He has built up his ego around a business, one in which there was
sunk not only his own fortune but that of a host of friends. When
this was so threatened as to seem inevitably lost, his ego was
deeply wounded, he lost courage and hope and then needed the
strength of his wife. This she gave, and when the tide of affairs
turned, his own courage was ready and unimpaired. We are like
trees,--the hard, strong, knotty parts of our fiber are
distributed in irregular fashion, and he who seems strongest has
a weak place somewhere. Attack that, and his resistance, courage
and hope disappear.
While there are the types of mood and emotional make-up, there
are curious monothymic types, people who habitually tend to react
with one emotion or mood.
The fear type. It must again be emphasized that we cannot
separate emotion, mood, instinct, intelligence in our analysis.
And so we shall speak of individuals of this or that type when
what we mean is that they reacted habitually and remarkably in
one direction. Thus with the man F., who has quick imagination,
and whose ability to forecast is inextricably mixed with a
liability to fear. It is true that some do not fear because they
do not foresee, and that placidity and calmness are less often
due to courage than to lack of imagination.
F. feared animals excessively as a child and injury to himself as
a boy, so that he played few rough games. To a large extent his
parents fostered this fear in him by carefully guarding and
watching him, by putting him through that neurasthenic regimen so
brilliantly described by Arthur Guiterman in his story of the
aseptic pup. Yet he had a brother as carefully brought up as
himself who became a rough-and-tumble lad, with as little
likelihood to fear as any boy. So that we may only assume that
F.'s training fostered fear in him; it did not cause it.
At the age of thirteen the fear of death entered F.'s life, the
occasion being the death of an uncle. The mourning, the quick
fleeting sight of the dead man in the black box, the interment of
the once vigorous, joyous man in the earth struck terror into the
heart of the boy. From that time much of his life was controlled
by his struggles with the fear of death, and his history is his
reaction to that fear. At fourteen he astonished his
free-thinking family by becoming a devout Christian, by praying,
attending church regularly and by becoming so moral in his
conduct as to warrant the belief that there was something wrong
with him. Indeed, had a psychiatrist examined him at this time,
there is no doubt he would have diagnosed his condition as a
beginning Dementia Precox. But he was not; he simply was
compensating for his fear of death.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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