5. There are certain other emotional states associated with
energy and the energy feeling of great interest. What we call
eagerness, enthusiasm, passion, refers to the intensity of an
instinct, wish, desire or purpose. In childhood this energy is
quite striking; it is one of the great charms of childhood and is
a trait all adults envy. For it is the disappearance of passion,
eagerness and enthusiasm that is the tragedy of old age and which
really constitutes getting old. Youth anticipates with eagerness
and relishes with keen satisfaction. The enthusiasm of typical
youth is easily aroused and sweeps it on to action, a feature
called impulsiveness. Sympathy, pity, hope, sex feeling--all the
self-feelings and all the other feelings--are at once more lively
and more demonstrative in youth, and thus it is that in youth the
reform spirit is at its height and recedes as time goes on. What
we call "experience" chills enthusiasm and passion, but though
hope deferred and a realization of the complexity of human
affairs has a moderating, inhibiting result, there is as much or
more importance to be attached to bodily changes. If you could
attach to the old man's experience and knowledge the body of
youth, with its fresher arteries, more resilient muscles and
joints, its exuberant glands and fresh bodily juices,--desire,
passion, enthusiasm would return. In the chemistry of life,
passion and enthusiasm arise; sickness, fatigue, experience and
time are their antagonists.
This is not to deny that these energy manifestations can be
aroused from the outside. That is the purpose of teaching and
preaching; the purpose of writer and orator. There is a social
spread of enthusiasm that is the most marked feature of crowds
and assemblies, and this eagerness makes a unit of thousands of
diverse personalities. Further, the problem of awakening
enthusiasm and desire is the therapeutic problem of the physician
and especially in the condition described as anhedonia.
In anhedonia, as first described by Ribot, mentioned by James,
and which has recently been worked up by myself as a group of
symptoms in mental and nervous disease, as well as in life in
general, there is a characteristic lack of enthusiasm in
anticipation and realization, a lack of appetite and desire, a
lack of satisfaction. Nothing appeals, and the values drop out of
existence. The victims of anhedonia at first pass from one
"pleasure" to another, hoping each will please and satisfy, but
it does not. Food, drink, work, play, sex, music, art,--all have
lost their savor. Restless, introspective, with a feeling of
unreality gripping at his heart, the patient finds himself
confronting a world that has lost meaning because it has lost
enthusiasm in desire and satisfaction.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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