Revival: Understanding Yourself: The Mental Hygiene of Personality (1935) by Ernest R. Groves

Author:Ernest R. Groves [Groves, Ernest R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Psychology, Public Policy, Personality, Social Services & Welfare, Political Science, Social Security, General
ISBN: 9781351343497
Google: 1kmMDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 42363041
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-11-29T00:00:00+00:00

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OUR PSYCHIC POWER PLANT

THE emotions are the energizers of our psychic life. Their influence on the mind is similar to that of the endocrine glands on the body. Indeed the connection between the two in certain emotions is so close that they are two forms of expression of a situation that involves both body and mind. The emotions are as powerful and explosive in their realm as endocrine secretions are in theirs. When we go searching into our emotional life we are seeking the source of power. No one who has ever on shipboard visited the boiler room is likely to forget the vividness of his experience. Far down in the bowls of the ship he has come upon the inferno where the sweat-laden men turn oil or coal into the steam or electricity which propels the ship and provides power for its complex mechanism.

Sometimes emotional experience is literally a psychic inferno. Always it is the most dynamic aspect of the mind and in some respects the most difficult to understand. From this, however, it must not be inferred that the emotions represent a section of mental experience that can be entirely isolated from the rest. What we think of as emotions and intellectual activities are not two separated sections of mind, but each is an emphasis of a predominant functioning that includes also, but in less degree, the other feature. Emotional experience always contains some intellectual element, even though it be at times very little, just as intellectual activity always has associated with it some amount of emotion, although it also may be very slight.

Nothing brings out the character of the emotions more clearly than to think of them as the drives of human behavior. Behind conduct and thinking there is the motivating, emotional pressure that on the psychic level seems to spur the personality into activity. When we consider fear and anger, two of the strongest emotions, as they must have operated upon primitive man in the earlier period of human evolution through thousands of years, we realize the great survival value they have had. Not only did they capture attention at critical moments; they also brought forth the endocrine resources and permitted the individual to put all his mental energy or bodily strength into attempting to escape from danger or into attacking his enemy, whether it were man or beast. The power-giving emotion brought the entire organism into one cooperative, purposeful effort.

It helps us in understanding the importance of our emotional experiences to think of them as the awakening of feeling strong enough to possess consciousness and dominate all body activities, bringing them into unison. Thus we have a combination of strong feeling, a fixed idea, and the impulse to act in the appropriate manner, all existing at the moment and working together to permit an escape from danger or the overcoming of a threat, whether brought by things or people. It is as if the personality were given over to the control of one dominating drive that for the moment pushes aside every other consideration.

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