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
What complicates his sex difficulties, and makes social adjustment
almost impossible or completely impossible, is that his pituitary
frequently cannot react to assist him. Often, as emphasized, it
is bound in by bone on all sides and neither ante-pituitary nor
post-pituitary can adequately secrete for his needs. So social
instinct and the capacity for inhibition, the ability to control
himself conceptually and somatically, are poor. As a child it is
difficult to train him along the lines of the elementary habits and
customs. He is into late childhood a bed-wetter, and steals and lies
quasi-unconsciously.
His mother realizes soon that he cannot be made to acquire a sense of
responsibility either for himself or for others. She becomes afraid to
let him go into the street because of his inability to take care of
himself, to acquire the right attitude toward street cars, autos,
strangers, in short, danger. She dreads to take him to places because
no sooner would they be out of them, than she would discover that he
had taken something that did not belong to him, quite as a matter of
course. He will fabricate stories with no motive, fabricate them
out of whole cloth for the pure fun of it. In a word, moral
irresponsibility is the keynote of the volitional traits of the
thymo-centric personality from childhood up.
With so much against them, physical inferiorities, mental defects,
moral lacks of every sort, it is little wonder that the thymo-centrics
die young. Infections hit them badly. The cases of flu that went off
in twenty-four hours belonged to the type. Fulminant meningitis,
pneumonia, diphtheria, scarlet fever, the varieties that are supposed
to kill in twenty-four to forty-eight hours because of the terrible
virulence of the attacking microbe, are probably so malignant only
because the organism attacked is a thymus subject.
In the alcohol and drug habitué wards of hospitals as well as in
medicolegal cases of degenerates, gunmen and other criminals,
the characteristic conformation and diagnostic stigmata of the
thymo-centric are often encountered. Life treats them badly.
Misunderstood and misjudged, they are the hopeless misfits of society.
If the pituitary and the thyroid can enlarge to compensate for their
defects, they may become the queer brilliants, the eccentric geniuses
of the arts and sciences. Should they not, mental deficiency and
delinquency are their portion. Epilepsy, then, is sometimes their mode
of escape from the terrors of an utterly foreign world. Should they
survive all other hazards, suicide may still be their most frequent
fate. A study of 122 cases of suicide by one observer showed that the
status lymphaticus was practically constant and often pronounced.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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