Louis Berman

The Glands Regulating Personality Louis Berman

Excerpt: ...be termed the oligocene. As the circle of acquaintance widens, other loved objects usher in the miocene phases of the development. With these become interspersed various hates and detestations, deliberately cultivated and accepted by the consciousness. So we have a cross-slice of the personality in the first five or six years of childhood. But now, with the onset of the second dentition, a subtle change begins in the endocrine equations of the body. The second dentition itself is an expression of a certain internal secretion wave passing through the cells, an increase of action of some hormones, a decrease of others. And a consciousness of physical sexuality appears, while the outlines of character, hitherto mere tracings, become firmer, heavier, quasi-indelible lines. That there is some activity on the part of the internal secretions of the sex glands, the ovaries and testes, can be demonstrated by accurately charting the behaviour of a boy or girl after this time. It will be found that there is a cyclic variation of health and conduct, more or less marked of course in each case. A cold may appear periodically at the end of each month, an increase of irritability and waywardness may be observed, or, on the contrary, a decrease of the regular restless playfulness. The ghost of sex begins to haunt the scene. Now all kinds of possibilities of conflict emerge. The child is still a bisexual, growing into a mixed sex type, depending upon the nature and amount of its internal secretions. The influencing adult of the family, the most important of the external factors encouraging or depressing the tendencies of the child, possesses a fairly fixed ideal of monosexuality which he or she, generally quite unconsciously, seeks to impose upon it. A doting feminine mother will make her son as much as possible like her husband: if she dislikes her husband, as much as possible like her father or grandfather. A masculinized mother will tend to make a sex object out...