The Glands Regulating Personality: A Study of the Glands of Internal Secretion in Relation to the Types of Human NatureBerman, Louis
History
The Glands Regulating Personality: A Study of the Glands of Internal Secretion in Relation to the Types of Human Nature
Berman, Louis
Endocrinology; Personality
Now all kinds of possibilities of conflict emerge. The child is still
a bisexual, growing into a mixed sex type, depending upon the nature
and amount of its internal secretions. The influencing adult of the
family, the most important of the external factors encouraging or
depressing the tendencies of the child, possesses a fairly fixed ideal
of monosexuality which he or she, generally quite unconsciously, seeks
to impose upon it. A doting feminine mother will make her son as much
as possible like her husband: if she dislikes her husband, as much as
possible like her father or grandfather. A masculinized mother will
tend to make a sex object out of the son, however, which means his
feminization. But, on the internal secretion side, the boy may be
definitely masculine. That is, after adolescence he would be strongly
masculine, _if the vegetative-endocrine mechanisms created by the
mother's personality had not slipped into the inside track_, so to
speak. As a consequence, continual subconscious conflict between the
two sets of sex reaction will, sooner or later, disturb, perhaps
disrupt and ruin his life.
So an infant may start life with a fairly balanced endocrine
equipment, with its wake of a normal life (barring accidents and
infections), and yet he may end as an inferior, insane, criminal, or
failure directly because of establishment of conflict between himself
as one sort of sex type, and his obligatory associates of another
sort of mixed sex type. This applies also to the mother-daughter, the
father-son, and the father-daughter relationship.
Male and female created He them, is a bald misstatement of the facts.
Male and female emerge as final by-products of endocrine heredity,
environmental treatment and adaptation. Often the male-female,
the female-male, persist anatomically, or are forced to persist
functionally. Society, constructed upon the Biblical dogmas of man as
a fallen angel, and absolute sex, is responsible for much misery and
suffering meted out to the functional hermaphrodite, as we shall see
later in an analysis of the endocrine character of Oscar Wilde. The
privileges and powers of sex relationship, marriage and parenthood,
should be safeguarded for the mixed sex type, the man or woman with
the variable sex index. For there are no tragedies in life more
pitiful than those in which an aggressive masculinely built type is
forced to assume a submissive, receptive, passive, feminine rôle and
vice versa, the tragedy of compelled homosexuality, because of wrong
associates.
MASOCHISM AND SADISM
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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