The Glands Regulating Personality - Louis Berman, M.D.
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For normally, with feminine puberty, there is an increased activity of
the thyroid, the posterior pituitary and the adrenal medulla. These
changes indeed constitute the formula of normal feminization. In the
male, the ripening of the testes is accompanied or perhaps preceded by
augmented function of the adrenal cortex and the anterior pituitary.
This difference in biochemistry accounts for the contrast between the
sexes in the skin, hair, fat, cartilage (voice) and bone changes.
Ovary and adrenal medulla and posterior pituitary and thyroid
predominance constitute the feminine formula. Testis and adrenal
cortex and anterior pituitary predominance comprise the masculine
endocrine directorate.
THE REACTIONS OF THE OTHER GLANDS
As in so many other aspects, the facts about the various influences
exerted by the endocrine glands upon the reproductive system are
complicated and disjointed. A chink of light has been let in upon a
dark cave, and slowly the chink will widen. But the gross effects are
clear.
Around the ovary and the uterus, the endocrines gyrate as the planets
around the sun. The ovary is the organ for the preservation and
maturation of the germ plasm, that treasure which the body is built
but to cherish and hand on as a sacred heirloom. The ova, the female
egg cells, are the fundamental concern of the ovary. Secondarily, it
secretes its messengers to keep the rest of the body, and particularly
the other endocrines, in touch with the necessities of the adventures
of these ova. It is thus enabled to bend every force and power at its
command to the service of the reproductive instinct.
In learning their role so well in the course of evolution, the
thyroid, the pituitary and the suprarenal have become indispensable
stimulants (in various degrees peculiar to the individual), to the
primary function of the ovary. As a consequence, to hold the sex
stimulating glands in check, there had to appear others, restraining
them and so preventing sex precocity. These are the thymus and pineal.
So closely are they all related that insufficient action of the
thyroid, pituitary or adrenals may cause atrophy of the ovaries
and uterus, with abolition of genital function. If the sex glands
themselves fail, as occurs usually in most women sometime in the
forties, the thyroid-pituitary-adrenal association must readjust
itself to the new development. The adaptation evokes the phenomena of
the transition to a new life, the climacteric.
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF PUBERTY
Tracing the development of sex life there is a certain order of events
in a normal history. Before puberty, the ova have lain asleep, as it
were, in a cocoon state. Now with puberty they awaken. And with them
all those profound mechanisms and inventions that have to do with
their nutrition up to ripening. Then revolve the cycles that are
translated as menstruation, the propulsion, fertilization and
implantation of the ova in the uterus,--the full development of the
fetus,--its birth, and feeding after birth--all of which are ductless
gland controlled.
Samuel Butler once noted that:
"All our limbs and sensual organs, in fact, our whole body and life,
are but an accretion round and a fostering of the spermatozoa. They
are the real "He." A man's eyes, ears, tongue, nose, legs and arms
are but so many organs and tools that minister to the protection,
education, increased intelligence and multiplication of the
spermatozoa, so that our whole life is in reality a series of complex
efforts in respect of these, conscious or unconscious according
to their comparative commonness. They are the central fact in our
existence, the point towards which all effort is directed."
Nothing could be said more truly of Woman, and the ova she carries.
All that transpires during pubescence is symptomatic of the underlying
tidal stir in the cells. The uterus becomes gorged with blood
periodically, to provide an enriched soil for the perhaps to be
fertilized ovum to plant itself. The breasts grow, and fat is
deposited in particular places as reserve material for the making of
milk. The qualities which are to appeal to the eye and ear and even
nostrils of the male appear. Instincts dawn, an independence of spirit
germinates, emulsified with a curious shyness and coyness and a
desperate loneliness and secrecy. And all because there have been let
loose in the blood from the glands of internal secretion the chemical
substances that set going the clockwork of sequential incidents
elaborated and repeated through countless aeons of time.
FEMININE PRECOCITY
Ordinarily, in the north temperate climate, puberty begins about
the fourteenth year, but may begin anywhere from the tenth to the
sixteenth. Feeding and environment indirectly, the state of the
internal secretions as a whole directly, determine this. In girls,
those definite signs, menstruation and the growth of the breasts,
before the age of ten, mean premature awakening of the ovaries and a
concomitant co-reaction of the other endocrines, creating the ensemble
of maturity.
In females, the primary stimulus, the initial spark of femininity,
must originate in the ovary. There are other forms of precocity in the
female, dependent upon stimulations of other glands, but these forms
are masculinisms, a masculinization of the personality, and not a
true awakening of the feminine constitution. So one must distinguish
sharply between a precocity by masculinization and precocity of
premature feminization. The latter always implies the touch of the
fairy's wand upon the sleeping ovaries. Sexual precocity in boys may
be produced by a premature overactivity not only of the specific
reproductive organs: the testes, but also by an early excess of
secretion on the part of the cortex of the adrenal gland or the
pituitary gland, or by a too early involution of the pineal or thymus.
When such abnormalities of adrenal, pituitary, thymus or pineal occur
in girls, it is the masculine streak in the hastening of growth that
is made manifest. All this emphasizes the relative bisexuality of
every normal, no matter how pronounced, when superficially viewed, his
or her form of predominating sex may be. Under the right conditions
recession of the most marked virility or femininity becomes
conceivable, and occurs.
THE SECRET OF THE MASCULINE
Masculinization having entered upon the scene, one may well ask: what
truly (which means chemically) lies behind all these differences
and divergences between male and female? What is the secret of the
variable internal secretion admixtures? You can tell us that the
recipes are different, the ingredients different, the results
different as a Nesselrode pudding is from, say, a rice pudding. But
what is the inner mechanism of the process? Since the masculine and
the feminine are but expressions of certain relative capacities and
potentialities, some single principle must run through the making of
both.
Recognizing of course the qualifications inherent in so broad a
statement the answer is: the handling of the lime salts. Life
originated, or at least lived and worked for long ages in sea water.
During these eras the salts of the sea have come to play a dominant
role in its being. The lime salts, because of their peculiar
properties of dissolving or precipitating themselves according to
electrical conditions in their medium, have come to occupy a
central position in all the processes of growth, metabolism and sex
differentiation. So it is that masculinity may be described as a
stable, constant state in the organism of lime salts, and the feminine
as an unstable, variable state of lime salts. The male skeleton
contrasts with the female as the stronger, larger, heavier and
straighter because it is an expression of a greater capacity to
utilize, store and keep lime in the system. Women throughout their
reproductive period are liable to rapid and pendulum-like fluctuations
of their lime content.
Menstruation, pregnancy, lactation, all draw upon the stores of lime,
sometimes depleting them to the point of softening of the bones and
wrecking the whole skeleton. The endocrines control the transport,
and course, combinations and permutations in the history of lime's
progress among the cells, and are in turn themselves affected by it.
Man is relatively free of these liabilities, and so remains man by
his freedom from the recurrent crises involving the lime salt reserve
which constitute the essence of the life story of woman.
THE SEX INDEX
It follows from these considerations that when it becomes necessary
to size the sex composition of a man or woman, a measurement becomes
establishable which may be spoken of as the sex index. To be able to
say of Mr. Llewylln Jones that he is sixty per cent masculine and
forty per cent feminine, or of Mrs. Worthington that she is seventy
per cent feminine and thirty per cent masculine would be of the utmost
value under all kinds of circumstances. Unfortunately, lacking as we
do the exact figures of an advanced blood chemistry (yet in its most
infantile infancy) a direct indexing of the sort is impossible. But it
is certainly conceivable, along the lines of measurement suggested
by the Binet tests and others, that a scale of evaluation of the
secondary sex traits may be elaborated, which would turn out as
valuable in understanding the frictions of the individual, and more
concretely, that aspect of it to which pathologists of the mind are
tracing so much needless misery and suffering: maladjusted sexuality,
expressed and suppressed. Nothing will contribute more to harmonious
adjustment for these sufferers than recognition of the fact that we
are all, more or less, partial hermaphrodites.
THE FUNCTIONAL HERMAPHRODITE
The complete or total hermaphrodite we define as the individual who
possesses the reproductive organs of the male and the female, both
testes and ovaries. So rare is such a combination in man that for a
long time its occurrence was doubted, descriptions of it regarded as
myth. However, undoubted cases are on record, examined by the most
careful of observers, of ovo-testis or mixed reproductive organs.
Strangely enough, the history of these cases, shows that at one time
the masculine set, and at another the feminine set, will hold sway
over the sex traits and functions. Blending does not happen.
Rare though the true hermaphrodite may be, the partial hermaphrodite
is relatively frequent. The mixed ensemble of the directly contrasting
type, such as the concomitance of testes with feminine secondary sex
traits, or of ovaries with masculine sex traits, have been described
from time immemorial as freaks. Occurring even more frequently is the
mixed sex ensemble, in which the type of reproductive organs and of
secondary sex traits run roughly parallel, emulsified with certain
traits of the opposite sex. Physical features of one sex, instincts
and mental attitudes of the other co-exist in the same individual by
reason of an excess in one direction or a deficiency in another of the
internal secretions. The degree of masculine trend in a woman is a
crude measure of adrenal domination, the degree of feminine deviation
in a man is roughly proportional to the amount of pituitary influences
in his make-up.
Whether one or the other sex tendency will dominate depends upon the
quantity of sex hormone divergence from the ideal normal. But also
determinant are the environment stimuli provoking excessive or
deficient secretory reactions from the other endocrines involved,
through the vegetative nervous system. Such especially are the
associates of the mixed sex individual. Ordinarily the combative male
and the submissive female are differentiated by contrasts of skin
and hair, fat and bone structure. The combative male is built as a
fighting machine, the submissive female as an organism of attractive
grace and beauty for impregnation and parturition. When one sees the
fragile woman aggressive, the masculinoid woman submissive, one
may infer an education of experience that has brought the usually
recessive glands into the foreground, and by their hyperactivity
imposed a bisexuality of function upon a unisexual anatomic structure.
A man apparently as formidable as a tyrannosaurus, may be ruled by
his wife for the same reason. These combinations of a single organic
sexuality with a functional bisexuality, based upon internal secretion
disturbances, are frequent, and merit the name of functional
hermaphrodites or mixed sex types.
MIXED SEX AND THE FAMILY
The psychology of the family in its relation to the endocrine traits
of its members is something that still remains to be thoroughly worked
out as a problem of tremendous importance. Particularly are the
reactions of the mixed sex types to be carefully considered. For,
since the family is fundamentally a sex institution, devised to
satisfy the sex needs, all the way from companionship to parenthood,
it is apparent that the mixed sex types will be tried the hardest by
its inexorable conditions. It is in relation to the mother (or nurse)
first, the father next, and other associates in proportion to their
proximity, that the primary endocrine-vegetative mechanisms, the germs
of the growing soul, become established. These are superimposed upon
the hereditary instinct apparatus.
Fear, rage and love reactions develop first in association with the
suckling reflex, and the accompaniments, the mother's smile and voice,
the color of her hair, eyes and skin, her breasts and odors. Each time
the babe reacts to a pleasant or unpleasant stimulus, there is an
outpouring of certain internal secretions, a cessation of others, a
tingling of certain vegetative nerves and organs, a hushing of others.
The ensemble of reactions tends to be repeated around the same
stimulus, until the whole becomes automatic. One may observe the same
process in the lower animals. Offer a piece of meat to a dog and his
mouth waters. Ring a bell before offering the meat. Repeat this a
number of times, and after a while the mere ringing of the bell,
without the presence of the meat, will cause his mouth to water. This
associated vegetative secretion reflex is the most fundamental to
grasp in an understanding of the deepest strata of personality.
Now there are, besides the associated vegetative-endocrine reactions,
certain inborn automatic processes in the vegetative system and in
the internal secretion system, which work automatically to produce
increased intravisceral pressures. The reduction of these pressures
below the point of their intrusion upon consciousness, their relief,
as we say, also form the centers of constellations around feelings
of satisfaction or love. Such, for example, are the voiding of
excretions. Sooner or later, these automatic reactions, and the
associated reflexes formed around the mother, father and other
associates, come into conflict. Inhibitions or prohibitions of the
automatic act at certain times or moments are imposed by somebody.
And so there occurs a pitting of the automatic mechanism against the
associated reflex. Conflict with adjustment by suppression must occur.
Thus a sense of self as active wisher (for the automatically pleasant
experience), and punishable suppressor (of the same in favor of the
acquired associated reflex) develops.
So far, so good. Compromise by regulation from above, from the
brain, of the automatic reactions follows, as training. No absolute
repression is forced, no absolute encouragement is indorsed.
Harmonious equilibrium, or normality, continues. But now there come
upon the scene the unconscious fears.
In the paleontology of character, these fears are the deepest strata,
the eocene era, so to speak, of the soul. They are the hardest to get
at and the most silent, as well as the most dominant of the influences
which guide conduct. In Sir Walter Raleigh's words:
"Passions are best likened to streams and floods.
The shallows murmur, the deeps are dumb."
During the first period of childhood, up to five or six, the primary
fears group themselves around the taboos and secrets of its life.
Though we have every reason for believing that the sex glands are
acting in some way upon the organism during this time, nothing
definite is known. Yet, as the numerous studies of the subconscious
recently made prove, sex curiosity like the other curiosities,
flowers. More than about the automatic visceral reactions, these
curiosities evoke the repressive imperatives of the associates, the
mother and father especially. These repressive influences may be
and often are the effects of ignorance, prudishness, vulgarity, or
homosexuality, or the sex perversions that are known as sadism and
masochism. But by the necessities of the case, the sex wishes become
overlayed by reflexes associated with the mother and father and close
associates as love. This might be termed the oligocene. As the circle
of acquaintance widens, other loved objects usher in the miocene
phases of the development. With these become interspersed various
hates and detestations, deliberately cultivated and accepted by the
consciousness. So we have a cross-slice of the personality in the
first five or six years of childhood.
But now, with the onset of the second dentition, a subtle change
begins in the endocrine equations of the body. The second dentition
itself is an expression of a certain internal secretion wave passing
through the cells, an increase of action of some hormones, a decrease
of others. And a consciousness of physical sexuality appears, while
the outlines of character, hitherto mere tracings, become firmer,
heavier, quasi-indelible lines. That there is some activity on the
part of the internal secretions of the sex glands, the ovaries and
testes, can be demonstrated by accurately charting the behaviour of a
boy or girl after this time. It will be found that there is a cyclic
variation of health and conduct, more or less marked of course in each
case. A cold may appear periodically at the end of each month, an
increase of irritability and waywardness may be observed, or, on the
contrary, a decrease of the regular restless playfulness. The ghost of
sex begins to haunt the scene.
Now all kinds of possibilities of conflict emerge. The child is still
a bisexual, growing into a mixed sex type, depending upon the nature
and amount of its internal secretions. The influencing adult of the
family, the most important of the external factors encouraging or
depressing the tendencies of the child, possesses a fairly fixed ideal
of monosexuality which he or she, generally quite unconsciously, seeks
to impose upon it. A doting feminine mother will make her son as much
as possible like her husband: if she dislikes her husband, as much as
possible like her father or grandfather. A masculinized mother will
tend to make a sex object out of the son, however, which means his
feminization. But, on the internal secretion side, the boy may be
definitely masculine. That is, after adolescence he would be strongly
masculine, _if the vegetative-endocrine mechanisms created by the
mother's personality had not slipped into the inside track_, so to
speak. As a consequence, continual subconscious conflict between the
two sets of sex reaction will, sooner or later, disturb, perhaps
disrupt and ruin his life.
So an infant may start life with a fairly balanced endocrine
equipment, with its wake of a normal life (barring accidents and
infections), and yet he may end as an inferior, insane, criminal, or
failure directly because of establishment of conflict between himself
as one sort of sex type, and his obligatory associates of another
sort of mixed sex type. This applies also to the mother-daughter, the
father-son, and the father-daughter relationship.
Male and female created He them, is a bald misstatement of the facts.
Male and female emerge as final by-products of endocrine heredity,
environmental treatment and adaptation. Often the male-female,
the female-male, persist anatomically, or are forced to persist
functionally. Society, constructed upon the Biblical dogmas of man as
a fallen angel, and absolute sex, is responsible for much misery and
suffering meted out to the functional hermaphrodite, as we shall see
later in an analysis of the endocrine character of Oscar Wilde. The
privileges and powers of sex relationship, marriage and parenthood,
should be safeguarded for the mixed sex type, the man or woman with
the variable sex index. For there are no tragedies in life more
pitiful than those in which an aggressive masculinely built type is
forced to assume a submissive, receptive, passive, feminine role and
vice versa, the tragedy of compelled homosexuality, because of wrong
associates.
MASOCHISM AND SADISM
The functional hermaphrodite enables us, too, to understand the
phenomena of masochism and sadism, to a certain extent, on the
chemical side. The masculine personality, the combination of
masculine, e.g., adrenal cortex and gonad internal secretion
predominance, is built for aggression. The feminine personality,
the union of feminine, e.g. thyroid and ovarian superiority, is
constructed for submission. Reverse the possibilities, or confuse
them, as occurs in the functional hermaphrodite, and the attitudes
become reversed or perverted. So a masculinoid personality in woman
will make for sadism, a feminoid personality in a man for masochism.
Variants and refinements of these perversions will often be found
in the functional hermaphrodite who must satisfy two doubly flowing
streams of visceral pressure within himself. Persistence of the thymus
or pineal gland tends to a prolongation of the infantile and child
types, that will be taken advantage of.
CHAPTER VII
THE RHYTHMS OF SEX
If one permits a drop of ink to fall into a glass of water, amazing
figures and shapes, bizarre and chameleon, are born as the blue swirls
and whirls through the resisting medium. Unseen forces and currents,
tides and pressures, set up a seething and flowing, pulling and
twisting of the drop of ink until it becomes a strange wraith created
out of the molecules. A temporary individuality lives in the water.
So likewise the forces of sex, essentially the forces of the internal
secretions, mould and sculpt and mould again the woman out of
the flesh and blood. Adolescence--puberty--menstruation: the
maid,--pregnancy--labor--lactation: the matron, thirty years of ups
and downs of these processes around the idea of love or suppressed
love, against an aesthetic background of some sort--and finally the
loss of the stress and strain of sex, the menopause. All the landmarks
of the life of woman, in their entirety, are erected and dominated by
the tides and currents, the phases of concentration and dilution, of
the different internal secretions in the endocrine mixture which is
the blood.
Marvelous are all the manifestations of the reproductive necessity.
Considering that reproduction was at first merely a form of growth, a
discontinuous kind of growth, that seized upon sex as a splendid means
to escape death, the chemical methods evolved arouse a sense of awe.
A baby is born with her or his glands practically as fixed for her or
him as the color of the eyes. Thymus and pineal keep him a child, keep
him unsexed. Then at puberty, a new current is added to the calmly
flowing river, and behold! a turmoil. Ovaries or testes actively
functioning erupt upon the calm spectacle, and the girl is
transfigured into the maid, the boy into the youth. After the ovaries,
the corpus luteum: after the corpus luteum, the placenta: after the
placenta, the mammary glands: after that the cycle begins again until
the ovaries are exhausted and the chain is broken. Besides, all the
other glands of internal secretion beat in rhythm, fluctuate in their
activities, may divide prematurely the tides or dam them completely.
Innumerable varieties and combinations of interglandular action supply
us with the limitless types of adolescent girls. Some endocrine
cooperatives that make one girl stable and settled, will make others
unstable and unsettled. Alicia may be hyperthyroid, and so excitable,
nervous, restless, and subject to palpitation of heart and
sleeplessness. Bettina may have too much post-pituitary, and so will
menstruate early, tend to be short, blush easily, be sentimentally
suggestive and sexually accessible. Christina may be adrenal cortex
centred and so masculinoid: courageous, sporty, mannish in her tastes,
aggressive toward her companions. Dorothea may have a balanced thyroid
and pituitary and so lead the class as good-looking, studious, bright,
serene and mature. Florence, who has rather more thyroid than her
pituitary can balance, will be bright but flighty, gay but moody,
energetic, but not as persevering. And so on and so on.
Environment, habit-formation, training, education serve only to bring
out the internal secretion make-up of the girl, or to suppress
and distort and so spoil her. Adolescence will be peaceful, calm,
semi-conscious, or disturbing, revolutionary and obsessive according
to the reaction of the other endocrines to the rise of the ovaries.
Harmony, and so continued happiness of the mind and body, means
that they have been welcomed into the fold. Disharmony, ailments,
unhappiness, difficulties, mean that they are being treated as
intruders, or are acting as marauders. The after life, sexually the
period of maturity, barring accidents, diseases, and shocks, will bear
the same character. The kind of adolescence provides the clue to the
kind of maturity, for both are effects of the same endocrine factors.