Part 18 (2/2)
So much for the compensated adrenal types. They are the good workers, the efficients, the kinetic successes of the driven world. They make, at a certain level, good slave drivers because they feel within themselves a driving force. But suppose the adrenal type becomes uncompensated, or perhaps is inadequate to the demands of life to start with. Then the story becomes different. The perfect efficient superman of business or profession begins to lag. Though he is himself in the morning, he begins to lag in the afternoon. That is when he tires. In the evening he is all in. More sleep, recreational trips, vacations slip into the rank of necessities, whereas previously they had been laughed at as luxuries. More minute or large moles emerge in the skin, especially if the individual is of a fair type. If a strenuous effort is not made to give the adrenals an opportunity to recuperate, or if adjustment on the part of the other glands does not occur, this stage of intermittent and remittent adrenal inadequacy gives way in turn to the state of permanent adrenal insufficiency.
The adrenal insufficient is important because he is to be seen everywhere. Built along the same lines as the adrenal adequate and apt to be taken for him, he differs and contrasts vividly below the surface. One may sum him up by saying that he is one variety of neurasthenic, perhaps the most frequent variety. Cold hands and feet plague him, cold feet psychically as well as physically, for a chronic and obsessive indecision is one of his most prominent complaints.
A fatigability, that goes with a low blood pressure, lowered body temperature and a disturbed ability to utilize sugar for fuel purposes, is another of his chief complaints. The skin often presents an instability of the blood vessels, so that they now react to stroking with a blanched instead of a reddened effect. Irritability, a liability to go off the handle at the slightest provocation, and a consequent complete exhaustion that, after an outburst, sends him to bed, is conspicuous. Dismissed sometimes contemptuously as weaklings, they are accused of laziness, craziness, and haziness. In their psychic attempts to compensate, they land into all kinds of hot water, from which friends, relatives or luck extricate them sometimes. The other times they go to the wall.
The congenital adrenal deficient is a special problem. If the history of such an individual is followed from birth, one gets a pretty typical story. The genealogy is nervous. Nervous is a word of many meanings. But when parents confess themselves nervous, it generally means a mental and emotional instability of some sort. Sometimes the idea is camouflaged as high strung. In the feeding narrative of the child, one finds not occasional incidents or episodes, but continued trouble, difficulties, adventures. Even after the first year or two, the nutritional chronicle is not satisfactory. Lack of appet.i.te, lack of energy, lack of response to stimuli are its keynotes and the motifs of the later years of childhood.
Growth is a strain. It becomes a task to make these children grow and gain. Chronically below the average weight and height, herculean efforts are made by the conscientious parents, but with small success.
With the entry of school life and compet.i.tion, the curtain rises upon the real tragedy, a tragedy in which the avenging Fates are the usual ignorance, stupidity and misunderstanding. If the teachers alone are duty-obsessed, or perhaps s.a.d.i.s.tic, the child endures the agonies of repeated admonitions, demotions, and punishments. However, a certain thick-skinned indifference may develop to protect the sufferer.
If the parents are in addition ambitious, or proud, or compet.i.tive, then woe betide the victim. With their nervous dispositions, it is the school and the tutor who are to be blamed, if not the child. From school to school, from system to system, from novelty to fad, from doctor to doctor, from fakir to charlatan, from pillar to post, they wander in search of an education. Educational cults by the dozen have sprouted and grown fat around these unfortunates.
The chief defect of the congenital adrenal inadequate is an insufficiently developed adrenal cortex. That means an insufficiently developed brain and nervous system. For we have seen how closely all these are related in development. Now education can never be the education of a vacuum. And we have to deal here with a relative vacuum. When there are no potentialities, there can be no education.
Where the potentialities are limited, education must be limited.
The congenital adrenal inadequate is defined in physical and mental energy. Hence educators cannot drive him. Up to a certain point he can be led, but no farther. He should not be expected to go to a college, and waste the opportunity of some one financially unlucky, but whose endocrine system is more generously endowed.
Not that the outlook is absolutely hopeless. p.u.b.erty, with its tremendous changes in the glands of internal secretion, when one can almost hear the clicks and the whirring of the wheels in the internal machinery, may transform. The unfathomed possibilities of gland therapy are still to be probed. But the general rule remains.
THE REACTIONS TO MODERNISM
The adrenal personalities in all their variations must be safeguarded and carefully looked after in the strained complexities of modern post-bellum civilization. In a sense, the adrenal type is the Atlas of the twentieth century world, and small wonder that he and his descendants stagger beneath the burden. The adrenals are organs for the mobilization of energy, physical and mental, for emergencies. They are the glands which meet shocks and neutralize the effects of shock.
In the solitary animal, the everyday producers of shock are pain, fright and wounds. The adrenal mechanisms oversecrete to encounter the enemy, and then there is a period of rest and recuperation. Man, however, with the growth of his imagination and the increase in number and density of his surrounding herd, has become the subject of continuous stimulation. In the past, this was balanced by the almost universal dominance of some religious belief, as an effective opiate.
Concepts like Fate, Predestination, an all-guiding and all-wise Providence, relieved and s.h.i.+elded the adrenals, and acted as valuable adjuvants for the preservation of normality.
The nineteenth century witnessed the birth and expansion of a great number of new stimulant reagents, the discoveries of physics and chemistry, which, with the climax of the World War of 1914-1918, have made for a more or less complete deliquescence of accepted religion.
For the great majority there was no faith to take its place. War, pre-war, and post-war shocks have continued with their incessant pounding upon the reserves of energy. Under these conditions the adrenal personalities are bound to suffer. The other endocrine types suffer, too, but quite differently.
Today, anti-adrenal, anti-religious ideas are epidemic. Of these, first prize belongs to a cult of egotism fathered by the Napoleonic Idea, consciously a.s.sertive and self-conscious in Max Stirner's ”The Ego and His Own,” which engendered a swarm of imitators and plagiarists. Human beings are all incorrigible egoists more or less, furtive or frank. But social and religious codes curbed the most narcissistic of kings and conquerors. Before Napoleon, all of them vowed allegiance and expressed submission to some sort of deity, confessed some fear of the Lord in their hearts. But the ideas of Napoleon flouted all that. The unscrupulous predatory who put effectual scheming for the self plainly above every other consideration and rode rough shod over all his fellows appealed powerfully to the latent animality of the adrenal types. Then came the dawning awareness of capital and labor of themselves as cla.s.ses fiercely opposed forever in the policy of cut-throat versus cut-throat. The labor organizations and the commercial companies and corporations pitted themselves against each other consciously.
Doctrines like ”Property is but Robbery,” ”Everyone for himself and the devil take the hindmost,” the ”Iron Law of Wages” and the ”Facts is Facts” of the Gradgrinds were the phrases of the nineteenth century that a.s.sisted. Finally came the Darwinian revelation of man as the ape-parvenu, which completed the disintegration of the old restraints.
Man seemed to see himself now for the first time stark and naked. But Man consists of many varieties, and all reacted differently to the image in the clouded mirror. There was universal attempt at suppression. But slowly the anti-adrenal forces infiltrated every activity and every soul. Like a hidden focus of infection in the body, it germinated and poisoned. A slow fever crept into life. A febrile quality tinged the acquisition of wealth, the concentration upon s.e.x, and the desperate pursuit of the novel stimulus.
Then, like the hand that appeared at Belshazzar's Feast, came the War, only it was a hand that stayed with a long flas.h.i.+ng lightning sword in its grip, sweeping pitilessly among the erstwhile dancing mult.i.tudes to mutilate and destroy. A good many people, with that st.u.r.dy animality George Santayana speaks somewhere of as a trait of mankind, set out to enjoy the War. It was a new sort of good time upon an incredibly large scale. It was an undreamed-of opportunity. The mechanisms of suppression of the mind render it incapable of appreciating horror until encountered. And so thousands with dangerously unstable adrenals were plunged into the most trying conditions possible. Hundreds of them, already shaken, on the borderland of instability, reacted with the phenomena of breakdown of control, lumped with a host of other phenomena, under the general rubric of ”sh.e.l.l shock.”
That alone was not all. If hundreds collapsed, thousands approached the verge of collapse. They survived and were discharged from the armies as normal. They reappear in civil life as cases of ”nerves.”
Ordinarily that would mean that they would be cla.s.sed as failures. But such have been the psychologic reactions to the war that all kinds of compensations in the way of dangerous mental states have become frequent in these inadequate adrenal types. A trend to violence and a resentful emotionalism are combined with desperate attempts to spur the jaded adrenals with artificial excitements. Consequent melancholia and depression, the ”blues,” are inevitable. A survey of drug addicts would probably show a definite percentage of this type. The same applies to certain petty criminals and law breakers.
The adrenal element in the personality must be considered in every disturbance, morbid, personal, or social involving brunette types, Huxley's dark white, Mediterranean-Iberians, red-haired persons, and even pigment-spotted fair people. Historians have traced the earliest civilization to the doings of a brunette people, the Sumerians, the first to build cities in the Euphrates-Tigris region more than five thousand years before Christ was born. An adrenalized people one would, expect to be the first to take advantage of possibilities because of their energy capacity. The earliest Sumerian stone carvings of warriors exhibit an undersized skeleton compared with the large head, broad face, a low hair line and prominent nose that would fit into the ensemble of the adrenal type. Certain other historical aspects of the adrenal personality have yet to be worked out.
THE PITUITARY PERSONALITIES
The presence of two antagonistic elements in the one gland complicates any attempt at even the most abstract a.n.a.lysis of a personality dominated by that gland. The pituitary, composed of an anterior lobe and posterior lobe, supplies two fairly uncomplicated corresponding types, best described as the masculine pituitary type, and the feminine pituitary type. The masculine pituitary type is one determined by the rule of the anterior pituitary, representing superlative brain tone and action, good all-around growth and harmonious general function, the ideal masculine organism. The feminine pituitary type has an excess of post-pituitary, with susceptibility to the tender emotions, sentimentalism, and emotionalism, feminine structural lines. Ante-pituitary dominance in a male reinforces the general masculinity while the post-pituitary depresses it. The post-pituitary in a woman augments her natural trend, ante-pituitary tending to counteract it. In other words, post-pituitary and ovary are conjunctive, ante-pituitary and ovary are disjunctive, post-pituitary and testis are opponents, ante-pituitary and testis are allies.
<script>