Sex and Society: Studies in the Social Psychology of SexThomas, William Isaac
Science
Sex and Society: Studies in the Social Psychology of Sex
Thomas, William Isaac
Sex; Women -- Social and moral questions; Women -- Social conditions
If we examine, in fact, our pleasures and pains, our moments of
elation and depression, we find that they go back for the most part to
instincts developed in the struggle for food and rivalry for mates.
We can perhaps best get at the meaning of the conflict interest to the
organism in terms of the significance to itself or the organism's own
movements. Locomotion, of whatever type, is primarily to enable the
animal to reach and grasp food, and also to escape other animals
bent on finding food. The structure of the organism has been built
up gradually through the survival of the most efficient structures.
Corresponding with a structure mechanically adapted to successful
movements, there is developed on the psychic side an interest in the
conflict situation as complete and perfect as is the structure itself.
The emotional states are, indeed, organic preparations for action,
corresponding broadly with a tendency to advance or retreat, and a
connection has even been made out between pleasurable states and the
extensor muscles, and painful states and the flexor muscles. We can
have no adequate idea of the time consumed and the experiments made in
nature before the development of these types of structure and interest
of the conflict pattern, but we know from the geological records that
the time and experiments were long and many, and the competition so
sharp, that finally, not in man alone, but in all the higher classes
of animals, body and mind, structure and interest, were working
perfectly in motor actions of the violent type involved in a life
of conflict, competition, and rivalry. There could not have been
developed an organism depending on offensive and defensive movements
for food and life without an interest in what we call a dangerous or
precarious situation. A type without this interest would have been
defective, and would have dropped out in the course of development.
There has been comparatively little change in human structure or human
interest in historical times. It is a popular view that moral and
cultural views and interests have superseded our animal instincts;
but the cultural period is only a span in comparison with prehistoric
times and the prehuman period of life, and it seems probable that
types of psychic reaction were once for all developed and fixed;
and while objects of attention and interest in different historical
periods are different, we shall never get far away from the original
types of stimulus and reaction. It is, indeed, a condition of normal
life that we should not get too far away from them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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