The Glands Regulating Personality - Louis Berman, M.D.
Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29
The medieval scholiasts, who fought as fiercely about names as nations
about territories, divided men into the sanguine, the bilious, the
lymphatic and the nervous. It was a pretty crude classification of
different constitutions. The endocrine criteria, more exact and
concrete, divide them into the adrenal centered, the thyroid centered,
the thymus centered, the pituitary centered, the gonad centered, and
their combinations.
THE ADRENAL PERSONALITIES
An adrenal personality is one dominated by the ups and downs of his
adrenal gland. In the large, the curve of his life is the curve of
secretion by this gland, both of its Cortex and medulla. Such an
adrenal personality is entirely normal, within the definition of
the normal as something not threatening the duration of life, nor
comfortable adaptation to it. So are the other glandular types. No
sharp line can be drawn between the normal and the abnormal in any
case, the borderland is wide, the transitions many.
The skin is one of the chief clues to the adrenal personality. The
relation between the adrenal and the skin dates way back in the
evolutionary scale, for adrenalin has been isolated directly from
pigment deposits in the epidermis of frogs. Skin pigment bears a
direct relation to the reaction of the organism to light, especially
the ultraviolet rays, to the radiation of heat, and hence to the
fundamental productions and consumptions of energy by the cells. So
the gland of energy for emergencies writes its signature always all
over the skin.
In an adrenal personality, the epidermis is always slightly, somewhat,
or deeply pigmented. The pigmentation is due to a dark brown deposit
lightly or thickly scattered over the skin. With the general diffuse
pigmentation or darkening there are often the black spots, the
pigmented birth marks, or the lighter ones of freckles. The latter
signify some permanent or transitory adrenal inadequacy in the past,
ante-natal or post-natal, of the individual, and presage the same in
his future. These spots have been frequently observed to appear
after an attack of diphtheria or influenza. There seems to be more
tuberculosis among those who have them than those who do not. We
therefore say that diphtheria, influenza and tuberculosis stand out
as adrenal-attacking diseases, which have a greater power to kill,
cripple or hurt those with defective adrenal constitutions than
others.
The hair of the adrenal type is characteristic: ubiquitous, thick,
coarse and dry. It is prominent over the chest, abdomen and back,
and has a tendency to kink. Often its color is not the expected: an
Italian's will be yellow, a Norwegian's jet black. It has been stated
that most red-haired persons are adrenal types. Such persons also have
well-marked canine teeth which is another adrenal trait. They also
have a low hair line.
When the adrenal type has a properly co-operating pituitary and
thyroid, he possesses a striking vigor, energy and persistence. With a
fortunate combination, he develops into a progressive winning fighter,
arriving at the top in the long run every time.
Brain work is pretty well lubricated in the well-compensated adrenal
type. Brain fag is closely associated with, if not dependent upon,
adrenal fag, particularly of the cortex. Brain tissue and adrenal
cortex tissue are near relatives, and a normal human brain never
develops without a normal adrenal cortex. The adrenal type with an
hypertrophied adrenal cortex is always efficient.
Among women, the adrenal type is always masculinoid. If physically
feminine--due to adequate feminine reactions on the part of the
other endocrines--she will at least show the qualities of a psychic
virilism. A generation ago, such a woman had to repress her inherent
trends and instincts in the face of public opinion and law, and so
suffered from a feeling of inferiority. Nowadays, these women are
striding forward and will attain a good many of the masculine heights,
commanding responsible executive positions and high salaries. An
adrenal type will probably be the first woman president of the United
States.
However, that presupposes a normal range of action of the other
endocrines. Let there be some quirk or weakness elsewhere in the
chain of hormones, and instead of the successful woman, behold
the spinsters, the maiden aunts, the prudes and cranks who never
satisfactorily adapt themselves in society. To them must be given
a good deal of credit for the suffrage revolution. These unadapted
adrenals, as we may call them, once sowed the seeds, expending their
masculinism in the struggles of the pioneers' martyrdoms, preparing
the harvest their sisters, the more adequate adrenal types, will now
reap. The unadapted adrenals of today will have to look for new worlds
to conquer.
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 appetite, 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 competition, 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 sadistic, 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 competitive,
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. Puberty, 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 shielded 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 assertive 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 classes
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 assisted. 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 sex,
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 flashing lightning sword in
its grip, sweeping pitilessly among the erstwhile dancing multitudes
to mutilate and destroy. A good many people, with that sturdy
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 "shell 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 classed 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 analysis 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.
One mechanical circumstance involved in the pituitary personalities
may be the determinant of the entire life history. That is the
emphasized fact that the pituitary is encased in a small bony box, at
the base of the skull. The size of this bony box, and its capacity to
yield to the various pressures of a pituitary enlarging to meet the
demands of the organism, will often spell happiness or misery,
success or failure, genius or idiocy for the man or woman. Certain
possibilities are conceivable. All of them occur, for the developments
of X-ray technique have rendered available almost a direct view of the
sella turcica.
In the first place, the bony box may be definitely too small to start
in with. That means a small and so potentially inadequate pituitary,
both anterior and posterior, potentially inadequate in that it will
become impossible for it to grow and produce extra secretion upon
demand. Handicapped thus, the unfortunate so born is doomed to
inferiority and very little can be done for him. He will not develop
satisfactorily. He possesses small genital organs which will not
evolve properly in adolescence, or if they will not stand still, tend
to revert to the opposite sex type. Then he tends to be dwarfed,
fatigable, adipose. Among these types are included subjects of
obsessions and compulsions who are dull and apathetic, cannot learn or
maintain inhibitions, and so, without initiative, evolve into moral
and intellectual degenerates, liable to epilepsy and the most
remarkable sex aberrations. All because a cranny of the skull, about
the size of a thimble, is not large enough for their dominating gland.
If the bone of the cavity of the pituitary is softer and yielding,
so that some enlargement of the gland is possible, especially of the
anterior, there appear rapid growth with a tendency to high blood
pressure, great mental activity associated with frequent and severe
headaches (often of the migraine type), a combination of initiative
and irritability and a marked sexuality. X-ray examination of the
sella turcica shows what is called erosion of the bone as it yields to
the pressure of the growing gland.
The ideal sella turcica for the ideal pituitary type is a large room
in which the gland may grow and reach its maximum size and so its
maximum function, without needing to exert pressure or destroy and
erode bone in front of it, to the side of it or behind it. The
distinctive masculine and feminine types, classed as the normal,
belong to this group. Sometimes, the bone in front of the pituitary
will yield, while the one in the rear will not, and sometimes the
conditions are reversed. Thus we may have ante-pituitary sufficiency
with post-pituitary insufficiency, or ante-pituitary insufficiency
with post-pituitary sufficiency, complexes which contribute to create
the grosser functional hermaphrodite types of mixed sex.
In the average feminine pituitary type of personality, post-pituitary
dominates. In a woman and to a lesser degree in a man, the general
build is slight and rather delicate. The skin is soft, moist, and
hairless, the face is the doll or Dresden China sort, with a roseate
or creamy complexion, flushing easily, eyes large and prominent. The
mouth shows a high arched palate and crowded teeth rather long. The
voice is high-pitched. One recognizes the traditional womanly woman,
petite and chic, who always marries the hero in stories. She is
usually fond of children, easily moved, has a good libido, and the
traditional feminine traits. When unstable, the post-pituitary type is
restless and hyperactive, craves excitement, and continual change of
interest and scene, a new pleasure every moment. A good many of the
women of today, who fifty years ago would have been nice sedate girls
because of their excellent post-pituitary constitution, have
been irritated by the atmosphere of post-1914 into the excess
post-pituitary state, the adventurous never-satiated avid pleasure
hunter, in whom the craving for stimulation will stop at nothing. F.
Scott Fitzgerald portrayed an exquisite specimen of the kind in his
short story "The Jellybean," with a quasi-heroine of a good Southern
family, built to be a high standard wife and mother, who drinks,
swears, gambles, and finally marries on a dare. Modern post-pituitary
woman is excitement mad and thrill chasing. The worst of it is that
the resultant personal tragedies cannot be dismissed as transient
inevitables. The heredity of the internal secretions determines that
the offspring of these women are bound to be pituitary unstable, the
least desirable of endocrine instabilities because of the concomitant
mental effects. Even from the purely selfish point of view, the
standpoint of enlightened selfishness, the post-pituitary type must
beware of excesses. For disturbances of menstruation, psychic fears,
anxieties, states of suspicion and obsession, various pains are among
the penalties.
A period of post-pituitary excess as an effect of disease, pregnancy,
or the rapid life, may be followed by post-pituitary deficiency as a
result of exhaustion of the gland. The girl or woman then becomes fat
and suffers from headaches (the fair, fat and forty type) yet retains
a certain capacity for enjoyment which enables her to continue gay,
happy and gentle, kind, interested. So she contrasts with the thyroid
deficient who gets fat, but also dull, stupid, even morose.
The masculine pituitary personality, the man with a dominant anterior
pituitary gland in a roomy sella turcica with plenty of space to grow
in, is the ideal virile type. They are generally tall (unless the
growth of the long bones was checked too early by a social precocity
of the testes) with a well-developed strong frame, large firm muscles,
and proportionately sized hands and feet. The head is of the marked
dolichocephalic type, flattened at the sides, face is oval more or
less, with thick eyebrows, eyes rather prominent, nose broadish and
long, lower jaw prominent and firm. Prominent bony points like the
cheek bones, the elbows and the knees, the knuckle joints of the hands
and feet. The teeth are large, especially the upper middle incisors,
and they are usually spaced. The arms and legs are hairy. High grade
brains, the ability to learn, and the ability to control, self-mastery
in the sense of domination of the lower instincts and the automatic
reactions of the vegetative nervous system, the rule by the individual
of himself and his environment are at their maximum in him. The
ante-pituitary personality is educable for intelligence, and even
intellect, provided the proper educational stimulus is supplied. Men
of brains, practical and theoretical, philosophers, thinkers, creators
of new thoughts and new goods, belong to this group. The distinction
between men of theoretical genius, whose minds which could embrace
a universe, and yet fail to manage successfully their own personal
everyday lives, and the men of practical genius, who can achieve and
execute, the great engineers, and industrial men lies in the balance
between the ante-pituitary and the adrenal cortex primarily. Men like
Abraham Lincoln and George Bernard Shaw belong to this ante-pituitary
group.
The feminine pituitary personality, in whom there is predominance of
the post-pituitary over the ante-pituitary, occurs in men. The type
is short, rounded and stout. They have heads that seem too large
for their bodies, the general hair distribution on the trunk and
extremities is poor, although that of the scalp and face is plentiful,
and they acquire an abdominal paunch early. They exhibit the feminine
tendency to periodicity of function, their moods, activities,
efficiency are cyclic, reminding one of the menstrual variations of
the female. This rhythmicity saturates their personalities, so that
poetry and music almost morbidly appeal to them. A number of the great
poets and musicians are to be classified as of the feminine pituitary
species. Last, but not least, they are the hen-pecked lovers and
husbands. Sex difficulties are frequent in their history.