The Glands Regulating Personality - Louis Berman, M.D.
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Among these pristine factors determining the content of consciousness,
the endocrines are most important, because they alone to start with,
of all the other factors, are different in each and every individual.
They are what render him unique at birth, even though he looks the
counterpart of millions of other babies born at the same time. They
constitute his inner destiny. As he grows, the external factors,
social experiences, climate, accidents, and disease modify and
condition the reactions and complexity of the endocrine system. As
these modifications and associations are of the greatest import for
the final elaboration of the personality, composing as they do the
elements of the unconscious which confers the unique stamp of normal,
abnormal, supernormal, or subnormal, it is worth while now to review
the most general of the determining laws. Man is an energy phenomenon,
both conscious and unconscious, with the energy emanating from the
endocrine-vegetative mechanisms. So it becomes possible for us,
by their aid, to analyze the conscious, the subconscious and the
unconscious with the terms long current in the analyses of physics.
1. Man is an energy machine which, though it is constantly losing
energy as a whole; consists of parts constantly accumulating energy
(as a result of inherent chemical reactions accelerated by the
absorption of food). This process of local accumulation of energy
associated with general loss of energy may be observed even in the
ameba, in the form of stored reserve food material. Evolution
created a system of organs, the viscera, as specialists in energy
conservation, utilization or transformation.
For intercommunication and interaction between the viscera two systems
were elaborated: a younger system of direct contacts, the nerves,
and nerve cells, through which influences could be conducted for the
stimulation, acceleration, retardation or inhibition of an energy
process in them; and the older, the endocrine gland association, for
the production of chemical substances to act as messengers to be sent
from one viscus to another, and also to the nerves, through the blood
or lymph which bathe all the cells. They could affect only one or
certain organs, because by selection only the chosen organ or organs
knew the code, as it were. The chemical system is much the older
system, and preceded the nerve system by aeons of time. The whole
system, viscera, visceral nerves and the endocrines gradually united
into a complete autonomous organism within the organism, and as such
functions as the vegetative apparatus.
EVOLUTION OF THE ENDOCRINES
2. In the course of evolution, variations occurred in all three
components of the apparatus, the viscera, the nerves, and the
endocrines. Now variations in the viscera and the nerves are
essentially grossly physical and quantitative. That is, there may be a
bigger stomach or a smaller stomach, larger nerve fibres or smaller.
And as Life always has worked with a large margin of safety, and
always played for safety first as regards quantity, these variations
have not become of much significance for the history and destiny of
the animal.
But variations among the endocrines made a tremendous difference. To
have very much thyroid and very little pituitary, much adrenal and not
enough parathyroid meant a great deal to the Organism as a whole,
as well as to the vegetative apparatus. For states of tension and
relaxation, activity and inactivity in the nerves and viscera would be
determined by these variations in the ratio between the variants. The
vegetative apparatus in its virginity, say in the new-born infant, may
be said to have its development primarily determined by the reaction
potentials of the endocrine part of it, that is the latent power of
each gland to secrete at a minimum or a maximum, and the balance
between them.
EDUCATION OF THE VEGETATIVE SYSTEM
3. Training or education involves, beside other effects, a training
of the endocrines, and hence of the entire vegetative apparatus, to
respond in a particular way to a particular stimulus. Experience is
like the introduction of new push-buttons, levers, and wheels into the
mechanism. All learning which calls out or arrests the functioning of
an instinct, must, from what we have learned of the chemical dynamics
of instincts as reactions between hormones, nerves and viscera, affect
the vegetative system. When there is a conflict between two or
more instincts, between pressures of energy flowing in different
directions, there may be compromise and normality, or a grinding of
the gears and abnormality.
Where does the brain come in, in all this? As the servant of the
vegetative apparatus. To call it the master tissue is manifestly
absurd, when it can only be the diplomatic constitutional monarch of
the system. It can, in fact, act only as the great central station
for associative memory, as only one of the factors implicated in
education.
The most powerful educative agents of the vegetative apparatus of a
human being are the other humans around him. And they comprise the
most powerful of the external effectors of education, for better, for
worse. The training and education of the endocrine-vegetative system
is the basis of all social rules (Habit, Custom, Convention, Law,
Conscience). An unresolved discord, a continued conflict among the
parts of the vegetative system, in spite of such education, is the
foundation of the unhappiness of the acute or chronic misfits and
maladjusted, the neurotic and the psychotic.
THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF THE UNCONSCIOUS
4. Another vastly important law that governs the content of the
conscious and the unconscious, and resultant behaviour is the fact
that the nerves and nerve cells of the vegetative apparatus, the
nerves leading to the viscera and the endocrine glands, like the solar
plexus, are affected by stimuli of lower value than those which arouse
the brain cells. In the metaphorical language of the old psychology,
the threshold value, that is the strength or loudness of stimulus
sufficient to make itself felt or heard, is less for the vegetative
apparatus than for the brain. So we begin to glimpse why an emotion
seems to be experienced before the visceral changes that really
preceded it, but pressed their way into consciousness later. This
gives us a clue to the unconscious as the more sensitive and deeper
part of the mind.
More than that, it supplies us with a physical basis for the
unconscious which will explain much of the observed laws of
its workings. It provides a reason for the apparent swiftness,
spontaneity, and unreasonableness of what is called intuition. And it
may show us a source for a good deal of the material of dreams and
dream states.
We have said that we think and we remember, not alone with the brain,
but with the muscles, the viscera and the endocrines. So do we forget
not alone with the brain, but with the muscles, the viscera, the
endocrines and their nerves. The utmost importance of muscle attitudes
in remembering has been established in the experimental laboratory.
It is one of the great services Freud rendered to psychology (and one,
by the way, largely responsible for the acceptance of his doctrines
by the disinterested intelligence) that he showed that a species
of forgetting is nothing casual, but active and purposeful, a
manifestation of the life of the unconscious. However, though his
description of the process was correct, he left it to occur in a
vacuum. As a matter of fact this forgetting consists in the inhibition
of associative memory by a process in the vegetative apparatus, so
as to maintain the equilibrium within itself which is reflected in
consciousness as comfort.
The unconscious, in short, consists of the buried associations among
the parts of the vegetative apparatus and the brain cells. We seem to
be much nearer to grasping the nature of the unconscious, when we look
upon it as a historical continuum, a compound or emulsion of different
and various states of intravisceral pressure and tone, in the
vegetative apparatus, dependent upon the balance between the
endocrines, as well as upon past experiences of the viscera in the
way of stimulation or depression. We forget that which is held down,
literally, in the vegetative apparatus. This explanation of forgetting
tells, too, why the forgotten (stored in the sub-brain, the
endocrine-vegetative system) continually projects itself into and
interferes with the regular flow of consciousness, e.g., in slips
of the tongue, mistakes of spelling, and so on: because the energy
bottled in the vegetative system tends to erupt into the consciousness
into which it would ordinarily flow.
In the evolution of the mind, there have been elaborated devices
to protect it against the vegetative apparatus. Consciousness, or
awareness, must be accepted as a fundamental, primal fact, like
protoplasm. Consciousness and protoplasm may be the complementary
sides of the same coin. Whatever the truth, the fact stands out
that the oldest, deepest, most potent consciousness is that of the
traditionally despised lowest organs, the vegetative organs, the heart
and lungs, stomach and intestines, the kidneys and the liver, and so
on, their nerves, e.g., the solar plexus, and the glands of internal
secretion. They invented and elaborated muscle, bone and brain to
carry out their will. Evolution has been in the direction of a
greater perfection of the methods of carrying out their will. Their
consciousness, working upon the growing and multiplying brain cells,
has created what we call self-conscious mind.
Mind, reacting upon its creator, has, in a sense, come to dominate
them, because it has become the meeting ground of all the
energy-influences seething and bubbling in the organism, and
so developed into the organ of handling them as a whole, their
Integrating-Executive. But just the same and all the time, the
underlying consciousness of the viscera and their accessories stand as
the powers behind the throne, but as what we have now learned to speak
of, in relation to the Mind, as the Unconscious.
PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
To sum up these relations of the viscera, the endocrines, the
unconscious and the mind, it may be stated as a far-reaching
generality for the understanding of human life: that character and
conduct are expressions of the streams of energy arising in the
vegetative apparatus, primarily endocrine determined at birth, and
secondarily experience determined after the organism has learned to
react as a whole, as consciousness. The result of such a reaction as a
whole tends to balance the disturbance of energy, so as to maintain
or restore the equilibrium, or sense of harmony and comfort, when
consciousness again disappears. This law is an attempt at synthesis of
the labors of the psychanalysts, the behaviourists, and the students
of the internal secretions (Freud, Jung, Adler, Sherrington, Watson,
Von Bechterew, Kempf, Crile, Cannon, Cushing, Fraenkel are the
great names of the movement). Most of the details, and all of the
quantitative applications of the law still remain to be worked
out. But a statement like the following of Cushing, the eminent
surgeon-student of the endocrines, that "it is quite probable that the
psychopathology of everyday life hinges largely upon the effect of
ductless gland discharges upon the nervous system," shows which way
the wind is blowing.
In the face of these conceptions the position of the psychanalyst as a
practical therapeutist becomes clearer, and the causes of his failure
when he fails. In the first place, he deals with psychic results as
processes, and ignores the physiology of their production. Since a
true cure of the neurosis, what he is after, is impossible without a
removal of the cause, a disturbance in the vegetative apparatus, he
cannot succeed where an automatic adjustment among the viscera does
not follow his probings and ferretings of the unconscious. In the
second place, he disregards the existence of a soil for the planting
of the malign complexes in the individual in whom they grow and
flourish. That soil is composed in part of the endocrine relations
within the vegetative apparatus. And as we can often attack that soil
more effectively and radically from the endocrine end than from the
experience end (e.g., repressed episodes) we may transform the soil
and make it barren rock for morbid complexes, at any rate. The concept
of the endocrine-vegetative apparatus as the determinant of normal
and abnormal behaviour, emotional reactions and disturbances of power
should in time cause even the most fanatic of the psychanalysts to
recognize the functional basis of the mental acrostics they are so
fond of dissecting.
NATURAL ABILITY
Another achievement of the psychanalysts is the recognition of the
influence of organic and functional inferiorities of the individual
upon the history of his personality. Gross organ inferiorities are
those which are definite handicaps in the struggle for success in
society, such as heart disease. Such handicaps, however, are limited
to relatively few of a population. The raison d'etre of the greater
number of minor mental inefficiencies the psychanalyst puts down to
handicaps in the unconscious. Again he mistakes figurative imagery for
explanations. The conception of endocrine diversity in the make-up
supplies us with the rationale of the vast majority of organic and
functional defects and inferiorities, in short, subnormalities of any
group, large or small.
Moreover, how would the psychanalyst explain the occurrence and
influence of organic and functional _superiorities_ and their
tremendous influence upon the individual and society? We live in a
generation which has acquired a flair for the pathologic. Undoubtedly
it is a soul-sick generation, and its interest in sickness of the
mind is only natural. Just the same, whatever advances, improvements,
progress, have been made (and certainly a number of the changes in his
environment, external and internal, must be admitted to be changes for
the better) have been made, not by natural disability, but by natural
ability. What is the physiology of natural ability?
The finest study of natural ability that has as yet been composed is
Francis Galton's on Hereditary Genius. It also remains the best study
of the natural conditions of success. He showed that of the type of
man he classed as "illustrious" there occurred about one in a million,
and of the type "eminent" about two hundred and fifty in a million.
Of the qualities which determine natural ability of this kind, he
selected inherent capacity, zeal, and perseverance as the three
prerequisites. And he states that "If a man is gifted with vast
intellectual ability, eagerness to work, and power of working, I
cannot comprehend how such a man should be suppressed." "Such men
(those who have gained great reputations) biographies show to
be haunted and driven by an incessant, instinctive craving for
intellectual work." "They ... work ... to satisfy a natural craving
for brain work." "It is very unlikely that any conjunction of
circumstances should supply a stimulus to brain work commensurate with
what these men carry in their own constitutions."
What is this inherent craving for brain work? What is this zeal? And
what is power of endurance and perseverance, the quality of stamina?
How are they to be interpreted in terms of the internal secretions?
In view of what has been said of the ante-pituitary as the gland of
intellectuality, studies of intellectually gifted people having shown
well functioning large pituitaries, and of mental defectives in a
certain number of cases a small limited pituitary, it is justifiable
to regard the factor of inherent capacity as a function of the
ante-pituitary. The factor of zeal or enthusiasm points to the
thyroid. Markedly enthusiastic types are thyroid dominant types. Vigor
as a third factor, the ability to stand stress and strain of continued
effort is dependent upon good adrenal and interstitial cell function.
So we may say that craving and capacity for brain work plus ardor plus
perseverance in its pursuit, the triplicate of natural ability, are
the reflections in conduct and character of balanced and sufficient
ante-pituitary, thyroid, and adrenal-interstitial contributions in
the chemical formula of the personality. In the chapter on historic
personages analyzed from the endocrine viewpoint, we shall see that
some of the most eminent and illustrious people of history have been
pituitary-centered.
MENTAL DEFICIENCY
Natural ability grows in an endocrine soil of a particular kind,
perhaps affected by the internal secretions much as natural soil is by
fertilizers like phosphates or nitrates. Increased production follows
increased fertilization. Natural disability must vary similarly with a
perversion or improper mixture, deficiency or absence of the hormones
that combine in natural ability.
It is assumed as a matter of course that the brain itself is there,
which, to carry out our analogy, means that the crude soil or earth is
there. Sufficient quantity and adequate quality of nerve tissue must
be regarded as prerequisite. If the brain has been damaged in any way
during development or birth, if it has been smashed up in any way, or
if it has failed to evolve the minimum number of healthy nerve cells,
the endocrine influence becomes negligible. It is like attempting to
insert a key into a door which has no lock.
It is among the specimens of normality of the brain cells that we may
look for our examples of endocrine mental deficiency. Included are all
sorts of examples of feeble-mindedness varying from the moron to the
imbecile and idiot, arrested brain life. The cretin is the classic
type of mental deficiency due to endocrine insufficiency, curable or
improvable by the proper handling.
Insanity, degeneration of the normal brain life, may be caused by an
upset of the endocrine balance. Among the commonest manifestations
of insanity are excitements and depressions, apathies and manias,
hallucinations, delusions and obsessions, all of which are
reproducible under known conditions of internal secretion excess or
failure. Alternating states of mania and depression are caused in some
instances by extreme hyperthyroidism. The critical periods of life,
when a profound revolution is overturning the endocrine equilibrium,
puberty, pregnancy, and the menopause, are the periods of most
frequent occurrence of insanity, when mental instability reveals
endocrine instability (Dementia praecox, pregnancy psychosis,
menopause neurosis). Actual insanity need not be the only
manifestation. By far the greater number of mental disturbances due
to aberrations of the internal secretions never see an asylum or a
doctor. They live more or less close to the borderline of insanity as
persons who have spells, eccentricities and peculiarities, hysteria,
tics or just "nervousness."
About two-thirds of mental deficiency is definitely inherited, about
one-third acquired. It is the opinion of a number of psychologists
that it is inherited as what the Mendelians call a recessive, that is
as a trait which will be overshadowed, if there is admixture of normal
mentality, but will crop up by breeding with another mental defective.
What we know of the endocrine factors in heredity leads us to suppose
that it is the mating of one marked endocrine insufficiency with
another that is often responsible for the inherited tendency to
feeble-mindedness and insanity. The effect of the hormone system upon
the vegetative apparatus may create the more obscure insanities and
quasi-insanities. The direct action of the internal secretions upon
the brain cells, producing a sort of hair trigger situation within
them, may cause the explosive discharges from them which appear as
overpowering impulses or uncontrollable conduct. The waves of feeling
which precede them are unquestionably endocrine determined. The wave
of fear a cat experiences upon seeing a dog is accompanied and indeed
preceded by an increase of the amount of adrenalin in the blood. The
picture of fright, as observed in a so-called normal person, staring
eyes, trembling hands, dry lips and mouth, corresponds to the portrait
of the appearance in hyperthyroidism. In persons afflicted with
uncontrollable impulses, the inhibiting hormones may not be present in
sufficient quantity.
Feeble-mindedness, ranging from stupidity to imbecility, may also be
a direct effect of insufficient endocrine supply to the brain cells.
When there is not enough of the thyroid secretion in the blood, the
tissue between the cells in the brain become clogged and thickened, so
that a gross barrier to the passage of the nerve impulses is created.
We have here an illustration of internal secretion lack actually
producing gross changes in the brain. But without a doubt, most
endocrine influences upon the brain, at work every minute and second
of its life, are the subtle ones of molecular chemistry and atomic
energetics. We know that such mental qualities as irritability and
stupidity, fatigability, and the power to recover quickly or slowly
from fatigue, sexual potency and impotence, apathy and enthusiasm are
endocrine qualities. We know also that the thyroid dominant tends to
be irritable and excitable, the pituitary deficient to be placid and
gentle, the adrenal dominant to be assertive and pugnacious, the
thymus-centered to be childish and easy-go-lucky and the gonad
deficient to be secretive and shy. This brings us to the relation of
the internal secretions to the type of personality as a whole.
CHAPTER X
THE TYPES OF PERSONALITY
THE ENDOCRINE PERSONALITY
If a single gland can dominate the life history of an individual it
becomes possible to speak of _endocrine types_, the result of the
_endocrine analysis_ of the individual. Studying endocrine traits of
physique, life reactions, disease tendencies, hereditary history and
blood chemistry, one may gain an insight into the composition or
constitution of an individual. The endocrine type of an individual
is a summary of these, his behaviour in the past, and is also a
prediction of his reactions in the future, much as a chemical formula
outlines what we believe to be the skeleton of a compound substance
as deducible from its properties under varying conditions. Only,
admittedly, as yet the endocrine label is but roughly qualitative and
most crudely quantitative, whereas the chemical formula is the essence
of the exact.
However, the fact remains that though we are only upon the first
rungs of the ladder, we are upon the ladder. The horizon undoubtedly
broadens. We possess a new way of looking upon humanity, a fresh
transforming light upon those strange phenomena, ourselves. Of the
ugly achievements of that dreadful century, the nineteenth, the most
illuminating was the discovery of itself as the _ape-parvenu._ Yes,
we are all animals now, it said to itself, and set its teeth in the
cut-throat game of survival. But there was no understanding in that
evil motto of a disillusioned heart. The ape-parvenu, desperately
lonely and secretive, has still to understand himself.
Let us be clear if we can. There is perhaps a certain presumption in
the phrase, the endocrine type. It is ambitious, and perhaps will not
fulfill its promise. But it is useful because it points a parallel and
an ideal. As Wilhelm Ostwald never tired of repeating, H_{2}O is a
complete shorthand record for the bundle of qualities commonly known
as water. It is an example of that highest task of mind, synthesis.
It is the highest synthesis of the studies of the internal secretions
that certain combinations of them, permutations and blendings of
them, are responsible for those unique wonders of the universe,
personalities.
The riddle of personality! Are we at last upon the track of its
uncovering? That elusive mystery, which philosophers have wrapped in
the thousand veils of Greek and Latin words, and psychologists, even
unto the third and fourth generation of Freudians, have floundered
about in, moles before a dazzling sun, is it to be unwound for our
inspection? Think of the human soul. What an invisible, intangible
chameleon is its true reality! Watch it, and you see something that
seems to uncurl and expand like a feather with exultation and delight
and joy, to contract and stiffen into a billiard ball with fear and
pride, shrewd caution and vigilant malevolence, to rear back and spark
fire like lightning with anger and temper, and to crawl and slither
with abjection and smirking slyness, when it needs to. This multiplex
Thing-Behind-Life, are we really about to dissect it into its
elements?
Personality embraces much more than merely the psychic attributes. It
is not the least important of the lessons of endocrine analysis
that there is no soul, and no body, either. Rather a soul-body, or
body-soul, or the patterns of the living flame. The closer tracking of
the internal secretions leads us into the secrets of the living
flame, why it lives, and how it lives, the strange diversities of its
colorings and music and the odd variations in its energy, vitality
and longevity. Why it flickers, why it flares and glares, spurts,
flutters, burns hard or soft, orange-blue or yellow.