The Glands Regulating Personality - Louis Berman, M.D.
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With the prolonged activity of the corpus luteum during pregnancy,
prolonged stimulation of the breasts occurs. The secretion of the
post-pituitary would now cause the change from the internal cell
secretion to milk. But it is inhibited from so doing by the placenta.
When the placenta is removed, after labor, the post-pituitary can act,
and a free flow of milk is established. However, to counterbalance
this, and to prevent the post-pituitary from overacting, the breasts
secrete a hormone with an action like that of placenta, but not so
strong, which tends to inhibit the ovary. So is put off the imposition
of a pregnancy upon a period of lactation, obviously bad for mother,
infant, and embryo. We have here an exquisite sample of the checks and
compensations which make for a self-balancing of the whole endocrine
system.
CRITICAL AGES
The Dangerous Age is a phrase coined by a Scandinavian writer as a
more dramatic euphemism for the time of life when sex function ceases,
the climacteric. As a matter of fact, the age of adolescence is just
as much of a dangerous age as the age of deliquescence. The only
difference between them is that the dangers of the one have been
hushed up, the dangers of the other well boomed and advertised.
Both are dangerous to the individual, because both are periods of
instability and readjustment of the cells, particularly the brain
cells, to a deranged endocrine system and blood chemistry.
Moral attitudes differ at the two ages, not so much as an effect of
experience, as expressions of different visceral pressures produced
by newly dominant internal secretions. So in Eugene O'Neil's play,
"Diff'rent," we see the woman Emma Crosby as she is in her youth, when
her ovaries have budded and bloomed for only a few years, and her
other endocrine influences are still dormant. She breaks off her
engagement to Captain Caleb Williams on the eve of her wedding because
she is informed of the episodes of a sex affair he was involved in on
his last voyage, under circumstances not discreditable to him. The
next act shows her thirty years later when, as an elderly spinster,
she is passing through the climacteric, and is in the state of sexual
hyperesthesia some women are afflicted with before the menopause. It
is as if the ovaries and the accessory sex internal secretions erupt
into a sort of final geyser before they are exhausted. So the captain,
ever faithful, finds her, and discovers to his horror that she is a
thousand times more like other women than he has ever been like other
men. Because of his ignorance of the underlying chemical basis for
the transfiguration, tragedy follows. Critics may cackle about a sex
starved woman, who has repressed her natural desires, and hail the
play as a contribution to the Freudian clinics. As a matter of fact,
it is a study of libido variation, with endocrine variation, at two
stages of the inner chemical life of a woman.
The chain of events at the menopause, the acme and then ebb of the sex
tide, may be summed up something like this:
The ovaries cease producing their eggs and so shrivel as a storage
battery atrophies when it dries up. An important member of the
endocrine board of directors thus drops out, and so a rearrangement
of gland activities, a new regime, becomes necessary. If a balance
of power is established quickly and equitably, very little happens.
Quickly the woman passes on to the next plane of her existence. But
if some endocrine proves recalcitrant, and takes advantage of the
situation to make itself dominant, trouble and maladjustment, and
their psychic echoes, come. Anterior pituitary control will mean
a relative masculinization, with hair on the face and aggressive
attitudes. Post-pituitary most often refuses to settle down, and
expressing its ambition as headaches, flushes, obesity and hysteria,
may cause extreme misery and unhappiness to its possessor. Sooner
or later, if the harmonious equilibrium of the normal life is to be
revived, all the glands must regress, thyroid, pituitary and adrenals.
With the waning of the ovarian function, the thyroid type will also
exhibit its particular flare. If there is thyroid excess the woman
will be excitable and irritable, the thyroid deficient will be
depressed and dull, the thyroid unstable (that is swinging between
excess and deficiency) will have a cyclic up and down alternation of
mood and temperament. The adrenal centered will have a high blood
pressure and masculinoid traits, the adrenal inferior will have a low
blood pressure and suffer from a constant weakness and fatigability.
So each form of reaction to the critical ages is individualized
according to the predominating glandular influence in the constitution
of the woman. When the womb has atrophied, and the breasts have
shrunk, the typical tan complexion, and the angular masculinoid
figure, face and psyche follow, and the transfiguration has been
completed.
Man has his critical age of sex cell deterioration as well as woman.
The age period swings between forty-five and fifty-five. Here enters
upon the scene that organ of external and internal secretion, the
prostate, the most important of the accessory sex glands in the male.
Experiments with its extract upon growing tadpoles have demonstrated
it to have the same differentiating effects as thyroid, but without
the poisoning effects. Furthermore, the microscope reveals cyclic
changes in its cells comparable to the menstrual phenomena of the
uterus. Indeed it is accepted as the homologue or male representative
of the uterus. Small and undeveloped during childhood, its growth at
puberty parallels that of the other reproductive organs. Its secretion
has been shown to be necessary to the vitality of the sperm cells.
The regression of the prostate, its retirement from the field of
sex competition, is the central episode of the male climacteric.
Accompanying its shrinking are prominent an irritable weakness,
despondency, and melancholia, which may emerge at any time if there is
disease or disturbance of it. The influence of the prostate upon man's
mental condition, and its contribution to the sex index, still remains
to be investigated in detail.
SEX CRISES
At the periods of interstitial cell hyperactivity, when a wave
of radicalism in the blood sweeps through the tissues, the other
endocrines are tested, and their latent stability or instability is
made manifest. Even before puberty, cyclic variations of health and
conduct may be observed in boys and girls which undoubtedly depend
upon currents among the internal secretions. Children, who, in the
best of circumstances, habitually are attacked by a wanderlust and run
away from home, or suffer from fits of naughtiness, are samples of
such endocrine lability. Children specialists have found that at about
the end of the second year their charges begin to individuate. In a
certain percentage, sex traits appear pretty early. But the fact
of the matter is that it is rather the minority of girls who
spontaneously exhibit the traditional stigmata of the natural girl.
The doll-cherishing, housekeeping imitator of mother is another story.
At puberty arise the most exquisite cases of life crisis dependent
upon hormonic crisis. The boy becomes restless, irritable and
quick-tempered when his thyroid and adrenals respond to the call of
the interstitial cells. If they do not, he will become dull, heavy,
lazy and listless. The girl correspondingly is transformed into a
vivacious, gay, nervous and apprehensive butterfly, or a sedate,
dreamy, bashful, or even morose moth. It is interesting to note that
poise, mental equilibrium, is not established until physical growth
ceases, marked by a cessation of growth of the long bones known as
ossification of the epiphyses. Poise seems to be controlled by the
ante-pituitary. The growth of the long bones is also dominated by the
ante-pituitary. It would seem as if, its secretion dedicated to the
one function, could not be available for the other. So it happens that
those in whom growth ceases early (probably because of an earlier
and more vigorous invasion of the internal secretion system by the
interstitial cell product), develop mental maturity more rapidly and
possess more of it than those in whom growth continues. The acumen and
salacity of certain dwarfs is proverbial. The puberty phenomena
teach that sex crises of every sort are dependent fundamentally upon
fluctuations, periodic or aperiodic, of the sex index, as we have
defined it.
THE DETERMINING FACTORS OF SEX LIFE
The material summarized in the preceding paragraphs furnish some
slight inkling of the vast dominion of Sex, in all its relations,
somatic and spiritual, over which the glands of internal secretions
rule. The founder of modern pathology, Virchow, said that woman is
woman because of her ovaries. He meant that woman is a woman, the sort
of woman she specifically is, because of her internal secretions. But
no divine decree has laid down a line of cleavage between man and
woman. There are fundamental constitutional differences between man
and woman. But it is just as true that man is man because of _his_
internal secretions.
We have seen that the concepts of Man and Woman are the end-points of
a curve including variations of every possible combination that are
embraced in the construction of a sex index. This sex index is not an
absolute constant, although its range of fluctuation is pretty well
fixed at birth. It varies from day to day, year to year, depending
upon the influences that have been brought to bear upon it. But it
determines the character of the three planes of sex: the endocrine,
the vegetative, and the psychic. The endocrine is concerned with the
fundamental chemistry of sex, the internal secretions, which determine
the chemical reactions that provide the free energy for the sex
process. Upon the vegetative plane occur those transformations,
tensions, and relaxations, in the viscera, which are controlled
in part by the endocrines and in part by the experiences of the
individual as registered in his subconscious. Upon the psychic,
conscious planes appear the echoes and reflections of the occurrences
upon the other two planes, as well as reactions arising in the brain
from the necessity of the organism reacting as a whole to isolated
episodes. Accompanying is a self-awareness of the organism as a unit.
The three planes are not like separate plates of glass one raised
above the other, the usual idea picture of planes. They are
nebulae, swirling into each other, influencing and being influenced
continually. The reactions among these three complexes of sex create
the milieu for the variations and aberrations of tendency, character
and conduct which stamp his unique quality upon the individual. Sex
morale is likewise so influenced. The fundamentals of sex ethics will,
in due time, be revised in accordance with these conceptions.
CHAPTER VIII
HOW THE GLANDS INFLUENCE THE MIND
It is impossible to review here in detail all the facts accumulated
concerning the influence of the internal secretions upon all the
processes of mind, intellectual and emotional. A volume would not
suffice for their adequate consideration. Reflexes, instincts,
habits, tendencies and emotions are involved in their machinery. The
development and normal functioning of the intellect, the pure reason
as Kant called it, are controlled by them. Brain, without them in
solution, without enough of them in that wonderful solution, the
blood, sleeps or remains dormant like the butterfly in the cocoon.
The cretin, who has not enough thyroid or no thyroid, is an imbecile
because of his deficiency. Supply him with thyroid from outside
sources, feed him animal thyroid, be it of the sheep, the pig, or the
goat, and behold a miracle! he is restored to the level of at least
the relatively normal intelligence.
Acuteness of perception, memory, logical thought, imagination,
conception, emotional expression or inhibition and the entire content
of consciousness are influenced by the internal secretions. The most
ultramicroscopic activities of the molecules and atoms in the highest
nerve cells and nerve tissues are dominated. The speed of their
chemistry and their associations, and thus the speed of thought, are
regulated. Iodine has been shown to increase the electric conductivity
of the brain that is, the rate at which electrons will fly through it.
The thyroid may then be regarded as manipulating the amount of iodine
brought to play upon the brain cells at a particular moment of danger
or exaltation. Adrenalin increases the electric conductivity of the
brain. Nerve impulses, and with them sensations and ideas, travel
faster or flow more quickly through iodinized or adrenalinized brain
cells. In dangerous situations we think more rapidly and keenly, for
in emergencies the blood floods the brain with extra thyroid and
adrenal secretions.
THE BODY-MIND COMPLEX
Mind, still regarded by most of mankind as something distinct and
apart from the body, is thus exhibited as but part and parcel of it. A
deaf, dumb, and blind animal, deprived of tongue, and olfactory mucous
membrane, without sensations from the outside world can grow no mind,
in the sense of intelligence. The sense organs of the body mediate
the primary mind stuff. Without internal secretions and a vegetative
system there could be no soul, in the sense of complex emotion. Nor
those combinations of thought and emotion which synthesize attitudes,
sentiments and character. The internal secretions and the vegetative
system mediate the primary soul stuff. Mind is thus emulsified with
body as a matter of cold literal fact. The soul was once a subtlety
of metaphysics. Now when mind appears soaked in matter saturated with
chemicals like the hormones, therefore woven out of material threads,
the independent entity created out of intangible spirit flies like a
ghost at dawn.
View the outlook. Mind, the slippery phantom, now becomes controllable
for the purposes of everyday life, because we can put our fingers
upon, touch, handle and change these material factors, the internal
secretions and the vegetative system. Through them we may affect the
very quality of the nerve tissue. The future of the race, the future
of human nature, depends upon the knowledge to be born of the
researches into the vast possibilities of this idea. Man, the
Adventurer, the prey of Chance and Luck, will then become, indeed now
becomes, the Captain of Fate and Destiny.
It is, of itself, a revolution in the intellect, to conceive of
instincts and emotions, suggestibility and contra-suggestibility,
initiative and imitation, volitions and inhibitions as chemical
matters. In all their relations, mutually reacting effects and
defects, excesses and deficiencies, the internal secretions set up
psychic echoes and reflections. When morbid and their equilibrium
dislocated, we may even have phobias and neuroses.
A man's nature is essentially his endocrine nature. Primarily, when he
is born, he represents a particular inherited combination of different
glands of internal secretion. They, constituting the inventory of his
vital stock in trade, start him in life. Afterwards, food, the routine
of his existence, the accidents of experience, education, disease and
misfortune, in short, environment, modify him because they modify his
ductless glands and his vegetative apparatus, as well as his brain,
depressing some parts, and stimulating others, and so rearranging the
system. In particular will he be transformed as the gland is affected
which is the centre of the system to which the others adapt and
accommodate themselves. The inertia of the system is very great,
almost absolute, and always tends to return. If he has children, he
hands on his constellation of endocrines, in spite of mishaps, not at
all or only slightly transformed. Sometimes, however, the experiential
transformation has been sufficiently deep, and shaken the very
constitution of his germ-plasm. So family dispositions and traits,
national and racial temperaments, are propagated, maintained and
varied.
THE SEX INSTINCTS
Hormone reactions, as we have seen, initiate the complicated forces,
processes and expressions of sex. The dictum of the founder of modern
pathology, Virchow, that Woman was in effect an appendix to the
ovaries, has long been taken to apply to her psychic traits as well
as somatic. Her mind, like her skin, her hair and her pelvis, is a
product of the ovarian endocrines. But these determinations are by no
means her monopoly. Man is likewise a creation of the chemical wheels
within wheels and springs within springs that are his glands of
internal secretion. That he is not so obviously an appendix to his
testes is due to two reasons. First, the male sex hormones have not
the instability nor cyclic rhythmicity of the female. Secondly, and
perhaps consequently, his sex instincts have become overlayered with
other more labile instincts, with habits and customs and necessities
that appear to oust the sex instinct into an altogether decentralized
position. Moreover, it is the function of the female to be the excitor
in the sex process: her subconscious, thoroughly aware of the fact,
sees to it that the sex instinct stands starkly central and dominating
in her life.
The moods of love, like the more stereotyped manifestations of sex,
are dependent upon a proper supply to the blood of the internal
secretions of the reproductive organs, the gonadal endocrines. If the
testes are removed from frogs, it is found that the clasp-reflex,
symptom of sex desire, is abolished. If, after an interval of several
days, the testes' extract is injected into the frog, the reflex
reappears for a few days. The hormone provoking this sex reflex is
present in the testes only during the breeding season. In birds,
the seasonal nesting and migrating instincts may be eliminated by
interfering with their ovaries. At the same tine there is a change in
their plumage toward the male type. Similarly, the males, when their
sex endocrines are cut off, will change their psychic nature as well
as physically. Besides owning his flag-waving comb, his spurs and
brighter feathers, the rooster struts to attract the female, and
fights aggressively with his sex competitors. When he is made a capon,
he loses his spurs and comb and distinctive plumage, and in addition
becomes retiring and submissive, in short, a pseudo-hen in his
instincts as well as in appearance. If the genital glands are
extirpated from a male before puberty, the wattles remain small, pale
and bloodless, no active, amorous or combative instinct emerges. The
creature maintains a demure silence, and may even be sought by a
virile male. So we may see homosexuality of a kind in the lowest
animals. On the other hand, hens deprived of ovaries tend to
metamorphose in the male direction, even to acquire the male spurs,
and to display the male attitudes.
All through the animal world, in the springtime, when the pituitary
awakens or increases its secretion, and so stimulates the sex glands
to augmented activity, emotions of sex and their expression are
provoked by the inner stirring. When the nightingale warbles
passionately and the mocking bird gurgles provokingly, when the robin
fills its scarlet breast and the starling floats in ecstasy through
the perfumed air, when the pigeon coyly woos its mate, and the
butterfly flirts with the dazzling multicolors of its wings, when
all the marvelous devices of sex attraction in nature, selection and
courting, mating and reproducing are pondered, who but must wonder at
the infinite possibilities of reaction of the sex hormones? All is for
love, and all is because of the love in the blood that is manufactured
unconsciously by a few hidden cells.
EXPRESSIONISM AND EXHIBITIONISM
We need a detailed examination of the various forms of expression
art has differentiated into, in its relation to exhibitionism and as
effects of the circulating libido-producing substance of the gonads.
Sex exhibition differs in man and woman because of the differently
combined internal secretions that are their substrates. The male's
attitude, aggressive pursuit, is instigated by the compound adrenal
and gonad endocrines. The female's various emulsions of coyness and
display are motivated by posterior pituitary and gonad hormones in
alliance.
It is a dogma to state that the internal secretions of sex do not
begin to function until after puberty. Some children manifest
exhibitionism with a certain independence of environment.
Before adolescence a good many girls act like tom-boys, and are
distinguishable externally from boys only by their clothes. But others
display signs of sex differentiation that are to be traced back to
an awakening interstitial gonad action. Some boys have no interest
whatever in sex. Others will show an intense curiosity spontaneously,
a curiosity which perhaps may be explained as a larval precocity,
dependent upon the minimum of sex hormone production by the gonads.
Close observation of the correlation of somatic and psychic
development in extreme examples of these children corroborates this
view. Jonathan Hutchinson has described full-busted children of
London already boasting of their affairs. Indeed, as education and
environment affect the body (in so far as they influence it as a
whole) by exciting or inhibiting the glands of internal secretion,
sex-arousing stimuli from without must be considered to evoke their
effects as stimulants of the latent puberty glands.
At puberty, when the sex glands bloom, and the complex of the sex
instincts is activated, exhibitionism manifests itself in a host of
guises and disguises. Femininity in a woman, the womanly woman, or the
eternal feminine, may indeed be defined by the degree of somatic and
psychic exhibitionism she presents. A woman who has a delicate skin,
lovely complexion, well-formed breasts and menstruates freely will be
found to have the typical feminine outlook on life, aspirations
and reactions to stimuli, which, in spite of the protests of our
feminists, do constitute the biologic feminine mind. Large, vascular,
balanced ovaries are the well-springs of her life and personality.
On the other hand, the woman who menstruates poorly or not at all
is coarse-featured, flat-breasted, heavily built, angular in her
outlines, will also be often aggressive, dominating, even enterprising
and pioneering, in short, masculinoid. She is what she is because she
possesses small, shrivelled, poorly functioning ovaries. Between these
two types all sorts of transitions exist, according as the other
endocrines participate in the constitutional make-up. But no better
examples could be given, off-hand, of the determining stamp of the
internal secretions upon mind, character and conduct.
INSTINCT AND BEHAVIOUR
The sex instinct, analyzed as an endocrine mechanism, provides the
clue to the understanding of all instinct and behaviour. If the
post-pituitary regulates the maternal instinct, then its correlates:
sympathy, social impulses, and religious feeling, must be also
influenced, and so is furnished another example of a chemical control
of instinctive behaviour. McDougall, once of Oxford, now of Harvard,
introduced into psychology the idea of the simple instinct as a unit
of behaviour, regarding the most complex conduct as a compounding of
instincts. The instinct itself he analyzed into three elements: a
specific stimulus-sensation, an emotion following, all ending in a
particular course of muscular reaction. Translated into endocrine
terms, what happens may be pictured as a series of chemical events.
When the activity of a ductless gland rises above a certain minimum,
its hormones in the blood sensitize, as a photographic plate is
sensitized, a group of brain cells, to respond to a message from
the outside world, with a definite line of conduct. There is a
registration by the brain cells of the presence of the specific
stimulus. Then there is communication by them with the endocrine
organs. As a result, some of them are moved to further secretion,
and others are paralyzed or weakened. In consequence of changes
of concentration in the blood of the various internal secretions,
tensions, movements and tumescences, as well as relaxations,
inhibitions and detumescences, occur throughout the vegetative
system--the blood vessels, the viscera, the nerves and the muscles.
Each wires to the brain news of the change in it. In addition, the
brain cells themselves are excited or depressed by the new hormones
bathing them. In their final fusion, the commingling vegetative
sensations constitute the emotion evolved in the functioning of the
instinct.
To lower the new tensions throughout the vegetative system to
the normal range, the instinctive action is carried out. This
superficially is regarded as the essence of the instinct. As a matter
of fact, it is only the endpoint of a process, the resultant of a
drive to restore equilibrium within the organism. It may all happen in
less time than it takes to tell about it.