New Britain Herald Newspaper, April 17, 1925, Page 23

How To BE YOURSELF What an Eminent Psychologist Has to Say About the Riddle of Personality, the Relation of Environment to the Individual, and Why You Must Be the Master of Your Ouwn " Fate and the Captain of Your Own Soul if You Want Suécess in Life FAMOUS authorities tell us that per- sonality is the most important factor that a man or woman seeking success has got to consider. But “per- sonality” is a ‘mysterious sort of equa- flr}n, something you have or haven't, a will-o'-the-wisp which alights on certain fortunate individuals and passes by the rest of mankind. e David Seabury gives below some ex- cellent information on the subject. He is a writer and lecturer along psycho- logical lines. Following courses in Har- \l'urd University, he spent years of study in London, Paris, Munich and Rome. One of the frequent visitors to the home of}his parents, when he was a small ch{ldl, was the famous psychologist, \\'1]11§m James. Upon returning to A.menca, he became consulting psycholo- gist at Culver Military Aczdemy,-where (!m problems, mental abilities and voca- tional fitness of 500 boys yearly gave lbulndant opportunity for practical ex- perience, By David Seabury Author of “Unmasking Our Minds” RECOGNIZE today, in the field of . applied psychology, that all of us live in a masquerade; that is, that human life has become, virtually a masquerade. As Prof. Paton, of Princeton Uni- ’, s constantly teaching, our laws, our customs and the whole manner of living have been built up without any regurd to what the forces of human nature are, and that when we start out to be successful we must adapt condi- tions to these forces instead of following our present system of trying to adapt the forces of human nature to outward conditions. We have developed civilization as an instrument, as a condition, without re- gard to the fact that as human beings we have to live in it and that life should be so organized as to make possible the true expression of the forces of human nature. We should center in human beings. The new psychology has come down to the recognition of this tremendous theory: that the first secret of success in life is not adaptation of the individual to the environment, but of environment to the individual. We have been out for generations to succeed along the old point of view, the attempt to fit n}e human being to his circumstances. We know today that this is psychologically impossible. MOTHER said to me a while ago, “I should think that any good en- vironment was good.” I asked her: “Do you really believe that . “Yes, certainly,” she replied positively. “Would you say that God’s good sun- ¢hine and air made a good environ- ment?” 5 ves, of “course!” , for fish?" I suggested. “00!" she crjed. That's the point. We recognize that sunshine and fresh air is a good environ- ment, but a canary bird can't sing in water and a fish can’t swim in a cage Just so, the individual human being can not be efficient unless in the environment cuited to his nature. It is up to you to find out in what environment you can «wim or sing, and not think you can swim or sing in any environment be- cause it is & “good environment.” Busi- ness men make that mistake, fathers and mothers make that mistake, because they don't stop to reason out the effect of a particular environment on the par- ticular person in question. If you have the attributes, so to ‘¥peak, of a fish, you can’t live in the kind of element that would be just the right thing for the canary-bird kind of person. If we put that in terms, not only of vocation, but of the forces of character, which make the background of a voca- tion, it may be clearer. Let us say that we are dealing with a very emotional and impressive nature that has an im- mense amount of nurture in it, the mother type, for instance, that has a warm-hearted feeling toward the whole world. This girl grows up in a very intellectual environment, where she sees - David Seabury, the eminent authority on psychology, discusses that elusive quality, _ bersonality,.from a4 new angle ?::e:nghler and father very largely in- Sted In a purely theoretical and ab- ftract study of life, *We'll suppose that 1 'ther 1s interested in various forms of political advancement and that sort of thing, }Jnt only from a purely intel- lectual point of view, This daughter has an image in her mind of that sort of thought and life as being what she should follaw, because it has been built up as her environment. She has the idea of taking up a career because that has been put in her mind. After college days she goes out to get a position, and one happens to come along as secretary to a mechanical engineer, A All right. She is doing a merely statistical, routine type of work. She has a good mind, so she will do it well, because we have learned that a high in- telligence quotient functions well in virtually any type of life so far as material accomplishment is concerned, but it doesn't function well so far as health and the ultimate good of that individual are concerned. She will be perfectly adequate for several years, but devastation is going on inside. Pretty soon her health begins to break down. She has periods of melancholy. She has periods ofediscouragement in social life. She can't make social contacts, because this devastation is going on. In her efforts to make herself the routine type of person, she has had to dam up the social instinct; she has drained out the social impulse. She can’t function along social lines when she is forcing herself into perfection along routine lines, therefore she becomes melancholy, and people begin to think of her as a very re- served and quiet type, while she really has this volcano of emotion inside for which there is no outlet. The ultimate result would probably be melancholia. What would have happened if Kreisler and Mischa Elman had been taken away from their parents when 6 weeks old and had grown upon a South Dakota cattle ranch until the age of 257 All the sen- sitive forces of their natures would have suffered from malnutrition; they probably would have become neurotic at 20. If an individual is thrust into an en- vironment that is too extreme, so that there is no field for his forces, his forces suffer from malnutrition (or as we p# it, inanition; inanition means lack of stimu- lus, malnutrition means lack of food, but it is easier to picture a person suffering from lack of food for his vital forces, the inner impulses of his character); then, if these forces go unused over a long period of time, they get what is called an infantile fixation. That part of his mind gets fixed in childhood and doesn’t develop. In the meantime, he has a great endowment striving to push through, and an environment which is all against it.- Perhaps he finds some instrument around the place, an old piano or lin, and tries to learn to play it. His parents, or those in charge, oppose this outlet; in their opinion it's a waste of time. He develops an in- feriority complex trying to be as rough- and-tumble as the fellows who can lasso a steer. Therreal man is entirely hidden behind this “overgrowth,” this mask, and there is no one at hand to under- stand what the real Kreisler is and what he is capable of doing. The presence of one sympathetic person would make a great difference. We have ecome to a recognition of the fact that success in any one direction is measured for us by an in- herited endewment strong enough to to a high level, and then early stimulus which starts it developing in the right direction, and last, by efforts rise k \ S ' o e i 3 oot 8. L - WHAT'S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE? Here is the bird cage and here beside it the fish bowl. But the bird is flying in the water and the fish is swimming in the air. And that’s what's the matter with a lot of us, says David Seabury, the psychologist; we recognize that sunshine and fresh rir are a good environment, but a canary bird cannot sing in water and a fish cannot swim in a cage. Just s0, the individual human being cannot be efficient unless in the environment suited to his nature. It is up to us to find out in what environment we can swim or sing, and not think we can swim or sing in any old environment just because it happens to be a “good environment” v which prevent any serious blockage in- juring that development. If the light- ning strikes a tree when the tree is twelve years old and breaks the top off, vou may get a tree, but you won't get a straight tree; you are going to get something that is measured by the power of that tree to overcome blockage. We recognize that the first ten years of a child's life are extremely formative vears. They do not, however, determine how he is going to be in maturity. They do determine the amount of conflict he has to overcome. Suppose Kreisler had been forced by those ‘around him to become a profes- cional cowboy and found himself unable to do so, and suppose he had been pun- ished because he didn't take a real in- terest in raising cattle—also because he had been taking an interest in music. The bitterness that would have been set up in him if the punishment had been carried on long enough, and the sense of inferiority that would have de- veloped in him by his failure in the purely materialistic .effort of raising cattle, would have been a tremendous blockage to his musical nature. The Puritans in New England successfully sewed up all the creative impulse there. You can’t find a musician, a painter, a sculptor, an author, or any kind of artist in New England before the coming of the Transcendentalists, The Puritan be- lieved that playing the violin was a sin Kreisler would have been punished by his parents for trying to learn music, and that would have made terrible blockages in his ultimate expansion. He would have had to overcome all that. The self-consciousness that was de- veloped in New land is a strong blockage to any type of creative expres- sion; the loss of self, self-consciousness, is necessary in all creative expression. Creative expression, in other words, has to be a super-conscious activity. There must be inspiration coming up in the mind before a man reaches real success in any field. This can hardly happen when his real self is covered under a mass of blockage by having been driven into some totally different ficld. His inherited background is covered by a shell, and the shell must be broken be- fore he can expand. That is part of the w of the new psychology, to help the individual to recognize what that background is— what his real personali When this is done, the expansion is enormous. HERE is an example of an extreme type of superimposed personality, which passed under my care, and which is an exceptionally “good” one for il- lustrating the pernicious results of ob- stinate coercion on the part of parents. A certain man came to me with an extreme form of insecurity complex. He had been so.driven back into himself and had so little adaptation to life and the forces within him that, in spite of the fact that he was a multi-millionaire, splendidly educated, and with an ex- ceptionally good family background, life had become to him a thing of horror. His own fundamental nature had never had a chance to get out into expression and he was not able to adapt it to life. Therefore, he felt as if he had no roots. His nature had been locked up in a shell, so that his personality, as it were, was imprisoned. He had got a feeling that life was a very unfriendly, terrible thing. Suffered from all the phobias to an extreme degree. His insecurity com- plex had developed into a neurosis. He was so afraid of water that for twenty-odd years of his life he would never go on hoard a boat. He was afraid of all the places and situations that were less secure. de was afraid of fire and high places and crowds. He felt s ppy in the universe that every setback bothered him. If his automobile was held up by traffic policemen, he felt panic-stricken because he couldn’t control the situa- tion. He was afraid of the dark and would stick pins into himself—his leg was covered with the scars—because the pain made him sure he was alive, He was not insane. What he had developed was not a psychosis; it was a N Neurosis is not the same thing as psychosis or insanity; neither does it lead to insanity. The very expression of neurosis makes a certain safety valve; the very emotional upheavals make for safety and the relieving of the mind. Psychosis is a brain condition; neurosis is an emotional and instinctive o0sis What would have happened if Fritz Kreisler and Mischa Eiman, the famous violinists, had been taken away from their parents as babies and had grown up en a South Dakota cattle ranch until the age of 257 All the sensitive forces of their nature would have sufféred from malnutrition; they probably would have become neurotic invalids by the time they “were 20 condition, It's a condition that operates on the nervous organism. Even a seri- ous neurotic realizes his condition; a person in psychosis does not realize it at all. Today this man with the insecurity complex is absolutely normal and well. We had to go back and get all the causes. I got all the story of his life that I could, and then used the word- association tests where we give about five hundred wbdrds and study the re- action to those words. TIXE first cause was easy to under- stand. This man was seeing things through the screen of misconceptions grown out of his early life, that made him feel that life was not safe. Now, the first thing that gives security to the individual is normal food given to the baby. The nursing process had been in- tetfered with continuelly in his case. There had been disturbances in the family which had played upon his chance to be properly nourished and properly taken care of. Fright is fully ad dangerous as hunger at this age, and a fright which this man received in early childhood started a Lackground of belief that life wasn’t going to be good to him, These circum- stances would have had less effect on the man if he had been less sensitive. The higher the blood level, the more force of refinement in the family back- 1, the greater chance to be ated. In his case there was a e family background which made him suffer intensely; whereas a man of a lower blood level would have been im- pervious. Nature builds up in the lower levels a sort of mental and moral ana- esthetic, Later on there came a period of com- plete father domination. His father planned out what he was to do and what he was to be. He had an absolute sched- ule to obey. He was a sensitive, emo- tional, responsive nature that could easily have gone in for some artistic type of work. He did not even know this himself because his life was so .'fhtnlutvly regimed. In this boy the devastation was tremendous, He became early in life a punctuality :iddm. I have had a good many of ;:(‘»‘:‘1{ they are just as much held by ;)1: :;::*:‘ofnhivmg to be on time all e man who takes drugs. hen this man came to me, if he was a minute late, he was pale. N we had uncovered this man's native instinets, we had material im- mediately to combat the shells of habit, velop his inner powers, and he }0' see the queer motives of the f life that he had lived. As he three or four rea] accomplishments S own, he began to get a sense of ence in himself and in life. In words, he made attachment to life Rot his own roots in the ground hey belonged. He finally got t point where no failure could shake him and the insecurity complex gradually disappeared There is no better method of getting to know oneself than through writ- ing an autobiography. Test it out with the best conception of normality can get. No one is entirely nc depart Yyou normal. “Where does my mind from normality, and ‘hmc made it depart from seem to what may normalit No matter what the problem may be, hould look at himself as n and at environment as the second equation hen he will ther or not it is necessary for him to change environment so that the forces of his nature may come through. that the sum that Bergson that “Joy 1 We have got to re piness is in rea t when he gn of true living! puright by Public Ledper Company