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
If the parents are in addition ambitious, or proud, or competitive,
then woe betide the victim. With their nervous dispositions, it is
the school and the tutor who are to be blamed, if not the child. From
school to school, from system to system, from novelty to fad, from
doctor to doctor, from fakir to charlatan, from pillar to post, they
wander in search of an education. Educational cults by the dozen have
sprouted and grown fat around these unfortunates.
The chief defect of the congenital adrenal inadequate is an
insufficiently developed adrenal cortex. That means an insufficiently
developed brain and nervous system. For we have seen how closely all
these are related in development. Now education can never be the
education of a vacuum. And we have to deal here with a relative
vacuum. When there are no potentialities, there can be no education.
Where the potentialities are limited, education must be limited.
The congenital adrenal inadequate is defined in physical and mental
energy. Hence educators cannot drive him. Up to a certain point he can
be led, but no farther. He should not be expected to go to a college,
and waste the opportunity of some one financially unlucky, but whose
endocrine system is more generously endowed.
Not that the outlook is absolutely hopeless. Puberty, with its
tremendous changes in the glands of internal secretion, when one can
almost hear the clicks and the whirring of the wheels in the internal
machinery, may transform. The unfathomed possibilities of gland
therapy are still to be probed. But the general rule remains.
THE REACTIONS TO MODERNISM
The adrenal personalities in all their variations must be safeguarded
and carefully looked after in the strained complexities of modern
post-bellum civilization. In a sense, the adrenal type is the Atlas
of the twentieth century world, and small wonder that he and his
descendants stagger beneath the burden. The adrenals are organs for
the mobilization of energy, physical and mental, for emergencies. They
are the glands which meet shocks and neutralize the effects of shock.
In the solitary animal, the everyday producers of shock are pain,
fright and wounds. The adrenal mechanisms oversecrete to encounter
the enemy, and then there is a period of rest and recuperation. Man,
however, with the growth of his imagination and the increase in
number and density of his surrounding herd, has become the subject of
continuous stimulation. In the past, this was balanced by the almost
universal dominance of some religious belief, as an effective opiate.
Concepts like Fate, Predestination, an all-guiding and all-wise
Providence, relieved and shielded the adrenals, and acted as valuable
adjuvants for the preservation of normality.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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