The Glands Regulating Personality: A Study of the Glands of Internal Secretion in Relation to the Types of Human NatureBerman, Louis
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The Glands Regulating Personality: A Study of the Glands of Internal Secretion in Relation to the Types of Human Nature
Berman, Louis
Endocrinology; Personality
In the chapter on the glands of internal secretion as an interlocking
directorate, certain generalities were stated as the laws of the
government of the organism's life by them in association with the
vegetative apparatus. It was put forward as a fundamental revision of
the theory, hitherto accepted, of the limitation of mind to the brain
cells. We think and feel not alone with the brain, but with our
muscles, our viscera, our vegetative nerves, and last but not least
our endocrine organs. In short, we think and feel with each and every
part of ourselves.
Among these pristine factors determining the content of consciousness,
the endocrines are most important, because they alone to start with,
of all the other factors, are different in each and every individual.
They are what render him unique at birth, even though he looks the
counterpart of millions of other babies born at the same time. They
constitute his inner destiny. As he grows, the external factors,
social experiences, climate, accidents, and disease modify and
condition the reactions and complexity of the endocrine system. As
these modifications and associations are of the greatest import for
the final elaboration of the personality, composing as they do the
elements of the unconscious which confers the unique stamp of normal,
abnormal, supernormal, or subnormal, it is worth while now to review
the most general of the determining laws. Man is an energy phenomenon,
both conscious and unconscious, with the energy emanating from the
endocrine-vegetative mechanisms. So it becomes possible for us,
by their aid, to analyze the conscious, the subconscious and the
unconscious with the terms long current in the analyses of physics.
1. Man is an energy machine which, though it is constantly losing
energy as a whole; consists of parts constantly accumulating energy
(as a result of inherent chemical reactions accelerated by the
absorption of food). This process of local accumulation of energy
associated with general loss of energy may be observed even in the
ameba, in the form of stored reserve food material. Evolution
created a system of organs, the viscera, as specialists in energy
conservation, utilization or transformation.
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