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 distinct type to which the first assistant to the chief medical
examiner of the city referred is the thymo-centric personality
(status lymphaticus is another technical name for it), we have been
considering. The persistence of the thymus after adolescence makes for
an arrest of masculinization or feminization, the end-point arrived
at by the processes of puberty. That is, a partial castration takes
place. Now, as the experiments of Steinach upon the transplantation of
ovaries into males deprived of their testes and of testes into females
deprived of their ovaries have demonstrated, the removal of the
interstitial cells of one sex assists enormously in arousing the
opposite sex traits that have been latent, homosexuality. In a
thymo-centric, tendencies to homosexuality and masochism appear.
And so all the remarkable after-effects of those processes that the
Freudians have so lovingly traced: the father complex in men, the
inferiority complex, and the feminoid complex in general.
The feminoid complex introduces again the character of the functional
hermaphrodite, the mixed male-female. The sex index will certainly
come in time as a measurement of sexuality. But until then some more
available classification of sex tendency is necessary. Including
sex intergrades, one may divide sex types into six classes:
male, _male_-female, male-_female_, female, _female_-male, and
female-_male_. The sex intergrades, the four hyphenated classes,
nearly all have some degree of persistent thymus. If its influence is
partial, the emphasis is before the hyphen, upon the ostensible. If
its influence is unchecked, the emphasis is after the hyphen upon the
apparently latent sex. The sex difficulties produced in these people
by the conflict between their conscious sex and their subconscious
sex, the sex duel in the same mind, Siamese twins pulling in
diametrically opposite directions, are comprehensible only from the
viewpoint of the internal secretions.
Homosexuality, in one form or another, frank or concealed, haunts
the thymo-centric and spoils his life. The persistent thymus, like a
vindictive Electra, stalks the footsteps of its victim, its possessor.
He wishes to live, according to society's remorselessly rigid
expectations, for virility and happiness. But his thymus condition
forces him also to live for femininity and misery. That homosexuality
is not purely a psychic matter, of complexes and introversion, as
the newest psychology would have us believe, has been proved by
observations of its development in animals with internal secretion
disturbances, acquired or experimental. Thus it has been recorded that
a male dog showed a large goitrous swelling of the thyroid in the
neck, with a rapid heart, staring eyes, the loss of flesh and fat and
the nervousness of a hyperthyroid condition. Therewith he became an
absolute homosexual. Observations on the primates along the same
lines have been made. In goitrous hyperthyroids thymus persistence is
common.
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