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 kinds of personality described, as prototypes and variants and the
fundamental facts supporting the view that they are the reaction types
of the human beings we meet in everyday life, represent simply a
beginning of the work to be done. Putting into our hands a new
powerful searchlight that penetrates the interiors of body and soul, a
fresh attitude toward the complicated problems of Man in society grows
imminent. The normal and the abnormal become illuminated with an
effect as if our retinas were suddenly to get sensitive to the
ultraviolet rays to which we are now blind. An apparatus is put in our
hands which shows us not only a static condition at a given moment,
but the whole life process of an individual, normal or abnormal, his
past and his future.
Upon that fetich of the biologists, the struggle for existence, the
struggle for survival, the struggle for possessions and satisfactions,
for happiness, victory and virility, in short, for success, as success
is measured by the biologists, a searching spectroscope can play, with
a yield for our understanding and control of life, that will stand
comparison with the astronomer's analysis of the stars. Toward the
process of adjustment and adaptation, of the environment to the
individual, as well as of the individual to the environment, attitudes
will change from _hopeless acquiescence in the inevitable to a
complete self-determination of the self and its surroundings._ The
adventures of the personality, strung along as the episodes of his
career, his friendships and sex reactions, his mishaps and diseases,
and the final fate or fortune that overtakes him, be he normal,
subnormal, supernormal, or abnormal, begin to become comprehensible,
and hence controllable.
CHAPTER XI
SOME HISTORIC PERSONAGES
THE INTERNAL SECRETIONS IN HISTORY
According to the views, facts and guesses concerning human
personality, as a body-mind complex dominated by the internal
secretions, outlined in the preceding pages, biography, and human
history as the interaction of biographies, become capable of
interpretation from a new standpoint. If human life, in its
essentials, is so much the product of the internal messenger system we
speak of as the endocrines, then biography should present us with a
number of illustrations of their power and influence. What is the
evidence that, as Huxley anticipated, "the introduction into the
economy of a molecular mechanism which, like a cunningly contrived
torpedo, shall find its way to some particular group of living
elements, and cause an explosion among them, leaving the rest
untouched," and the multiplication of such cunningly contrived
mechanisms, were responsible for those personalities, magnificent
chemical compounds, with whose adventures historians are concerned?
THE CASE OF NAPOLEON
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