Human Traits and their Social Significance — John Shaqi
Human Traits and their Social SignificanceEdman, Irwin
Philosophy
Human Traits and their Social Significance
Edman, Irwin
Social psychology
But because there are all these social forces making for the
repression of instincts, it does not mean that these latter
therefore disappear. If any one of them is unduly repressed,
it does not simply vanish as a driving force in human behavior.
It will make its enduring presence felt in roundabout
ways, or in sudden extreme and violent outbursts. Or, if it
cannot find even such sporadic or fruitive fulfillments, "a
balked disposition" will leave the individual with an uneasiness
and irritation that may range from mere pique to serious
forms of morbidity and hysteria. A man may for eight or ten
hours be kept repeating the same operation at a machine in a
factory. He may thereby repress those native desires for
companionship and for variety of reaction which constitute
his biological inheritance. But too often postponed satisfaction
takes the violent form of lurid, over-exciting amusements
and dissipation. The suppression of the sex instinct
not infrequently results in a morbid pruriency in matters of
sex, a distortion of all other interests and activities by a
preoccupation with the frustrated sex motive. Assaults and
lynchings, and the whole calendar of crimes of violence with
which our criminal courts are crowded, are frequent evidence
of the incompleteness with which man's strong primary instincts
have been suppressed by the niceties of civilization.
The phenomenal outburst of collective vivacity and exuberance
which marked the reported signing of the armistice at
the close of the Great War was a striking instance of those
immense primitive energies which the control and discipline
of civilization cannot altogether repress.
There has been, furthermore, a great deal of evidence adduced
in recent years by students of abnormal psychology
concerning the results of the frustration of native desires.
When the individual is "balked" in respect to particular
impulses or desires, these may take furtive and obscure
fulfillments; they may play serious though obscure and unnoticed
havoc with a man's whole mental life. Unfulfilled desires
may give rise to various forms of "complex," distortions of
thought, action, and emotion of which the individual himself
may be unaware. They may make a man unduly sensitive,
or fearful, or pugnacious. He may, for example, cover up a
sense of mortification at failure by an unwarranted degree of
bluster and brag. A particular baffling of desire may be
compensated by a bitterness against the whole universe or by
a melancholy of whose origin the victim may be quite unconscious.
These maladjustments between an individual's desires
and his satisfactions are certainly responsible for a
considerable degree of that irritation and neurasthenia which are
so frequently observable in normal individuals.[1]
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