, largely responsible for the acceptance of his doctrines by the disinterested intelligence) that he showed that a species of forgetting is nothing casual, but active and purposeful, a manifestation of the life of the unconscious. However, though his description of the process was correct, he left it to occur in a vacuum. As a matter of fact this forgetting consists in the inhibition of associative memory by a process in the vegetative apparatus, so as to maintain the equilibrium within itself which is reflected in consciousness as comfort.
The unconscious, in short, consists of the buried associations among the parts of the vegetative apparatus and the brain cells. We seem to be much nearer to grasping the nature of the unconscious, when we look upon it as a historical continuum, a compound or emulsion of different and various states of intravisceral pressure and tone, in the vegetative apparatus, dependent upon the balance between the endocrines, as well as upon past experiences of the viscera in the way of stimulation or depression. We forget that which is held down, literally, in the vegetative apparatus. This explanation of forgetting tells, too, why the forgotten (stored in the sub-brain, the endocrine-vegetative system) continually projects itself into and interferes with the regular flow of consciousness, e.g., in slips of the tongue, mistakes of spelling, and so on: because the energy bottled in the vegetative system tends to erupt into the consciousness into which it would ordinarily flow.
In the evolution of the mind, there have been elaborated devices to protect it against the vegetative apparatus. Consciousness, or awareness, must be accepted as a fundamental, primal fact, like protoplasm. Consciousness and protoplasm may be the complementary sides of the same coin. Whatever the truth, the fact stands out that the oldest, deepest, most potent consciousness is that of the traditionally despised lowest organs, the vegetative organs, the heart and lungs, stomach and intestines, the kidneys and the liver, and so on, their nerves, e.g., the solar plexus, and the glands of internal secretion. They invented and elaborated muscle, bone and brain to carry out their will. Evolution has been in the direction of a greater perfection of the methods of carrying out their will. Their consciousness, working upon the growing and multiplying brain cells, has created what we call self-conscious mind.
Mind, reacting upon its creator, has, in a sense, come to dominate them, because it has become the meeting ground of all the energy-influences seething and bubbling in the organism, and so developed into the organ of handling them as a whole, their Integrating-Executive. But just the same and all the time, the underlying consciousness of the viscera and their accessories stand as the powers behind the throne, but as what we have now learned to speak of, in relation to the Mind, as the Unconscious.
PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
To sum up these relations of the viscera, the endocrines, the unconscious and the mind, it may be stated as a far-reaching generality for the understanding of human life: that character and conduct are expressions of the streams of energy arising in the vegetative apparatus, primarily endocrine determined at birth, and secondarily experience determined after the organism has learned to react as a whole, as consciousness. The result of such a reaction as a whole tends to balance the disturbance of energy, so as to maintain or restore the equilibrium, or sense of harmony and comfort, when consciousness again disappears. This law is an attempt at synthesis of the labors of the psychanalysts, the behaviourists, and the students of the internal secretions (Freud, Jung, Adler, Sherrington, Watson, Von Bechterew, Kempf, Crile, Cannon, Cushing, Fraenkel are the great names of the movement). Most of the details, and all of the quantitative applications of the law still remain to be worked out. But a statement like the following of Cushing, the eminent surgeon-student of the endocrines, that "it is quite probable that the psychopathology of everyday life hinges largely upon the effect of ductless gland discharges upon the nervous system," shows which way the wind is blowing.
In the face of these conceptions the position of the psychanalyst as a practical therapeutist becomes clearer, and the causes of his failure when he fails. In the first place, he deals with psychic results as processes, and ignores the physiology of their production. Since a true cure of the neurosis, what he is after, is impossible without a removal of the cause, a disturbance in the vegetative apparatus, he cannot succeed where an automatic adjustment among the viscera does not follow his probings and ferretings of the unconscious. In the second place, he disregards the existence of a soil for the planting of the malign complexes in the individual in whom they grow and flourish. That soil is composed in part of the endocrine relations within the vegetative apparatus. And as we can often attack that soil more effectively and radically from the endocrine end than from the experience end (e.g., repressed episodes) we may transform the soil and make it barren rock for morbid complexes, at any rate. The concept of the endocrine-vegetative apparatus as the determinant of normal and abnormal behaviour, emotional reactions and disturbances of power should in time cause even the most fanatic of the psychanalysts to recognize the functional basis of the mental acrostics they are so fond of dissecting.
NATURAL ABILITY
Another achievement of the psychanalysts is the recognition of the influence of organic and functional inferiorities of the individual upon the history of his personality. Gross organ inferiorities are those which are definite handicaps in the struggle for success in society, such as heart disease. Such handicaps, however, are limited to relatively few of a population. The raison d'être of the greater number of minor mental inefficiencies the psychanalyst puts down to handicaps in the unconscious. Again he mistakes figurative imagery for explanations. The conception of endocrine diversity in the make-up supplies us with the rationale of the vast majority of organic and functional defects and inferiorities, in short, subnormalities of any group, large or small.
Moreover, how would the psychanalyst explain the occurrence and influence of organic and functional superiorities and their tremendous influence upon the individual and society? We live in a generation which has acquired a flair for the pathologic. Undoubtedly it is a soul-sick generation, and its interest in sickness of the mind is only natural. Just the same, whatever advances, improvements, progress, have been made (and certainly a number of the changes in his environment, external and internal, must be admitted to be changes for the better) have been made, not by natural disability, but by natural ability. What is the physiology of natural ability?
The finest study of natural ability that has as yet been composed is Francis Galton's on Hereditary Genius. It also remains the best study of the natural conditions of success. He showed that of the type of man he classed as "illustrious" there occurred about one in a million, and of the type "eminent" about two hundred and fifty in a million. Of the qualities which determine natural ability of this kind, he selected inherent capacity, zeal, and perseverance as the three prerequisites. And he states that "If a man is gifted with vast intellectual ability, eagerness to work, and power of working, I cannot comprehend how such a man should be suppressed." "Such men (those who have gained great reputations) biographies show to be haunted and driven by an incessant, instinctive craving for intellectual work." "They … work … to satisfy a natural craving for brain work." "It is very unlikely that any conjunction of circumstances should supply a stimulus to brain work commensurate with what these men carry in their own constitutions."
What is this inherent craving for brain work? What is this zeal? And what is power of endurance and perseverance, the quality of stamina? How are they to be interpreted in terms of the internal secretions?
In view of what has been said of the ante-pituitary as the gland of intellectuality, studies of intellectually gifted people having shown well functioning large pituitaries, and of mental defectives in a certain number of cases a small limited pituitary, it is justifiable to regard the factor of inherent capacity as a function of the ante-pituitary. The factor of zeal or enthusiasm points to the thyroid. Markedly enthusiastic types are thyroid dominant types. Vigor as a third factor, the ability to stand stress and strain of continued effort is dependent upon good adrenal and interstitial cell function. So we may say that craving and capacity for brain work plus ardor plus perseverance in its pursuit, the triplicate of natural ability, are the reflections in conduct and character of balanced and sufficient ante-pituitary, thyroid, and adrenal-interstitial contributions in the chemical formula of the personality. In the chapter on historic personages analyzed from the endocrine viewpoint, we shall see that some of the most eminent and illustrious people of history have been pituitary-centered.
MENTAL DEFICIENCY
Natural ability grows in an endocrine soil of a particular kind, perhaps affected by the internal secretions much as natural soil is by fertilizers like phosphates or nitrates. Increased production follows increased fertilization. Natural disability must vary similarly with a perversion or improper mixture, deficiency or absence of the hormones that combine in natural ability.
It is assumed as a matter of course that the brain itself is there, which, to carry out our analogy, means that the crude soil or earth is there. Sufficient quantity and adequate quality of nerve tissue must be regarded as prerequisite. If the brain has been damaged in any way during development or birth, if it has been smashed up in any way, or if it has failed to evolve the minimum number of healthy nerve cells, the endocrine influence becomes negligible. It is like attempting to insert a key into a door which has no lock.
It is among the specimens of normality of the brain cells that we may look for our examples of endocrine mental deficiency. Included are all sorts of examples of feeble-mindedness varying from the moron to the imbecile and idiot, arrested brain life. The cretin is the classic type of mental deficiency due to endocrine insufficiency, curable or improvable by the proper handling.
Insanity, degeneration of the normal brain life, may be caused by an upset of the endocrine balance. Among the commonest manifestations of insanity are excitements and depressions, apathies and manias, hallucinations, delusions and obsessions, all of which are reproducible under known conditions of internal secretion excess or failure. Alternating states of mania and depression are caused in some instances by extreme hyperthyroidism. The critical periods of life, when a profound revolution is overturning the endocrine equilibrium, puberty, pregnancy, and the menopause, are the periods of most frequent occurrence of insanity, when mental instability reveals endocrine instability (Dementia praecox, pregnancy psychosis, menopause neurosis). Actual insanity need not be the only manifestation. By far the greater number of mental disturbances due to aberrations of the internal secretions never see an asylum or a doctor. They live more or less close to the borderline of insanity as persons who have spells, eccentricities and peculiarities, hysteria, tics or just "nervousness."
About two-thirds of mental deficiency is definitely inherited, about one-third acquired. It is the opinion of a number of psychologists that it is inherited as what the Mendelians call a recessive, that is as a trait which will be overshadowed, if there is admixture of normal mentality, but will crop up by breeding with another mental defective. What we know of the endocrine factors in heredity leads us to suppose that it is the mating of one marked endocrine insufficiency with another that is often responsible for the inherited tendency to feeble-mindedness and insanity. The effect of the hormone system upon the vegetative apparatus may create the more obscure insanities and quasi-insanities. The direct action of the internal secretions upon the brain cells, producing a sort of hair trigger situation within them, may cause the explosive discharges from them which appear as overpowering impulses or uncontrollable conduct. The waves of feeling which precede them are unquestionably endocrine determined. The wave of fear a cat experiences upon seeing a dog is accompanied and indeed preceded by an increase of the amount of adrenalin in the blood. The picture of fright, as observed in a so-called normal person, staring eyes, trembling hands, dry lips and mouth, corresponds to the portrait of the appearance in hyperthyroidism. In persons afflicted with uncontrollable impulses, the inhibiting hormones may not be present in sufficient quantity.
Feeble-mindedness, ranging from stupidity to imbecility, may also be a direct effect of insufficient endocrine supply to the brain cells. When there is not enough of the thyroid secretion in the blood, the tissue between the cells in the brain become clogged and thickened, so that a gross barrier to the passage of the nerve impulses is created. We have here an illustration of internal secretion lack actually producing gross changes in the brain. But without a doubt, most endocrine influences upon the brain, at work every minute and second of its life, are the subtle ones of molecular chemistry and atomic energetics. We know that such mental qualities as irritability and stupidity, fatigability, and the power to recover quickly or slowly from fatigue, sexual potency and impotence, apathy and enthusiasm are endocrine qualities. We know also that the thyroid dominant tends to be irritable and excitable, the pituitary deficient to be placid and gentle, the adrenal dominant to be assertive and pugnacious, the thymus-centered to be childish and easy-go-lucky and the gonad deficient to be secretive and shy. This brings us to the relation of the internal secretions to the type of personality as a whole.
CHAPTER X
THE TYPES OF PERSONALITY
THE ENDOCRINE PERSONALITY
If a single gland can dominate the life history of an individual it becomes possible to speak of endocrine types, the result of the endocrine analysis of the individual. Studying endocrine traits of physique, life reactions, disease tendencies, hereditary history and blood chemistry, one may gain an insight into the composition or constitution of an individual. The endocrine type of an individual is a summary of these, his behaviour in the past, and is also a prediction of his reactions in the future, much as a chemical formula outlines what we believe to be the skeleton of a compound substance as deducible from its properties under varying conditions. Only, admittedly, as yet the endocrine label is but roughly qualitative and most crudely quantitative, whereas the chemical formula is the essence of the exact.
However, the fact remains that though we are only upon the first rungs of the ladder, we are upon the ladder. The horizon undoubtedly broadens. We possess a new way of looking upon humanity, a fresh transforming light upon those strange phenomena, ourselves. Of the ugly achievements of that dreadful century, the nineteenth, the most illuminating was the discovery of itself as the ape-parvenu. Yes, we are all animals now, it said to itself, and set its teeth in the cut-throat game of survival. But there was no understanding in that evil motto of a disillusioned heart. The ape-parvenu, desperately lonely and secretive, has still to understand himself.
Let us be clear if we can. There is perhaps a certain presumption in the phrase, the endocrine type. It is ambitious, and perhaps will not fulfill its promise. But it is useful because it points a parallel and an ideal. As Wilhelm Ostwald never tired of repeating, H_{2}O is a complete shorthand record for the bundle of qualities commonly known as water. It is an example of that highest task of mind, synthesis. It is the highest synthesis of the studies of the internal secretions that certain combinations of them, permutations and blendings of them, are responsible for those unique wonders of the universe, personalities.
The riddle of personality! Are we at last upon the track of its uncovering? That elusive mystery, which philosophers have wrapped in the thousand veils of Greek and Latin words, and psychologists, even unto the third and fourth generation of Freudians, have floundered about in, moles before a dazzling sun, is it to be unwound for our inspection? Think of the human soul. What an invisible, intangible chameleon is its true reality! Watch it, and you see something that seems to uncurl and expand like a feather with exultation and delight and joy, to contract and stiffen into a billiard ball with fear and pride, shrewd caution and vigilant malevolence, to rear back and spark fire like lightning with anger and temper, and to crawl and slither with abjection and smirking slyness, when it needs to. This multiplex Thing-Behind-Life, are we really about to dissect it into its elements?
Personality embraces much more than merely the psychic attributes. It is not the least important of the lessons of endocrine analysis that there is no soul, and no body, either. Rather a soul-body, or body-soul, or the patterns of the living flame. The closer tracking of the internal secretions leads us into the secrets of the living flame, why it lives, and how it lives, the strange diversities of its colorings and music and the odd variations in its energy, vitality and longevity. Why it flickers, why it flares and glares, spurts, flutters, burns hard or soft, orange-blue or yellow.
The medieval scholiasts, who fought as fiercely about names as nations about territories, divided men into the sanguine, the bilious, the lymphatic and the nervous. It was a pretty crude classification of different constitutions. The endocrine criteria, more exact and concrete, divide them into the adrenal centered, the thyroid centered, the thymus centered, the pituitary centered, the gonad centered, and their combinations.
THE ADRENAL PERSONALITIES
An adrenal personality is one dominated by the ups and downs of his adrenal gland. In the large, the curve of his life is the curve of secretion by this gland, both of its Cortex and medulla. Such an adrenal personality is entirely normal, within the definition of the normal as something not threatening the duration of life, nor comfortable adaptation to it. So are the other glandular types. No sharp line can be drawn between the normal and the abnormal in any case, the borderland is wide, the transitions many.
The skin is one of the chief clues to the adrenal personality. The relation between the adrenal and the skin dates way back in the evolutionary scale, for adrenalin has been isolated directly from pigment deposits in the epidermis of frogs. Skin pigment bears a direct relation to the reaction of the organism to light, especially the ultraviolet rays, to the radiation of heat, and hence to the fundamental productions and consumptions of energy by the cells. So the gland of energy for emergencies writes its signature always all over the skin.
In an adrenal personality, the epidermis is always slightly, somewhat, or deeply pigmented. The pigmentation is due to a dark brown deposit lightly or thickly scattered over the skin. With the general diffuse pigmentation or darkening there are often the black spots, the pigmented birth marks, or the lighter ones of freckles. The latter signify some permanent or transitory adrenal inadequacy in the past, ante-natal or post-natal, of the individual, and presage the same in his future. These spots have been frequently observed to appear after an attack of diphtheria or influenza. There seems to be more tuberculosis among those who have them than those who do not. We therefore say that diphtheria, influenza and tuberculosis stand out as adrenal-attacking diseases, which have a greater power to kill, cripple or hurt those with defective adrenal constitutions than others.
The hair of the adrenal type is characteristic: ubiquitous, thick, coarse and dry. It is prominent over the chest, abdomen and back, and has a tendency to kink. Often its color is not the expected: an Italian's will be yellow, a Norwegian's jet black. It has been stated that most red-haired persons are adrenal types. Such persons also have well-marked canine teeth which is another adrenal trait. They also have a low hair line.
When the adrenal type has a properly co-operating pituitary and thyroid, he possesses a striking vigor, energy and persistence. With a fortunate combination, he develops into a progressive winning fighter, arriving at the top in the long run every time.
Brain work is pretty well lubricated in the well-compensated adrenal type. Brain fag is closely associated with, if not dependent upon, adrenal fag, particularly of the cortex. Brain tissue and adrenal cortex tissue are near relatives, and a normal human brain never develops without a normal adrenal cortex. The adrenal type with an hypertrophied adrenal cortex is always efficient.
Among women, the adrenal type is always masculinoid. If physically feminine—due to adequate feminine reactions on the part of the other endocrines—she will at least show the qualities of a psychic virilism. A generation ago, such a woman had to repress her inherent trends and instincts in the face of public opinion and law, and so suffered from a feeling of inferiority. Nowadays, these women are striding forward and will attain a good many of the masculine heights, commanding responsible executive positions and high salaries. An adrenal type will probably be the first woman president of the United States.
However, that presupposes a normal range of action of the other endocrines. Let there be some quirk or weakness elsewhere in the chain of hormones, and instead of the successful woman, behold the spinsters, the maiden aunts, the prudes and cranks who never satisfactorily adapt themselves in society. To them must be given a good deal of credit for the suffrage revolution. These unadapted adrenals, as we may call them, once sowed the seeds, expending their masculinism in the struggles of the pioneers' martyrdoms, preparing the harvest their sisters, the more adequate adrenal types, will now reap. The unadapted adrenals of today will have to look for new worlds to conquer.
So much for the compensated adrenal types. They are the good workers, the efficients, the kinetic successes of the driven world. They make, at a certain level, good slave drivers because they feel within themselves a driving force. But suppose the adrenal type becomes uncompensated, or perhaps is inadequate to the demands of life to start with. Then the story becomes different. The perfect efficient superman of business or profession begins to lag. Though he is himself in the morning, he begins to lag in the afternoon. That is when he tires. In the evening he is all in. More sleep, recreational trips, vacations slip into the rank of necessities, whereas previously they had been laughed at as luxuries. More minute or large moles emerge in the skin, especially if the individual is of a fair type. If a strenuous effort is not made to give the adrenals an opportunity to recuperate, or if adjustment on the part of the other glands does not occur, this stage of intermittent and remittent adrenal inadequacy gives way in turn to the state of permanent adrenal insufficiency.
The adrenal insufficient is important because he is to be seen everywhere. Built along the same lines as the adrenal adequate and apt to be taken for him, he differs and contrasts vividly below the surface. One may sum him up by saying that he is one variety of neurasthenic, perhaps the most frequent variety. Cold hands and feet plague him, cold feet psychically as well as physically, for a chronic and obsessive indecision is one of his most prominent complaints. A fatigability, that goes with a low blood pressure, lowered body temperature and a disturbed ability to utilize sugar for fuel purposes, is another of his chief complaints. The skin often presents an instability of the blood vessels, so that they now react to stroking with a blanched instead of a reddened effect. Irritability, a liability to go off the handle at the slightest provocation, and a consequent complete exhaustion that, after an outburst, sends him to bed, is conspicuous. Dismissed sometimes contemptuously as weaklings, they are accused of laziness, craziness, and haziness. In their psychic attempts to compensate, they land into all kinds of hot water, from which friends, relatives or luck extricate them sometimes. The other times they go to the wall.
The congenital adrenal deficient is a special problem. If the history of such an individual is followed from birth, one gets a pretty typical story. The genealogy is nervous. Nervous is a word of many meanings. But when parents confess themselves nervous, it generally means a mental and emotional instability of some sort. Sometimes the idea is camouflaged as high strung. In the feeding narrative of the child, one finds not occasional incidents or episodes, but continued trouble, difficulties, adventures. Even after the first year or two, the nutritional chronicle is not satisfactory. Lack of appetite, lack of energy, lack of response to stimuli are its keynotes and the motifs of the later years of childhood.
Growth is a strain. It becomes a task to make these children grow and gain. Chronically below the average weight and height, herculean efforts are made by the conscientious parents, but with small success.
With the entry of school life and competition, the curtain rises upon the real tragedy, a tragedy in which the avenging Fates are the usual ignorance, stupidity and misunderstanding. If the teachers alone are duty-obsessed, or perhaps sadistic, the child endures the agonies of repeated admonitions, demotions, and punishments. However, a certain thick-skinned indifference may develop to protect the sufferer.
If the parents are in addition ambitious, or proud, or competitive, then woe betide the victim. With their nervous dispositions, it is the school and the tutor who are to be blamed, if not the child. From school to school, from system to system, from novelty to fad, from doctor to doctor, from fakir to charlatan, from pillar to post, they wander in search of an education. Educational cults by the dozen have sprouted and grown fat around these unfortunates.
The chief defect of the congenital adrenal inadequate is an insufficiently developed adrenal cortex. That means an insufficiently developed brain and nervous system. For we have seen how closely all these are related in development. Now education can never be the education of a vacuum. And we have to deal here with a relative vacuum. When there are no potentialities, there can be no education. Where the potentialities are limited, education must be limited. The congenital adrenal inadequate is defined in physical and mental energy. Hence educators cannot drive him. Up to a certain point he can be led, but no farther. He should not be expected to go to a college, and waste the opportunity of some one financially unlucky, but whose endocrine system is more generously endowed.
Not that the outlook is absolutely hopeless. Puberty, with its tremendous changes in the glands of internal secretion, when one can almost hear the clicks and the whirring of the wheels in the internal machinery, may transform. The unfathomed possibilities of gland therapy are still to be probed. But the general rule remains.
THE REACTIONS TO MODERNISM
The adrenal personalities in all their variations must be safeguarded and carefully looked after in the strained complexities of modern post-bellum civilization. In a sense, the adrenal type is the Atlas of the twentieth century world, and small wonder that he and his descendants stagger beneath the burden. The adrenals are organs for the mobilization of energy, physical and mental, for emergencies. They are the glands which meet shocks and neutralize the effects of shock. In the solitary animal, the everyday producers of shock are pain, fright and wounds. The adrenal mechanisms oversecrete to encounter the enemy, and then there is a period of rest and recuperation. Man, however, with the growth of his imagination and the increase in number and density of his surrounding herd, has become the subject of continuous stimulation. In the past, this was balanced by the almost universal dominance of some religious belief, as an effective opiate. Concepts like Fate, Predestination, an all-guiding and all-wise Providence, relieved and shielded the adrenals, and acted as valuable adjuvants for the preservation of normality.
The nineteenth century witnessed the birth and expansion of a great number of new stimulant reagents, the discoveries of physics and chemistry, which, with the climax of the World War of 1914-1918, have made for a more or less complete deliquescence of accepted religion. For the great majority there was no faith to take its place. War, pre-war, and post-war shocks have continued with their incessant pounding upon the reserves of energy. Under these conditions the adrenal personalities are bound to suffer. The other endocrine types suffer, too, but quite differently.
Today, anti-adrenal, anti-religious ideas are epidemic. Of these, first prize belongs to a cult of egotism fathered by the Napoleonic Idea, consciously assertive and self-conscious in Max Stirner's "The Ego and His Own," which engendered a swarm of imitators and plagiarists. Human beings are all incorrigible egoists more or less, furtive or frank. But social and religious codes curbed the most narcissistic of kings and conquerors. Before Napoleon, all of them vowed allegiance and expressed submission to some sort of deity, confessed some fear of the Lord in their hearts. But the ideas of Napoleon flouted all that. The unscrupulous predatory who put effectual scheming for the self plainly above every other consideration and rode rough shod over all his fellows appealed powerfully to the latent animality of the adrenal types. Then came the dawning awareness of capital and labor of themselves as classes fiercely opposed forever in the policy of cut-throat versus cut-throat. The labor organizations and the commercial companies and corporations pitted themselves against each other consciously. Doctrines like "Property is but Robbery," "Everyone for himself and the devil take the hindmost," the "Iron Law of Wages" and the "Facts is Facts" of the Gradgrinds were the phrases of the nineteenth century that assisted. Finally came the Darwinian revelation of man as the ape-parvenu, which completed the disintegration of the old restraints.
Man seemed to see himself now for the first time stark and naked. But Man consists of many varieties, and all reacted differently to the image in the clouded mirror. There was universal attempt at suppression. But slowly the anti-adrenal forces infiltrated every activity and every soul. Like a hidden focus of infection in the body, it germinated and poisoned. A slow fever crept into life. A febrile quality tinged the acquisition of wealth, the concentration upon sex, and the desperate pursuit of the novel stimulus.
Then, like the hand that appeared at Belshazzar's Feast, came the War, only it was a hand that stayed with a long flashing lightning sword in its grip, sweeping pitilessly among the erstwhile dancing multitudes to mutilate and destroy. A good many people, with that sturdy animality George Santayana speaks somewhere of as a trait of mankind, set out to enjoy the War. It was a new sort of good time upon an incredibly large scale. It was an undreamed-of opportunity. The mechanisms of suppression of the mind render it incapable of appreciating horror until encountered. And so thousands with dangerously unstable adrenals were plunged into the most trying conditions possible. Hundreds of them, already shaken, on the borderland of instability, reacted with the phenomena of breakdown of control, lumped with a host of other phenomena, under the general rubric of "shell shock."
That alone was not all. If hundreds collapsed, thousands approached the verge of collapse. They survived and were discharged from the armies as normal. They reappear in civil life as cases of "nerves." Ordinarily that would mean that they would be classed as failures. But such have been the psychologic reactions to the war that all kinds of compensations in the way of dangerous mental states have become frequent in these inadequate adrenal types. A trend to violence and a resentful emotionalism are combined with desperate attempts to spur the jaded adrenals with artificial excitements. Consequent melancholia and depression, the "blues," are inevitable. A survey of drug addicts would probably show a definite percentage of this type. The same applies to certain petty criminals and law breakers.
The adrenal element in the personality must be considered in every disturbance, morbid, personal, or social involving brunette types, Huxley's dark white, Mediterranean-Iberians, red-haired persons, and even pigment-spotted fair people. Historians have traced the earliest civilization to the doings of a brunette people, the Sumerians, the first to build cities in the Euphrates-Tigris region more than five thousand years before Christ was born. An adrenalized people one would, expect to be the first to take advantage of possibilities because of their energy capacity. The earliest Sumerian stone carvings of warriors exhibit an undersized skeleton compared with the large head, broad face, a low hair line and prominent nose that would fit into the ensemble of the adrenal type. Certain other historical aspects of the adrenal personality have yet to be worked out.
THE PITUITARY PERSONALITIES
The presence of two antagonistic elements in the one gland complicates any attempt at even the most abstract analysis of a personality dominated by that gland. The pituitary, composed of an anterior lobe and posterior lobe, supplies two fairly uncomplicated corresponding types, best described as the masculine pituitary type, and the feminine pituitary type. The masculine pituitary type is one determined by the rule of the anterior pituitary, representing superlative brain tone and action, good all-around growth and harmonious general function, the ideal masculine organism. The feminine pituitary type has an excess of post-pituitary, with susceptibility to the tender emotions, sentimentalism, and emotionalism, feminine structural lines. Ante-pituitary dominance in a male reinforces the general masculinity while the post-pituitary depresses it. The post-pituitary in a woman augments her natural trend, ante-pituitary tending to counteract it. In other words, post-pituitary and ovary are conjunctive, ante-pituitary and ovary are disjunctive, post-pituitary and testis are opponents, ante-pituitary and testis are allies.
One mechanical circumstance involved in the pituitary personalities may be the determinant of the entire life history. That is the emphasized fact that the pituitary is encased in a small bony box, at the base of the skull. The size of this bony box, and its capacity to yield to the various pressures of a pituitary enlarging to meet the demands of the organism, will often spell happiness or misery, success or failure, genius or idiocy for the man or woman. Certain possibilities are conceivable. All of them occur, for the developments of X-ray technique have rendered available almost a direct view of the sella turcica.
In the first place, the bony box may be definitely too small to start in with. That means a small and so potentially inadequate pituitary, both anterior and posterior, potentially inadequate in that it will become impossible for it to grow and produce extra secretion upon demand. Handicapped thus, the unfortunate so born is doomed to inferiority and very little can be done for him. He will not develop satisfactorily. He possesses small genital organs which will not evolve properly in adolescence, or if they will not stand still, tend to revert to the opposite sex type. Then he tends to be dwarfed, fatigable, adipose. Among these types are included subjects of obsessions and compulsions who are dull and apathetic, cannot learn or maintain inhibitions, and so, without initiative, evolve into moral and intellectual degenerates, liable to epilepsy and the most remarkable sex aberrations. All because a cranny of the skull, about the size of a thimble, is not large enough for their dominating gland.
If the bone of the cavity of the pituitary is softer and yielding, so that some enlargement of the gland is possible, especially of the anterior, there appear rapid growth with a tendency to high blood pressure, great mental activity associated with frequent and severe headaches (often of the migraine type), a combination of initiative and irritability and a marked sexuality. X-ray examination of the sella turcica shows what is called erosion of the bone as it yields to the pressure of the growing gland.
The ideal sella turcica for the ideal pituitary type is a large room in which the gland may grow and reach its maximum size and so its maximum function, without needing to exert pressure or destroy and erode bone in front of it, to the side of it or behind it. The distinctive masculine and feminine types, classed as the normal, belong to this group. Sometimes, the bone in front of the pituitary will yield, while the one in the rear will not, and sometimes the conditions are reversed. Thus we may have ante-pituitary sufficiency with post-pituitary insufficiency, or ante-pituitary insufficiency with post-pituitary sufficiency, complexes which contribute to create the grosser functional hermaphrodite types of mixed sex.
In the average feminine pituitary type of personality, post-pituitary dominates. In a woman and to a lesser degree in a man, the general build is slight and rather delicate. The skin is soft, moist, and hairless, the face is the doll or Dresden China sort, with a roseate or creamy complexion, flushing easily, eyes large and prominent. The mouth shows a high arched palate and crowded teeth rather long. The voice is high-pitched. One recognizes the traditional womanly woman, petite and chic, who always marries the hero in stories. She is usually fond of children, easily moved, has a good libido, and the traditional feminine traits. When unstable, the post-pituitary type is restless and hyperactive, craves excitement, and continual change of interest and scene, a new pleasure every moment. A good many of the women of today, who fifty years ago would have been nice sedate girls because of their excellent post-pituitary constitution, have been irritated by the atmosphere of post-1914 into the excess post-pituitary state, the adventurous never-satiated avid pleasure hunter, in whom the craving for stimulation will stop at nothing. F. Scott Fitzgerald portrayed an exquisite specimen of the kind in his short story "The Jellybean," with a quasi-heroine of a good Southern family, built to be a high standard wife and mother, who drinks, swears, gambles, and finally marries on a dare. Modern post-pituitary woman is excitement mad and thrill chasing. The worst of it is that the resultant personal tragedies cannot be dismissed as transient inevitables. The heredity of the internal secretions determines that the offspring of these women are bound to be pituitary unstable, the least desirable of endocrine instabilities because of the concomitant mental effects. Even from the purely selfish point of view, the standpoint of enlightened selfishness, the post-pituitary type must beware of excesses. For disturbances of menstruation, psychic fears, anxieties, states of suspicion and obsession, various pains are among the penalties.
A period of post-pituitary excess as an effect of disease, pregnancy, or the rapid life, may be followed by post-pituitary deficiency as a result of exhaustion of the gland. The girl or woman then becomes fat and suffers from headaches (the fair, fat and forty type) yet retains a certain capacity for enjoyment which enables her to continue gay, happy and gentle, kind, interested. So she contrasts with the thyroid deficient who gets fat, but also dull, stupid, even morose.
The masculine pituitary personality, the man with a dominant anterior pituitary gland in a roomy sella turcica with plenty of space to grow in, is the ideal virile type. They are generally tall (unless the growth of the long bones was checked too early by a social precocity of the testes) with a well-developed strong frame, large firm muscles, and proportionately sized hands and feet. The head is of the marked dolichocephalic type, flattened at the sides, face is oval more or less, with thick eyebrows, eyes rather prominent, nose broadish and long, lower jaw prominent and firm. Prominent bony points like the cheek bones, the elbows and the knees, the knuckle joints of the hands and feet. The teeth are large, especially the upper middle incisors, and they are usually spaced. The arms and legs are hairy. High grade brains, the ability to learn, and the ability to control, self-mastery in the sense of domination of the lower instincts and the automatic reactions of the vegetative nervous system, the rule by the individual of himself and his environment are at their maximum in him. The ante-pituitary personality is educable for intelligence, and even intellect, provided the proper educational stimulus is supplied. Men of brains, practical and theoretical, philosophers, thinkers, creators of new thoughts and new goods, belong to this group. The distinction between men of theoretical genius, whose minds which could embrace a universe, and yet fail to manage successfully their own personal everyday lives, and the men of practical genius, who can achieve and execute, the great engineers, and industrial men lies in the balance between the ante-pituitary and the adrenal cortex primarily. Men like Abraham Lincoln and George Bernard Shaw belong to this ante-pituitary group.
The feminine pituitary personality, in whom there is predominance of the post-pituitary over the ante-pituitary, occurs in men. The type is short, rounded and stout. They have heads that seem too large for their bodies, the general hair distribution on the trunk and extremities is poor, although that of the scalp and face is plentiful, and they acquire an abdominal paunch early. They exhibit the feminine tendency to periodicity of function, their moods, activities, efficiency are cyclic, reminding one of the menstrual variations of the female. This rhythmicity saturates their personalities, so that poetry and music almost morbidly appeal to them. A number of the great poets and musicians are to be classified as of the feminine pituitary species. Last, but not least, they are the hen-pecked lovers and husbands. Sex difficulties are frequent in their history.
The determination of endocrine type and tendencies, the prediction of the future personality, during childhood is one of the developments confidently to be looked for, as our knowledge of the internal secretions will grow. The possibilities of control loom as one of the most magnificent promises of science. Yet the high expectations for tomorrow should not depress our respect for the achievements of today. In the case of the pituitary, for instance, a hint as to the method of approach is furnished by the tabulation of the traits of pituitary dominance and pituitary inferiority in children.
Pituitary sufficient and dominant:
Large, spare, bony frame
Eyes wide apart
Broad face
Teeth, broad, large, unspaced
Square, protruding chin and jaws
Large feet and hands
Early hair growth on body
Thick skin, large sex organs
Aggressive, precocious, calculating, self-contained
Pituitary inferior:
Small, sometimes delicate skeleton
Rather adipose, weak muscles
Upper jaw prognathous
Dry, flabby skin
Small hands and feet
Abnormal desire for sweets
Subnormal temperature, blood pressure and pulse
Poor control of lower vegetative functions
Mentally sluggish, dull, apathetic, backward
Loses self-control quickly, cries easily, discouraged promptly,
psychic stamina insufficient
The pituitary personality in childhood produced by limitation of the size of the gland, because its bony box is completely or partially closed, presents typical hall-marks. He supplies the second and third offenders in the juvenile courts, the delinquents and pathological liars of childhood, the incorrigibles, the precocious hoboes, mental and moral deficients and defectives, the prey of the sentimental complexes of elderly virgins and helpful futility all around. Not utilitarianism or futilitarianism is needed, but pituitarianism. The feeding of pituitary gland in large enough quantities to these unfortunates may do more than ten charity organizations, with the most patrician board of directors complete.
THE THYROID PERSONALITIES
The accessibility of the thyroid gland in the neck, the ease of surgical approach, the definite effects following its removal, and then the miraculous marvels of the feeding of thyroid have rendered it the centre of attack by the largest army of endocrine investigators. As a result we know more about the thyroid in childhood, adolescence, adult life and old age than about the other glands.
In childhood, the subthyroid or thyroid deficient, the cretinoid type, the type resembling the cretin, is fairly common. The peasant's face, with the broad nose and the tough skin, coarse straight hair, the undergrowth, physical and mental, a persistent babyishness and a retardation of self-control development, make up the picture. He needs an excess of sleep, sleeps heavily, needs sleep during the day, when awakened in the morning still feels tired, and rather dull and restless, dresses slowly, has to be coaxed or forced to dress, gets to school late nearly every morning, does badly at the school, reaction time, learning time and remembering time being prolonged as compared with the average, and is lazy at home lessons. He perspires little, even after exertion, yet fatigues easily, is subject to frequent colds, adenoids, tonsillitis, and acquires every disease of childhood that happens along.
Adolescence, the coming of menstruation, the first blooming of youth is delayed in the subthyroid. The secondary sex traits as they develop tend to be incomplete and to mimic those of the opposite sex. Yet in adolescence too there may be a sudden change and reversal of the whole process, a jump from the subthyroid to the hyperthyroid state. So a girl who has been dull and lackadaisical, with no complexion and every prospect of evolution into a wall flower, may be transformed into a bright-eyed woman, generally nervous and restless, high colored, and possessed of a craving for continual activity and excitement. Skin, hair and teeth become of the thyroid dominant type. The heart palpitates under the slightest stimulus, she perspires almost annoyingly, heat and emotion are prostrating. If such a transfiguration does not occur, the effect of the reconstructions of puberty is to create a person with about the following characteristics.
1. Height below the average 2. Tendency to obesity (toward middle age) 3. Complexion sallow 4. Hair dry—hair line high 5. Eyebrows scanty, either as a whole or in outer half 6. Eyeballs deep-set, lack lustre, in narrowed slits 7. Teeth irregular, become carious early 8. Extremities cold and bluish 9. Circulation poor. Subject to chilblains
Intellectually, these people vary enormously, depending upon which of the other glands will enlarge to compensate for the deficiency of the thyroid. If the growth of the skull has left a roomy sella turcica for the pituitary to grow in, the intellect may be normal or even superior, though energy is below par. If this is not possible and the adrenals have to predominate, a lower, more animal and less self-controlled type of mentality is produced.
In direct contrast to the subthyroid types is he who originally was hyperthyroid. During childhood he is quite healthy, thin, but striking robust, active, energetic, generally fair-complexioned with nose straight and high bridged, eyes rather "poppy," teeth excellent, regular, firm, white with a pearly translucent enamel. These children are always on the go, never get tired, require little sleep. Seldom will one of the classical children's diseases strike them, measles perhaps, but no other. Adolescence for them, however, is more apt to be stormy and episodic, adjustment to the new world of people and things is much more difficult, wanderlust is acute. All an expression of cells keyed up, charged with energy that must flow somewhere or explode.
The ruddy live-wire, recognized everywhere as bubbling with vitality, the life of any group, the magnetic personality may, however, be shocked by some seismic event like the death of a father or mother, or the ruin of some cherished ambition. A break in the balance of the other glands follows quickly and disablement and invalidism, which may cure itself after some years, remain stationary, or descend to the worst forms of thyroid deficiency.
During maturity, the type are characterized usually by a lean body, or tendency rapidly to become thin under stress. They have clean cut features and thick hair, often wavy or curly, thick long eyebrows, large, frank, brilliant, keen eyes, regular and well developed teeth and mouth. Sexually they are well differentiated and susceptible. Noticeable emotivity, a rapidity of perception and volition, impulsiveness, and a tendency to explosive crises of expression are the distinctive psychic traits. A restless, inexhaustible energy makes them perpetual doers and workers, who get up early in the morning, flit about all day, retire late, and frequently suffer from insomnia, planning in bed what they are to do next day.
Certain types of thyroid excess associated with the thymus dominant next to be described are peculiarly susceptible to emotional instability. They are subject to brain storms, outbreaks of furious rage, sometimes associated with a state of semi-consciousness. To emphasize the analogy to epilepsy, their attacks have been called psycholepsy. Among the Italians especially they were watched and reported during the War, when the explosive fits were seen to take the form of irresponsible acts of insubordination or violence.
THE THYMO-CENTRIC PERSONALITIES
During the first period of childhood, up to five, six or seven, or more accurately, up to the point at which the permanent teeth begin to appear, every child may be said to be a thymus-dominated organism, because the thymus, holding the other endocrines in check, controls its life. That is why up to the third and fourth years at any rate, most children seem alike. Closer observation, however, reveals points of differentiation and signs of the coming potencies of the other hormones. During the second period, up to puberty, these marks of the deeper underlying forces of the personality make themselves more and more felt. The thymus, like a brake that is becoming worn out, continues to function in a progressively weaker fashion. Until with the arrival of the gonadal (ovaries' or testes') internal secretion, its influence is wiped out.