Chapter X: In Conclusion 303 (3)

To get to the bottom of this mystifying case, the neurologist determined to make use of what is known as the method of dream-analysis. This method has, as a fundamental principle, the theory that most dreams, especially the dreams of childhood, represent the imaginary fulfilment of wishes which cannot be, or have not been, realised in the waking life. In the present instance, the application of dream-analysis proved most helpful. It showed that, asleep no less than when awake, the girl's mind was occupied with ideas unfavourable to her mother, and was dominated by a wish that her mother were dead. This was indicated by a number of dreams, in some of which she saw herself and her sisters dressed in mourning, while in others she was attending the funeral of women who resembled her mother.

Quite evidently a mental conflict was in progress, the girl sufficiently appreciating the sinfulness of the death--wish to resist its full emergence into consciousness, even during sleep. But its presence and persistence, as revealed by the dreams, made it clear to the physician that he was dealing, not with actual insanity, but with a case of hysteria motivated by jealousy of the mother. Further analysis disclosed an abnormal fondness for the father, in whose affections the little daughter wished to reign alone.

Sometimes the hysteria traceable to jealousy presents symptoms ingeniously calculated to compel sympathetic attention from the parent who otherwise would continue to divide his or her affections in a manner displeasing to the jealous child. Thus, a small boy became subject to attacks of severe bodily pain, which came on, usually, at night, and were relieved only when his mother took him to bed with her, sending his father to sleep in another room. In this case, and in similar cases that have been studied by medical specialists, it is not a question of conscious deceit. The pain or other hysterical symptom is wholly the result of the sentiment of jealousy having so worked on the mind of a neurotically predisposed child as to cause a subconscious fabrication of symptoms certain to gain loving care.

Likewise, some children, and particularly children of an inferior mentality or those handicapped by physical defects responsible for a seeming or real neglect of them by parents and playmates, will, under the influence of jealousy, become so disturbed nervously as to indulge in eccentricities of conduct, having for their object the compelling of the attention they feel they have been denied. For example, jealousy often is at the root of the pathological lying of neurotic children, who, on occasion, do not hesitate to bring outrageous charges against innocent persons. Their purpose is not to injure these persons; they tell their morbid lies simply because they wish to become objects of interested and sympathetic attention. For the same reason, other jealousy-dominated children sometimes concoct elaborate deceptions, notably in the way of what are called "poltergeist" performances.

From time to time newspapers report stories of haunted houses, in which small articles of furniture and bric-à-brac are flung about by mischievous ghosts--hence the name "poltergeists"--that remain invisible. When investigation is made, the "ghost" usually turns out to be a small boy or girl, who frequently is regarded as being merely a naughty child, and is punished accordingly. This is a mistake. It is not naughtiness, but hysteria. And, not infrequently, it is hysteria brought on by jealousy.[7]

President Hall, of Clark University, who has made a special study of children's lies, fittingly comments:

"Without knowing it, these hysterical girls feel disinherited and robbed of their birthright. Their bourgeoning woman's instinct to be the centre of interest and admiration bursts all bounds, and they speak and act out things which with others would be only secret reverie. Thus they can not only be appreciated but wondered at; can almost become priestesses, pythonesses, maenads, and set their mates, neighbours, or even great savants agog and agape, while they have their fling at life, reckless of consequences. Thus they can be of consequence, respected, observed, envied, perhaps even studied. So they defy their fate and wreak their little souls upon experience with abandon and have their supreme satisfaction for a day, impelled to do so by blind instinct which their intellect is too undeveloped to restrain. And all this because their actual life is so dull and empty."[8]

Nor does the mischief done by jealousy in the case of nervously inclined children stop here. It is particularly important for parents to know that there may be a postponement of its evil effects. That is, though the jealous child, while a child, may not show more than a general nervousness and may seemingly outgrow his jealousy without ill effect, it is entirely possible that in later life mental or nervous troubles may appear as a result of the subconscious retention of the jealous notions that have long since vanished from conscious remembrance. I might cite a number of instances strikingly illustrative of this, but will be content with giving only one--the case of a man about thirty years old, who did not dare go outdoors because he was obsessed by a fear that he would kill the first person he met in the street.

"My life," he told the physician whose aid he sought, "is one long torment. There are days when I have myself locked in my room, as I cannot venture on the street with the murderous longings that fill my mind. I spend much of my time planning alibis to escape the consequences of the murder I feel sure I shall commit. Is there any hope for me, short of imprisonment in an asylum for the dangerously insane?"

This man, as his answers to the specialist's questions made clear, was actually of a splendid character and highly cultured. His one peculiarity was this dangerous obsession. Psychological analysis to trace its origin was undertaken, and led back to his childhood. It had, as the setting giving it force and keeping it alive, a deep-seated jealousy of his father, experienced before the age of seven. More specifically, it originated in a murderous wish, entertained one day when father and son were walking together, to push his father from a mountain-top into an abyss. The child had at once recognised that this wish was wicked. He had violently repressed it, had tried to forget it, and had seemingly succeeded in doing so. But in his neurotic subconsciousness it had remained alive, to incubate and grow, until it finally blossomed into the murderous and painfully persistent obsession against people in general.

Surely, it is worth while to watch for and eradicate jealousy in childhood. Surely, too, it is worth while to develop emotional control in your children while they still are very young, and to avoid giving reason for jealousy by showing a real neglect in satisfying their natural craving for sympathy and love. On the other hand, it is equally important to avoid being over-attentive to them. This, as brought out in detail in the second chapter, is the great danger to be feared when there is only one child in the family, the exuberance of the parental love filling the child with exaggerated ideas of his own importance that are sure to be rudely jostled when he comes into contact with other children.

From these other children, as from his school teachers and casual visitors to his home, he will unconsciously demand the adulation shown by his parents. Failing to receive it, jealousy is all too apt to seize him, and, out of jealousy, nervous symptoms or character kinks are a probable result--symptoms and kinks which may, perhaps, never be entirely overcome.

What, then, is the moral of all this? What practical suggestions may be made that will help parents to cope with the problem of children's jealousy? For one thing, and most important, there must be no showing of favouritism, if you have more than one child. By your whole attitude towards your children you must make plain to them that each one ought to be, and is, equally dear to you. Of course, however, this does not mean that you should go to the foolish extreme of some parents, who carry the principle of equality so far as to give identical presents to their children. This does not serve as a corrective and preventive of jealousy; rather, it simply panders to it, and is, at bottom, a confession of helplessness on the parents' part.

The real need is to give your children a home environment of such a character that the instinct of human sympathy will be highly developed in them. Jealousy has its roots in selfishness, in an over-development of what may be called the ego-centric instinct. The jealous child is pre-eminently a child unduly occupied with thoughts of self. His personal desires and his personal interests are of paramount importance to him, just because he has not been taught that the one truly self-satisfying ideal of life is to find joy in bringing joy to others. To be sure, he cannot be taught this by direct instruction when he is very small. But indirectly, through the subtle force of suggestion, he can be taught it even then, if he is given a good parental example.

His parents themselves, not merely to prevent the budding of the sentiment of jealousy, but for the sake of the child's moral education in general, must set him an example of unselfishness. In their relations with each other, with their friends, with casual visitors to their home, they must maintain an altruistic, rather than an ego-centric, attitude. Showing true love for their child, they must--and this is especially necessary in the case of an only child--cause the child unconsciously to realise that he is not, and should not be, the sole object of their thoughts; that they have other interests, other duties in life. Unless he is constitutionally abnormal, a child brought up in such an atmosphere of general, self-forgetting kindliness is almost certain to acquire the same healthy philosophy of life that his parents have--a philosophy inimical to jealousy in every form.

As an aid to the same end, it is important to begin, at as early a time as possible, to train the child to occupy his mind actively with games and studies of educational significance. It is a fact which scarcely needs demonstration that the child in whom love of study and interest in subjects of study are developed at an early age will be a child unlikely to become unhealthily occupied with thoughts of himself. He will have too many and too strong external interests to have either time or desire for morbid self-communing.

In fine, you may set this down as certain: the more you inspire in your children external interests in play and work, doing this partly by direct teaching and partly by setting them an example of industrious activity, the less reason you will have to fear that they will fall victims to the handicap of jealousy or to the nervous maladies resultant from any form of excessive preoccupation with thoughts of self.

If, however, despite your best efforts, your child does develop jealous characteristics in marked degree, the safest and wisest thing you can do is to take him at once to a good specialist in the treatment of mental and nervous troubles. It may be that the jealousy is only the resultant of some unsuspected error of his upbringing, but it may also be symptomatic of some serious disorder requiring careful medical treatment.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 7: In my "Psychology and Parenthood" pp. 223-227, will be found the details of a typical poltergeist performance.]

[Footnote 8: "Educational Problems," vol. i, p. 363.]

V

SELFISHNESS

"Jealousy," I stated a few pages back, "has its roots in selfishness, in an over-development of what may be called the ego-centric instinct." Aside from its role as a developer of jealousy, selfishness is indeed one of the major handicaps of childhood. Moralists have long urged on parents the importance of early training to prevent their children from becoming selfish. They have rightly pictured selfishness as among the greatest of human blemishes, giving character an ugly twist and making impossible that harmonious adjustment with other people which is indispensable to individual happiness and social progress. But it is not merely to be condemned from the moralist's point of view: it also is to be condemned from the physician's. Selfishness does much more than injure character: it may even ruin the health of those afflicted with it. To put the matter briefly, training against selfishness is imperative in early life, if only as a safeguard against the functional nervous and mental maladies so common to-day.

When parents fail to teach their children to control their emotions; when they foster in them exaggerated notions of their importance by giving way to the children in everything, being over-solicitous about them, performing duties for them which the children should early be taught to perform for themselves, selfishness is an almost inevitable outgrowth. The children, in addition, may become quite unfitted to cope with the stresses of existence. And they may further become so psychically disorganised that, if after a time they no longer find themselves always having their own way, there may develop nervous symptoms which not merely are the product of an inner emotional storm, but are strangely designed to fulfil the nervous one's latent wish to remain the centre of interest and influence. Or, more bluntly stated, nervous attacks frequently are sheer manifestations of selfishness. It is selfishness that gives rise to them, and, though the victim may not be at all conscious of the fact, they represent an abnormal effort of the personality to attain selfish ends.

This is not theory. It is an established truth, and is demonstrable from the case-histories of many nervous patients, adults and children alike. And, with increasing use of the most advanced methods of mental analysis, the influence of selfishness in causing nervous ailments is certain to become more widely appreciated than it is at present. Not that selfishness is the causal factor in all nervous cases. It would be absurdly false to assert anything of the kind, but the proportion of cases in which it does figure is astonishingly high. Parents need to know this; they need to recognise that failure to curb selfishness during the formative period of childhood may mean nervous wreckage, as well as the distorting of character. In the case of a child of so-called "nervous temperament"--a child, that is to say, who begins life with an unstable nervous organisation by reason of inherited weaknesses--nervous wreckage is almost certain to be the result of neglect to take precautions against the growth of selfishness. The full effects of parental neglect in this regard may not be visible for many years, but frequently they become disconcertingly evident while the child still is young. A case reported to me by a well-known American neurologist and psychopathologist is decidedly to the point in this connection, and may well be given in some detail.

It is the case of a girl of fourteen who was brought to the neurologist because of nervous symptoms which took the form of periods of anxiety and depression, alternating with outbreaks of great irritability. The girl, her mother stated, seemed to have lost interest in everything. At times she would sit mournfully weeping; at others, fall into a passion for no apparent reason. More than once she had declared that she wanted to die. She could not, or would not, give any explanation of this most singular behaviour.

Making a diagnosis of functional, rather than organic, disease, the neurologist resorted to dream-analysis to get at the hidden causes of trouble. At his request, the girl related several dreams, all of which had the noticeable peculiarity that in them the dreamer herself was, to an unusual extent, the dominant figure of the dream-action. Another striking feature of her dreams was that many of them had to do with imaginary experiences of a painful character befalling either the dreamer's father or her brother. Mindful of the theory that dreams are directly or indirectly representative of secret wishes, the neurologist questioned his little patient about her family life. She frankly admitted that she disliked her father, and was not overfond of her brother. She disliked the father--or, as she vehemently said, "hated" him--because he scolded her. Her coldness towards her brother arose from the fact that her mother had fallen into the habit of tactlessly holding him up as a model of good behaviour.

"I love my mother, though," she added, "because she is good to me, and generally lets me do what I want."

Summoning the mother to a private conference, the physician learned that, from early childhood, his patient had been very obstinate and self-willed. Her mother, through mistaken affection, had pampered her. She had literally made herself a slave to the daughter, even to the extent of giving up evening engagements that she might sit by her daughter's bed, gently stroking her head until she fell asleep.

"She cannot sleep unless I do this," said the mother, "and though I have lately tried to discontinue it, I cannot, because she cries and shrieks until I come to her."

To the neurologist the situation was now perfectly clear. The daughter's nervous symptoms were manifestly the not surprising reaction of a personality untrained in emotional control and unexpectedly confronted by a novel and painful state of affairs--the mother's half-hearted attempt to break away from her self-imposed slavery. However, it would hardly do to tell the mother that her early mismanagement of the child was responsible for the neurotic condition which had developed, and that this neurotic condition was, in reality, only a subconsciously originated device to reassert the daughter's waning authority over her mother. What the neurologist did say was:

"Madam, if you want your daughter to get well, you must at once stop this practice of stroking her to sleep. I must ask you to begin to-night. Send your daughter to her room, leave her in bed, shut and lock the door, and let her shriek. This may seem hard and cruel, but it is actually a greater kindness than a continuance of the stroking would be. It is, indeed, a first and necessary step in her cure."

The mother obeyed. For two nights the house resounded with the girl's cries. The third night she went to bed and to sleep without a protest. Then the physician once more sent for the mother.

"You are soon leaving town for the summer, I understand," he said. "What are you going to do with your daughter?"

"Why, take her with us, of course."

"You must do nothing of the sort. Instead, send her to a girls' camp. She needs contact with other girls; she needs the discipline such contact will give her. It is far and away the best medicine she can have. Her recovery depends solely on her developing a new point of view, a mental outlook that will extend beyond herself. This is what a good camp for girls can give her."

The outcome vindicated his words. That fall the nervously depressed girl came back from a summer in camp radiantly happy and with a vastly altered disposition. Since then her parents have had no trouble with her.

Please, however, understand clearly that she was really a sick girl when her mother took her to my neurological friend. It was not simply a question of dealing with a "naughty" girl. The depression, the tears, the attacks of irritability were not deliberately put on to excite sympathy and to play on the mother's affections. This assuredly was their basic purpose, but they were the product of subconscious, not conscious, mental action. They were the resultant of an emotional stress, the responsibility for which rested not with the girl herself but with her mother's unwise treatment of her. If she had become neurotic, it was because her mother had made her so. What she needed, and all she needed, was psychic re-education, and this she obtained through the neurologist's common-sense method of cure.

The fact that such cases are indicative, not of mere naughtiness, but of the action of an inner force operating independently of the victim's conscious volition, will become more apparent when I add that sometimes the symptoms causing medical aid to be invoked are physical instead of mental. In one typical case of this sort a neurologist was summoned to examine a small boy who had been attacked by a peculiar weakness of the legs. To all appearance, he was in perfect bodily health, but when he attempted to walk his legs gave way, and he would fall, unless quickly supported. The most careful testing failed to reveal any organic cause for this condition, and a diagnosis of juvenile hysteria was made. It was learned that the boy's trouble began soon after he had met in the street a badly crippled, semi-paralysed man, whose appearance had evidently made a deep impression on his mind, as he spoke of it, when he got home, in terms partly of astonishment and partly of fear. There could be no doubt that the sight of this man had acted as a "suggestion" to cause the development of a somewhat similar condition in the boy himself. The question remained, why should the mere seeing of a crippled man have sufficient suggestive force to bring on an hysterical crippling? For undoubtedly the boy must have had not a few equally distressing experiences long before this one.

On investigation it turned out that at the time he saw the cripple he was under considerable mental strain. A petted, spoiled child, he had rebelled against being sent to school. He would much rather stay home and play by himself or with his mother. His parents' desires in the matter were as nothing to him: it was what he wanted that was the important thing. For once, though, the parents insisted on being obeyed by their thoroughly selfish boy. He had to go to school, and go to school he did, until the hysterical paralysis set in. This paralysis, of course, was somewhat inconvenient, since it limited his opportunities for play, but it at least had the advantage of keeping him from attending the school that he detested. The boy himself was not in the slightest conscious of the part thus played by selfish wishing in the development of his diseased condition. He was really frightened at finding himself unable to stand and walk. Nevertheless, so strong was his antipathy against school that it was some time before the suggestion of paralysis was broken down by appropriate psychotherapeutic treatment.

Other cases even more extraordinary are recorded in medical annals. One "spoiled child," a little girl not five years old, had a series of convulsive attacks, following the unexpected refusal of her parents to grant a request that involved risk to her if they granted it. After the convulsions she was paralysed in her lower limbs, and the parents, terrified, called in an eminent specialist in nervous diseases. Fortunately, the specialist recognised almost at once that it was a case of hysterical paralysis, brought on by lack of discipline and lack of training in emotional control, and he obtained the parents' permission to isolate the little girl and treat her as he deemed best. His treatment was harsh, but exceedingly effective. For two days he starved the child, then put a bowl of bread and milk some distance from her bed. The suggestion of food was too strong for the suggestion of paralysis. Without further ado, she skipped nimbly out of bed and secured the bowl. But the specialist did not reproach her for being a naughty girl. His reproaches were for the parents, to whom he gave some greatly needed advice as to her future upbringing.

Hysterical pains, contractures, swellings, even hysterical blindness, have been observed in children who, after having been unduly indulged, feel that their father or mother, as the case may be, is no longer as attentive to and lenient with them as they would like. More frequently, under such conditions, the symptoms of nervousness are chiefly mental, or, if physical, are confined to muscular twitchings, slight involuntary movements of the face, head, hands, and similar manifestations. Unhappily, the true significance of these is often overlooked. They are thought to be defects which the child will "outgrow," and in many cases they certainly are outgrown, to all appearance. But, if the moral weaknesses underlying them--the self-centredness, the deficiency in emotional control--are not in the meantime corrected, at any crisis in adult life there is likely to result a nervous breakdown or a serious attack of hysteria. Indeed, in not a few cases of adult hysteria, the causal agency of selfishness is unmistakably in evidence to those accustomed to interpreting nervous symptoms. There are plenty of men and women whose chronic neuroticism is motivated by a subconscious craving to be the centre of attraction, or to be perpetually dominant in the family life. There are other unfortunates who, when their will is seriously crossed, take refuge, like the boys and girls just mentioned, in various forms of nervous disease. The curious experience of a New England physician, Doctor A. Myerson, for some time connected with the Boston Psychopathic Hospital, is by no means as unique as might be thought.

This physician was summoned to attend a woman suffering from what was supposed to be a cerebral hemorrhage. She no longer was able to move her right arm, right leg, or the right side of her face, and had entirely lost the power of speech. For many months previous to the onset of this deplorable condition she had been troubled at irregular intervals by headaches, nausea, and fainting spells. The patient herself and her friends had little doubt that she was in so serious a condition that recovery could not be expected. But Doctor Myerson, making use of the most up-to-date methods of neurological diagnosis, soon was able to reach a reassuring verdict. It was a case, he found, not of organic, but of functional paralysis--in fine, a case of hysteria. And, in the end, by employing what is technically known as the method of "indirect suggestion," he actually re-educated the paralyzed woman both to walk and to talk.

Meantime, he made a searching inquiry to ascertain just why she had been stricken by hysterical paralysis. He discovered, for one thing, that the patient's fainting and vomiting spells and her headaches had usually followed bitter quarrels with her husband--and usually had the effect of placing victory on her side. There was one point, nevertheless, on which the husband was immovable. He was a poor man and could not grant his wife's insistent demand to move to a more expensive neighbourhood. He would not have granted it if he could, for in the particular neighbourhood to which she wished to move she had friends whom he regarded as undesirable. It appeared that the attack of paralysis and speechlessness had been preceded by an exceptionally bitter quarrel over this question of moving--"a quarrel which," to quote from Doctor Myerson's report, "had lasted for a whole day and into the night of the attack."

Thus, the attack itself could be correctly interpreted as the supreme effort of a self-centred, neurotic personality to gain a desired end. But, while making this interpretation, Doctor Myerson was quick to add, in his report on the case, that the attack had not by any means been brought on through the patient's "conscious purpose or volition." It was all an affair of her subconsciousness, working in a blind, abnormal, irrational way to help attain the object of her conscious desire. That her subconsciousness should work so abnormally and so disastrously was chiefly due, beyond any doubt, to the absence of adequate training in self-control and emotional restraint.

But it is not only as a strange, irrational mode of fulfilling a wish that hysteria and other nervous disorders may become manifest in selfish people. Without this element of wishing entering in at all, nervousness is particularly likely to attack the selfish. Many nervous conditions are directly brought on by conscious or subconscious fixing of the thoughts on the bodily processes. We are so constituted that our internal organs work best when we pay no attention to them--or, more strictly, when we pay no attention to the physical sensations to which they give rise while working. If, for any reason, our attention is turned to and held on these sensations, they at once become exaggerated, and the organs giving rise to them tend to function badly. In this way any bodily organ may be disturbed in its action, and general symptoms of nervousness result through nothing but over-attention.

An eminent New York physician, Doctor J. J. Walsh, who has given special thought to this aspect of the problem of nervousness, states the case more fully, as follows:

"If something has particularly attracted a patient's attention to some part of his anatomy, and if his attention is concentrated on it and allowed to dwell long on it, his feelings may be so exaggerated as to tempt him to think that they are connected with some definite pathological condition, and he may even translate them into serious portents of organic disease. If a patient once begins to waste nervous energy on himself because of solicitude with regard to these symptoms, then it will not be long before feelings of tiredness, incapacity for work, at times insomnia and certain disturbances of memory, are likely to be noted. Then the neurasthenic picture seems to be complete.

"This is the process so picturesquely called 'short-circuiting,' by which nervous energy exhausts itself upon the individual himself instead of in the accomplishment of external work. Many of the worst cases of so-called neurasthenia have their origin in this process. It is true that this set of events is much more likely to occur among people of lowered nervous vitality, but, under certain conditions, it may develop in those who are otherwise in good health up to the moment when the attention happened to be particularly called to certain feelings. The physician can start these patients off anew, after improving their physical condition, if he can only bring them to see how much their concentration of mind upon themselves is the cause of their symptoms."[9]

Now, of all people likely to be thus afflicted, the selfish man or woman is by all means the likeliest, simply because his or her every mode of thinking revolves about self. It is the selfish man's wishes, his pleasures, his grievances, his reverses, that are of supreme importance to him. When, moreover, his early upbringing has been such as to leave him sadly short in emotional control, any passing disturbance in the workings of his internal organs may easily hold disastrous consequences for him. He worries over little ailments--as, for example, a slight attack of indigestion--to which people of less self-centred nature would give little or no thought. And, by his persistent worrying and his persistent over-attention to the way his stomach works, it may not be long before he has become a victim of chronic nervous dyspepsia.

Of course, unselfish people who are lacking in emotional control, or carry about with them the unassimilated memory of childhood emotional shocks, may likewise become nervous invalids of one sort or another. But they are much less likely to do this than selfish people are, if only because the unselfish are not so eternally occupied with themselves. They have externalised their thoughts; they have neither time nor inclination to think about trivial aches and pains. Unless overwhelmed by an unexpected emotional shock--for instance, by the sudden death of a beloved relative or by the shock of some great fright--they are likely to go through life comfortably and normally enough. On the other hand, the selfish person is always in danger of becoming morbidly introspective, with resultant damage to the functioning of his nervous system.

Besides all this, there is the important consideration that to be selfish means to be unhappy. Even if actual nervous ailments of a serious sort are escaped by the selfish, unhappiness in the social relations and in the _family_ relations is certain to be experienced. It is my firm belief that, more than any other single cause, selfishness is responsible for misunderstandings and increasing bitterness between husband and wife, ending all too often in a breakdown of the sacred institution of marriage. To deal successfully with that dread problem of to-day--the divorce evil--we must, I submit, first appreciate how basic in marriage failure is the factor of selfishness. To this theme I now invite the attention of my parent-readers, for it is a theme of particular interest to them. If I am correct, it is through education for marriage and, most of all, through education against selfishness that the divorce problem can most surely he solved.

What a problem it is! And a problem that has been steadily growing in seriousness. In the twenty years from 1867 to 1886, according to figures compiled by the United States Census Bureau, 328,716 divorces were granted throughout the country. In the next twenty years--that is, from 1887 to 1906--divorces aggregated the enormous total of 945,625. In other words, in a period of only twenty years nearly two million men and women in the United States had their marriage ties legally severed, the break-up being at the rate of about one hundred and thirty divorces a day.

And this increase has been progressively growing year after year. In 1867 there were only 9,937 divorces for the entire country. In 1906 no fewer than 72,012 divorces were granted. Four years ago an unofficial estimate put the annual divorce crop at nearly one hundred thousand, or, roughly, one hundred divorces for every one hundred thousand of population. The same estimate indicated that one marriage in every twelve ends in divorce.

Nor do these figures afford a complete view of the extent to which marital infelicity obtains in the United States. Every year thousands of marriages virtually, or actually, terminate without recourse to the courts. Men and women who have entered into the marriage state really in love with each other, develop so-called "incompatibilities of temperament" which transform love into indifference, even hate. Reluctant to seek divorce--perhaps conscientiously opposed to it--they continue to live together, husband and wife in name only, or they arrange a voluntary separation. Many others escape from what they have come to regard as an intolerable yoke by the easy expedient of desertion, not necessarily followed by court proceedings. It is impossible to give exact figures, but unquestionably the number of marriages which collapse in divorce is a comparatively small proportion of all unhappy marriages.

Taking the increase in divorce, however, as a concrete, definite measure of marriage failure, the problem of explanation and remedy remains obviously and sufficiently urgent. And it must be said that as a rule the offered solutions are either evasive or superficial.

Some investigators, despairing of finding any solution, insist that the increase in divorce is an unavoidable product of the complex, strenuous life of modern civilisation. Others, much of the same mind, advocate "trial marriages" as a palliative. Still others, singularly lacking in courtesy, or of a myopic vision so far as women are concerned, throw the blame on the "feminist movement," on the increasing emancipation of woman from her old-time position of slavish inferiority. Finally, there are investigators who, noting that the increase in divorce has steadily been gaining momentum since the Civil War, attribute this to the difference in economic conditions before and after the war. In effect, they say that there are more divorces because the country is wealthier, the inference being that increased national prosperity has had an unsettling effect on the national life.

That this contention is sound cannot be gainsaid; but it does not go deep enough. Of itself, it no more explains the increase in divorce than it does the increase in crime and the increase in mental and nervous disease, equally in evidence since the Civil War. These, too, there is warrant for affirming, have increased because of changed economic conditions. It remains, however, to ascertain the precise factor or factors brought into operation by this economic change to account for the growth in crime, insanity, nervous troubles, and divorce. And, in this connection, it is most interesting and important to observe that, so far as concerns crime, insanity, and nervous troubles, recent research has made clear exactly why there has been an increase and how this may best be checked.

It is now recognised that, psychologically speaking, crime, insanity, and nervousness represent an imperfect adaptation to the environment in which the criminal, the lunatic, or the nervous person lives. This failure of adaptation may be due either to inborn lack of capacity to meet the requirements of the environment, or to lack of proper training.

Not so many years ago it was the consensus of scientific opinion that in most cases of crime, insanity and nervousness the victim was hopelessly handicapped from the start by the nature of his being. There was much talk of "inherited criminality," "congenital brain defects," and "neuropathic inheritance." But observation and experiment have compelled an almost complete abandonment of this doctrine of fatal degeneration. To-day scientists largely hold that not more than 1 or 2 per cent. of criminals can be stigmatised as criminals by birth; that insanity is not inheritable, like eye-colour or hair-colour; and that nervousness is, at bottom, an acquired, rather than inherited, disorder.

Accordingly, if crime, insanity, and nervousness are on the increase, it follows that faults of training, rather than innate and unescapable tendencies, are the responsible factors. More specifically, crime, insanity, and nervousness have increased because no adequate effort has been made, by appropriate training, to fit the individual to withstand the extra strain put upon him by the economic changes of the past half century.

Still further, modern scientific research has discovered the specific training fault which, more than anything else, accounts for the failure in adaptation. Stated briefly, this fault consists in neglect to develop moral and emotional control during the first years of life.

In the case of criminality it has been proved, by repeated experiment tried on a large scale,[10] that even the descendants of a long line of criminals, if carefully trained in early childhood, will lead upright lives. In the case of insanity, the discovery that the three principal causes of mental disease are excessive indulgence in alcohol, sexual indiscretions, and emotional stress, points directly to the importance of training, aimed at the development of moral control. But most impressive, as emphasising the need for beginning this training at an early age, is the evidence accumulated in the case of those functional maladies, hysteria, neurasthenia, and psychasthenia--evidence which we have already discussed in much detail in these pages.

Study the history of every case of "nervous breakdown," of psychasthenic fear, of hysterical anxiety and disabilities, of neurasthenic aches and pains, and there will always be found a background of emotional intensity and self-centredness, persisting from early childhood. Hence, the demand of the modern neurologist and medical psychologist for training in youth that will foster control of the emotions and that will habituate the individual to forget self in useful activities. "The mind occupied with external interests will have neither time nor inclination to feed upon itself."

If, therefore, the one sure check to the increase in crime, insanity, and nervous disorders is moral training in early life, can it be doubted that the same process offers the strongest means of checking the tendency to flood the divorce courts?

Ninety-nine divorces out of every hundred, it is safe to say, result from errors of thinking and living--errors directly traceable to shortcomings in early training. Selfishness and lack of control--these, I insist, are the usual elements out of which divorces grow. And what are these but bad habits, for which good habits might have been substituted had proper precautions been taken by the parents in the plastic, formative period of youth? Even in respect to the sexual phase of marriage--that phase in which so many marriages come to grief--the trouble, when trouble occurs, may, in most cases, be wholly attributed to parental thoughtlessness or ignorance. On the sexual side, as on all sides of married life, the great need is for education for marriage.

It is not my intention here to go into details. It must suffice to say that investigation has shown that the sexual impulse begins to manifest itself in sundry ways far earlier than most parents appreciate, and that unless care is taken to observe and offset eccentricities of behaviour possibly containing a sexual element, permanent harm may result.

For example, there often is a sexual element in the cruelty with which not a few children treat play-fellows or household pets. The exaggerated affection little boys sometimes display for their mothers, and little girls for their fathers, is to-day likewise regarded by many medical psychologists as a sexual signal calling for educational measures to insure a more even distribution of affection for both parents. These same psychologists insist that at the first obvious signs of interest in sexual matters--as when the child begins to ask questions about his origin--he should be given frank, if tactful, elementary instruction in the facts of sex. Recall the quotation previously made from Havelock Ellis in this connection. Evasive or untruthful answers will not do. They only fix the attention more strongly on the subject, and from this fixing of the attention a dangerously morbid interest in things sexual may develop.

Clearly, parents who would do their full duty by their children have no easy task before them. Yet everything combines to show that unless they make a business of parenthood--and, in especial, unless, by direct instruction and the force of good example, they develop in their children the virtues of self-control and self-forgetfulness--the after lives of those children, when themselves married, will be anything but happy, and may, in addition, be lives marred by some form of serious nervous or mental disturbance.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 9: "Psychotherapy," pp. 559-560.]

[Footnote 10: See "Psychology and Parenthood," pp. 8-18.]

BASHFULNESS AND INDECISION

VI

BASHFULNESS AND INDECISION

Doctor W. Bechterew, a distinguished Russian physician, was one day visited by a man of extraordinary appearance. Cheap and shabby clothing fitted the visitor's gaunt frame badly; his gait was shuffling; his whole form and manner testified pathetically to an overwhelming burden of poverty, anxiety, and dread. But what was most remarkable about him was a pair of enormous black spectacles, giving a horribly grotesque aspect to his pallid, bearded face. It was with difficulty that Doctor Bechterew concealed the astonishment he felt and courteously inquired what he could do for his strange visitor.

"I have come," was the hesitating, almost stammering, reply, "in the hope that you can cure me of my bashfulness."

"Your bashfulness?" repeated the physician, with a quizzical, but kindly, smile. "Is that all that troubles you?"

"It is enough," answered the other, vehemently. "Doctor, it has made life a hell for me."

"And for how long have you been bashful?"

"Virtually since childhood. I can positively place its beginnings in my schooldays." His words now flowed swiftly, torrentially. "Long before I left school I noticed that I felt awkward and uneasy when anybody looked directly at me. I found myself blushing, stammering, turning away, unable to look people in the eye.

"After I left school and went to work, matters became much worse. In business I had to meet strangers all the time, and in the presence of strangers I felt absolutely helpless. My bashfulness increased to such an extent that I began to invent excuses to stay away from my work, and to remain at home in a miserable solitude. But this did not do; I had to earn my living. In desperation, I hit on the idea of wearing these black spectacles."

"So that people cannot see your eyes?"

"Exactly. They have helped me wonderfully; intrenched behind them, I feel comparatively safe. But I detest them, and I long to be like other men. Is there no cure for me?"

Bizarre, startlingly unique as this must seem, it, after all, differs only in the single detail of the spectacles from hundreds of other cases which might be cited. All over the world are men and women who suffer agonies from an oppressive, and to them inexplicable, sense of timidity when brought into contact with other people. Many, to be sure, make a brave effort to conceal the true state of affairs, compelling themselves to mingle more or less freely in society, despite the torturing apprehensions they then feel. Others of less stubborn mould either seclude themselves or deliberately choose careers that leave them much in solitude. Sometimes, for that matter, the choosing of such careers is an affair not of choice, but of necessity. A man of thirty-four confided to his physician, Doctor Paul Hartenberg:

"I began life as an assistant to my father in the wholesale liquor business, my work being such that I did not realise my extreme bashfulness. But it was made very clear to me when, owing to my father's failure, I was obliged to seek employment elsewhere.

"I applied for and was given the position of manager in a large café. It was part of my duty to keep order among the employees, and, to my dismay, I found that I was not equal to this. Whenever I had to exert my authority I was strangely embarrassed; I stammered, trembled, and, worst of all, blushed like a girl. The employees, as you may imagine, were not long in perceiving how timid and bashful I was, and affairs rapidly came to such a pass that the owner of the café angrily dismissed me.

"I then became a clerk in a department store. But, alas! my deplorable bashfulness was again my undoing. If a customer looked at me when asking a question or giving an order, I blushed, became so embarrassed that I had to turn away, and, in my confusion, paid no attention to what the customer was saying. If the latter repeated his words I became more disturbed than ever, trembled, perspired, and acted so queerly that people thought I was drunk.

"Again I was dismissed, and again I found employment, this time in a smaller store. The result was the same. Thus I passed from position to position, always descending in the social scale. What do you suppose I am doing at present? I am washing dishes in the cellar of a restaurant. It is not pleasant work, but it at least shelters me from the terrible gaze of strangers."

This, fortunately, is an exceptional case. Yet it is certain that many a man is to-day holding a position far below that for which he really has ability, simply because he is too bashful to assert himself, dreading not so much the increased responsibilities of more remunerative work as the fact that it will bring him more conspicuously and intimately into the view of other people. He feels in his soul, poor fellow, that the result will be to plunge him into unendurable confusion. It is an ordeal too great for him to face, and he clings desperately to the inferior position, which, from his distorted point of view, has the merit of allowing him to go through life unnoticed and, consequently, untroubled.

What, then, is this bashfulness which exerts so widespread and baneful an influence? Whence does it take its rise? And how is its victim to go about the task of overcoming it? These are questions of vital significance, particularly in this age of complex civilisation and strenuous competition, in which the bashful man is at a tremendous disadvantage. Happily, he appreciates this, and resorts with increasing frequency to the physician's office in quest of advice and aid. As a result, far more is known about bashfulness to-day than was ever the case before, albeit in its most important aspects as yet known only to a comparatively small number of psychologically trained physicians.

These physicians recognise that there are two distinct types of bashfulness, the one chronic, the other occasional, both of which represent an abnormal exaggeration of the shyness which is a normal characteristic of nearly every child, and which manifests itself in blushing, fidgeting, hiding the face, etc. Ordinarily, this organic shyness, as the psychologist Baldwin has termed it, disappears between the fifth and seventh year. But it may recur under special conditions, and it is specially likely to recur, as almost everybody knows from experience, under conditions focusing public attention on the person. Under such conditions--being called on unexpectedly to speak in public, taking part for the first time in theatrical performances, and so forth--bashfulness of the occasional type is very much in evidence, its symptoms ranging from tremor, palpitation, and vasomotor disturbances to the paralysis of "stage fright." Neither psychologically nor medically is this type of bashfulness of much importance. As the novelty of the conditions giving rise to it wears off--when, for example, one has become accustomed to public speaking--it usually disappears. Like the organic shyness of childhood, it is merely a product of inexperience, an expression of an instinctive reaction that is possibly "a far-off echo from the dim past, when fear of the unknown was a safeguard in the struggle for existence."

Altogether different is the case with those who are habitually bashful, of whom the world holds many thousands. Here, obviously, some factor or factors other than inexperience must enter to cause the chronic timidity which has the special quality of afflicting its victim only when in the presence of other human beings. This, indeed, is the distinguishing characteristic of bashfulness, as was pointed out long ago by Charles Darwin, in his statement that bashfulness seems to depend on "sensitiveness to the opinion, whether good or bad, of others." Darwin also held--and his view still is the prevailing one--that the sensitiveness of the habitually bashful man relates mostly to external appearances. That is to say, he is bashful because he knows he is awkward, because he is dressed out of style or not in keeping with the special occasion, or because he suffers from some real or fancied bodily defect. To the objection that there are plenty of awkward, badly dressed, and physically deformed men and women who are not at all bashful, the advocates of this theory fall back on heredity as the ultimate determining factor, insisting that it is an inborn weakness which makes the bashful man or woman supersensitive to the opinion of others regarding his or her personal appearance and demeanour.

Now, recent research seems to leave no doubt that heredity does operate to some extent in the causation of bashfulness, since most bashful persons--at any rate, among those who come under the care of physicians--have a strain of the neurotic in their family histories. On the other hand, it has been quite as positively established that the matter of external appearances has a causal relation to bashfulness in comparatively few cases, though it may act as an aggravating element. In case after case the first manifestations of true chronic bashfulness have been traced to a period in life far antedating any anxiety on the person's part respecting the way he walks or dresses or looks. More than this, when the bashful themselves are questioned as to the causes of their bashfulness, they usually either profess entire ignorance, or emphasise mental, rather than physical, factors.

"I attribute my bashfulness to no physical cause," is a characteristic response. "I attribute it to a certain weakness of mind, to my lack of self-confidence, to fear of ridicule, and especially to a nervous excitement which I feel whenever others look at me."

Of course, apart from the doubt which such a response casts on the external appearances theory of bashfulness, and its emphasis on the mental, as opposed to the physical, factor, it really throws scarcely any light on the question of causation. Just as there are many awkward, badly dressed, and deformed people who are not bashful, so there are many modest and sensitive ones who go through life in wholly normal fashion, perhaps untroubled even by bashfulness of the occasional type. Quite evidently there still is an underlying something which has to be taken into account before one can fully understand chronic bashfulness.

That something the modern medical psychologist is beginning to believe he has discovered through proceeding on the assumption that bashfulness is far more than a mere innate weakness or character defect; that it is, in reality, a functional nervous trouble, differing only in degree, not in kind, from hysteria and other psychoneuroses. That is to say, the medical psychologist assumes that, as is now believed to be the case in every psychoneurosis, the bashful man is the victim of subconscious memories of distressing incidents in his early life; incidents which, in his case, have had the effect of arousing in an exaggerated degree sentiments of shame or fear.