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
Freud, in 1895, studying a case of hysteria with Breuer, had attempted
cure by the method of free association, attempting to get the hysteric
to pour out her mental life. Not succeeding, and his interest aroused
by her continual references to her dreams, he discovered that by means
of those dreams he could tap the subconscious and unconscious in
regions hitherto inaccessible. For in the dreams, ideas, persons, and
experiences appeared that never came upon the stage of the conscious.
From that finding he developed the concept of repression, i.e., the
relegation of a painful experience into the unconscious, and kept
imprisoned there by the censor. Also how there it became the complex,
which, like a stage manager, never appeared before the footlights of
the conscious, but determined its content just the same by inhibition
or stimulation of any character or scene to be enacted upon it.
A complete critique of Freudianism cannot be attempted here. But in
relation to the endocrine system as controllers of nerve function
in health and disease, a valid criticism can be made. Firstly, the
Freudian jargon, its technicalities and explanations, are metaphors.
Some may regard them as justifiable descriptions of mental processes.
But it certainly can be urged against them that they provide us with
no idea concerning what is happening in the cells of the body and
brain as explanation for the event, normal or abnormal, supposedly
explained. Words like sublimation or transference are figures of
speech and nothing else. Secondly, they ignore totally the powers of
the vegetative apparatus, the viscera, muscles and secreting glands
together, as originators and determiners of the wish and its
adventures.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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