The Foundations of Personality [107]
conscious in the main. A man knows that the pretty young girls he meets tempt him from his allegiance to his wife and his desires to be good; a woman knows that the prosaic husband no longer pleases, and why he does not please,--only if you ask either of them bluntly and directly they will deny their difficulties. The organic activities of the body, basic in desire of all kinds, are crude and give rise to crude forbidden wishes, but the struggle that goes on is repressed, rebelled against and gives rise to trains of secondary symptoms,--fatigue, headache, indigestion, weariness of life and many other complaints. It is perfectly proper to complain of headache, but it is a humiliation to say that you have chosen wrongly in marriage, or that you are essentially polygamous, or that an eight-hour day of work at clerking or bookkeeping disgusts and bores you. People complain of that which is proper and allows them to maintain self-respect, but they hide that which may lower them in the eyes of others. Gain their confidence, show that you see deeper than their words and you get revelations that need no psychoanalytic technique to elicit and which are distinctly conscious. This brings me to the point that the constant inhibition, blocking and balking of desires and wishes, though in part socially necessary and ethically justifiable, is decidedly wearisome, at times to all, and to many at all times. It seems so easy and pleasant to relax in purposes, in morals, in thought, to be a vagrant spirit seeking nothing but the pleasures right at hand; to be like a traditional bee flitting from the rose to rose of desire. (Only the bee is a decidedly purposive creature, out for business not pleasure.) "Why all this striving and self-control?" cries the unorganized in all of us. "Why build up when Death tears down?" cries the pessimist in our hearts. Great epochs in history are marked by different answers to these questions, and in our own civilization there has grown up a belief that bodily pleasure in itself is wrong, that life is vanity unless yoked to service and effort. The Puritan idea that we best serve God in this way has been modified by a more skeptical idea that we serve man by swinging our efforts away from bodily pleasure and toward work, organized to some good end; but essentially the idea of inhibition, control, as the highest virtue, remains. Such an ideal gains force for a time, then grows too wearisome, too extreme, and a generation grows up that throws it off and seeks pleasure frankly; paints, powders, dances, sings, develops the art of "living," indulges the sense; becomes loose in morals, and hyperesthetic and over-refined in tastes. Then the ennui, boredom and disgust that always follow sensual pleasures become diffuse; happiness cannot come through the seeking of pleasure and excitement and anhedonia of the exhausted type arises. Preachers, prophets, seers and poets vigorously proclaim the futility of pleasure, and the happiness of service; inhibition comes into its own again and a Puritan cycle recommences. Stoic, epicurean; Roman republic, Roman empire; Puritan England, Restoration; Victorian days, early twentieth century; for to-day we are surging into an era of revolt against form, custom, tradition; in a word against inhibition. As with periods, so with people; self-indulgence, i. e., indulgence of the passing desires, follows the idealism of adolescence. Youth sows its wild oats. Then the steadying purposes appear partly because the pleasure of indulgence passes. Marriage, responsibility, straining effort mark the passing of ten or a dozen years; then in middle life, and often before, things get flat and without savor, monotony creeps in and a curiosity as to the possibilities of pleasure formerly experienced is awakened. (I believe that most of the sexual unfaithfulness in men and women over thirty springs not from passion but from curiosity.) There occurs a dangerous age in the late thirties and early forties, one in which self-indulgence makes itself clamorous. The monotony of labor, the fatigue of inhibition