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
The riddle of personality! Are we at last upon the track of its
uncovering? That elusive mystery, which philosophers have wrapped in
the thousand veils of Greek and Latin words, and psychologists, even
unto the third and fourth generation of Freudians, have floundered
about in, moles before a dazzling sun, is it to be unwound for our
inspection? Think of the human soul. What an invisible, intangible
chameleon is its true reality! Watch it, and you see something that
seems to uncurl and expand like a feather with exultation and delight
and joy, to contract and stiffen into a billiard ball with fear and
pride, shrewd caution and vigilant malevolence, to rear back and spark
fire like lightning with anger and temper, and to crawl and slither
with abjection and smirking slyness, when it needs to. This multiplex
Thing-Behind-Life, are we really about to dissect it into its
elements?
Personality embraces much more than merely the psychic attributes. It
is not the least important of the lessons of endocrine analysis
that there is no soul, and no body, either. Rather a soul-body, or
body-soul, or the patterns of the living flame. The closer tracking of
the internal secretions leads us into the secrets of the living
flame, why it lives, and how it lives, the strange diversities of its
colorings and music and the odd variations in its energy, vitality
and longevity. Why it flickers, why it flares and glares, spurts,
flutters, burns hard or soft, orange-blue or yellow.
The medieval scholiasts, who fought as fiercely about names as nations
about territories, divided men into the sanguine, the bilious, the
lymphatic and the nervous. It was a pretty crude classification of
different constitutions. The endocrine criteria, more exact and
concrete, divide them into the adrenal centered, the thyroid centered,
the thymus centered, the pituitary centered, the gonad centered, and
their combinations.
THE ADRENAL PERSONALITIES
An adrenal personality is one dominated by the ups and downs of his
adrenal gland. In the large, the curve of his life is the curve of
secretion by this gland, both of its Cortex and medulla. Such an
adrenal personality is entirely normal, within the definition of
the normal as something not threatening the duration of life, nor
comfortable adaptation to it. So are the other glandular types. No
sharp line can be drawn between the normal and the abnormal in any
case, the borderland is wide, the transitions many.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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