The Unadjusted Girl, With Cases and Standpoint for Behavior Analysis — John Shaqi
The Unadjusted Girl, With Cases and Standpoint for Behavior AnalysisThomas, William Isaac
Science
The Unadjusted Girl, With Cases and Standpoint for Behavior Analysis
Thomas, William Isaac
Female juvenile delinquents -- Case studies; Young women
I have seen (through the kindness of Hutchins Hapgood) the life history
of a woman who has had sexual relations with numbers of men. At the same
time she has always fed men. She has kept a restaurant, partly I think
to feed men. When one of her friends committed suicide she dreamed of
him for months and always dreamed that she was feeding him. While she
was sexually passionate her concern was mainly to satisfy the sexual
hunger of others, as she satisfied their food-hunger. When two of her
lovers were jealous, unhappy, and desperate, she ran from one to the
other like a mother visiting two sick children in different hospitals.
More than once she attempted suicide. When she tried to explain herself
to me she said that without some human relationship she felt unbearably
lonely, and that she was drawn to lonely men without regard to their
social condition. Many of her friends were criminals and she would speak
to any bum on a park bench. She was never a prostitute. One of her
friends said, “Martha is a woman to whom everything has happened that
should logically break a woman’s character and spirit. She ought to be a
demoralized victim of society. She has done nearly everything that is
supposed to ruin and destroy a person, especially a woman, but she is
not a bit destroyed. She knows the so-called lowest things in life, but
she wants the best and feels it. She feels what is beautiful and fine
and loves it. She does things that sometimes mean sordidness in others
but not in her. She gets drunk, but is not drunken. She is loose
sexually in her acts, but her spirit is as simple as the flowers.”
A touching expression of response from a man, a devotion to a parent as
deep as mother love, is found in a letter of the psychologist William
James, written to his father from England when the death of the latter
was anticipated.
13. My blessed old Father: I scribble this line (which may reach
you, though I should come too late) just to tell you how full of the
tenderest memories and feelings about you my heart has for the last
few days been filled. In that mysterious gulf of the past, into
which the present will soon fall and go back and back, yours is
still for me the central figure. All my intellectual life I derive
from you; and though we have often seemed at odds in the expression
thereof, I’m sure there’s a harmony somewhere and that our strivings
will combine. What my debt to you is goes beyond all my power of
estimating—so early, so penetrating and so constant has been the
influence.
You need be in no anxiety about your literary remains. I will see
them well taken care of, and that your words shall not suffer from
being concealed. At Paris I heard that Milsand, whose name you may
remember is in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ and elsewhere, was an
admirer of the _Secret of Swedenborg_, and Hodgson told me your last
book had deeply impressed him. So will it be....
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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