A Study of the Interplay of Personality
The Psychological Clinic Copyright, 1917, by Lightner Witmer, Editor. Vol. XI, No. 4 June 15,1917 ORTHOGENIC CASES. XII. :Author: Sarah Warfield Parker, A. M., Philadelphia, Pa.
It is hard to write a clinical study of Albert, easier by far to uin it into sheer story. To be sure, it was a case for psychoogical treatment, that came into our household one cold January And indeed, ours was a household where stern pedagogy and scientific training were supposed to dominate emotion and senti*n su?k a household, came a contact of races, Semite p1 ,^av’ an interplay of personalities, the impression of a mature Russian woman upon an adolescent Jewish boy, a contact that was ense, intimate, transitive. In that contact there was some 4 a lty of the elemental that swept aside scientific pedagogy and erican reserve to let the experience mould the boy as it must. “W e were fortunate in that of the two, the boy was the first to come to us. For five months therefore we had the opportunity to s u y his personality unmodified by the profound impression Mrs. G. made upon him.
TV. Albert was something over fourteen and a half when he came. e clinical recorder described him as “a fat boy, big for his age but a er babyish looking.” A pair of baggy brown tweed knickeroc . s left most unbecomingly exposed a pair of very pudgy legs; ck neck was squeezed into a stiff Buster Brown collar a size 00 smaU- A large head was set rather low on this fat body and crested with a riotous shock of coal black hair, curly and very stiff. e boy seemed overfed, overlarge for his clothes, but certainly n?t 0Verclean. Yet there looked out of that full face a pair of brown e> es, a trifle small, but altogether straight, and the tilt to that curly ack head was not unattractive.
^1G k?y fidgeted nervously. He crossed his legs, pulled at e knees of his trousers, hitched up his tie, pawed his face, bit his nai s and shoved his chair along the rug. The father and mother who had brought him sat one on each side of the fireplace and talked volubly at cross purposes. On the right sat a tall German Jew of sixty, a shrewd business man, a little of the tolerant father. His pride in the persistent shrewdness that had raised him from the poverty of the immigrant dishwasher in a Bowery chop house to the millions he had amassed in building up a large manufacturing business was linked with unconsciousness of his patent lack of culture. “When I was this boy’s age,” he said, “I had begun to make my own way in the world.”
“Nonsense!” interrupted the mother. “I want him to pass for a gentleman in society.” Then turning to the boy she snapped, “Take your hands away from your face, Albert.” She sat on the other side of the hearth, a plump, opulent woman, irritable and nervous to the point of hysteria. A sense of her superior culture made her manner toward both husband and son a trifle supercilious.
“But Albert never did get along in school,” she continued. “He started in when he was six at a convent school and I’ve had him in seven or eight private schools since. He never got on in any of them. He’s classed in with little boys of ten 01* eleven years old. Albert, stop biting your nails. He won’t study; he’s too lazy.” “He needs to be set to work,” interjected the father. “If his mother would let me start him at the bottom in one of my mills ” Again the mother interrupted, “His father doesn’t understand the boy. Albert, take your hands away from your face. Mr. Y. takes him down to the office and lets him idle around all morning and go to a matinee after lunch. I’m the only person that can manage Albert. Albert, stop fussing with your tie.” The husband caught at the diversion to put in a word, “If I could get my boy to concentrate, if I could get him to think before he speaks, he would be all right.”
But Mrs. Y. went on as though there had been no interrubtion, “Albert is lazy; he answers in any fashion to avoid thinking. He is gluttonous, sluggish, indifferent and thoughtless. Albert will you keep those hands still? “
“Don’t fuss the boy so much, Baby,” the father remonstrated. Mrs. Y. was not to be stopped, “This last month he has completely disorganized my household. He makes trouble with the servants, and teases his sister all the time. She is very charming, quite like my mother, who is a most unusual woman, but Albert nags her all day long. Albert, I can’t watch you chew your fingers another second. Go upstairs.”
The boy went, his black head a trifle bent, and on the first step he stumbled. In those first months, we never saw him go up or down steps without stumbling.
The parents left after a little and the coachman brought bac the story of an hysterical scene on the way to the station, when Mrs. stood up screaming, and threatened to jump from the carriage. So they left with us the boy that together they had born and bred, to better, if we could, the botch they had made of it. Albert had been excluded from schools for normal boys for two reasons: (1) because he could not “get on” in his school work; (2) because they could not tolerate his behavior. To inquire into his mental status is our first problem.
At the age of fourteen and a half Albert’s proficiency in school work was not higher than that of a fourth grade pupil. Such an estimate is at best an approximation, for in some mechanical operations he had efficiency equal to that acquired in the seventh and eighth grades, while in others his performance level was as low as that of the second grade.
In arithmetic he could add, subtract, multiply and divide as rapidly and nearly as accurately as boys of the eighth grade. Of decimals and fractions he knew almost nothing. Tables of measure, he knew only sketchily, and could not apply at all. In the reasoning examples of the Courtis tests his rating was no higher than the second grade. Five months after he came to us Dr Witmer wrote. He cannot solve a problem which a boy of ten would be able to solve even though the problem itself requires nothing more than addition or multiplication.” Although he had studied geography and history for several years he knew little of the first and absolutely nothing of the second. His tutor remarked, “His knowledge of geography was in a nebulous state.” He thought Scotland was in England, and London the capital of Paris?this in spite of the fact that he had been abroad three times and had spent many weeks in Paris. The information that America had whipped England in the war of the Revolution he received with absurd and pathetic jubilation as though it were a piece of news fresh from the front. In general information lie was quite as hazy. He thought that Episcopalians were not Christians, and that there were five seasons, spring, summer, fall, autumn, and winter. Of current events he knew almost literally nothing. Possibly he knew the name of the President of the United States; I should not be surprised to find that he did not. He was ignorant of charcoal, metals, hard and soft coal, plants, trees, and flowers. Albert read “rapidly but with little expression from a sixth grade reader,” and spelled well in the fifth grade. He was deficient, however, in the meaning of words. Such words as alderman, widow, scarf, profit, wares, conceit, deceit he did not know the meaning of. He did not get the sense of what he read. A teacher wrote “A child of seven or eight could tell the story (one of iEsop’s Fables) as well as he does.” He could not understand a single paragraph in a newspaper about a baseball game that he himself had seen. He had read scarcely anything, in fact he could not sit still long enough to read a book more than five minutes at a time. After reading the first two pages of one of the “Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” he was in a maze as to what was happening, floundered a page or two further and then threw the book aside. We have all had a similar experience when reading in a foreign language with which we are but imperfectly familiar. Neither could he follow the relatively simple plot of a moving picture film.
Grammar was a confused mass of meaningless diagrams and definitions. He knew nothing of paragraphing, and could not reproduce stories because he did not understand them. On the other hand, he composed diaries and letters rather fluently. His sentences were sometimes involved and marred by misused auxiliary verbs and prepositions, and the sense suffered often from his inability to think consecutively. Yet taken all in all, composition was his long suit?his only long suit.
Nevertheless, Albert seemed to have more mental capacity than appeared in his school work. His memory span for digits was eight; under the best of conditions, nine, and even ten. Tested with design blocks and letter squares, his visual imagery seemed to be particularly vivid and accurate. He played a good game of pinocle and, indeed, taught one of the teachers to play. Checkers, a game, which when well-played, taxes the ingenuity, the resourcefulness, the genuine intelligence of the players, Albert played exceptionally well. A game of checkers with Albert was a real match of minds, keenly stimulating. Mental examination revealed no specific mental defect in him other than a grave deficiency in persistent concentration of attention, a defect in the trainability of memory due to the immobility of his mind in the idea-complex forming process, and following upon these, a distinct limitation in understanding and in range of interest.
Albert was mentally lazy. He did not like to work and “played for time” all through his lessons. He failed to realize the seriousness of his deficiencies and wasted all his intelligence in the attempt to “bluff.” He talked loftily about algebra and geometry when he had not yet mastered fractions. He could not fix his attention upon anything. His mind was darting here and there and everyTHE INTERPLAY OF PERSONALITY. 101 where. Moreover, he had no self-confidence and no self-control. He could not and would not buckle down to study by himself. He wanted someone perpetually by his side to drive and coax him on, and above all, to explain.
I should like, if I can, to picture to you Albert in the class room. It was 9 a. m. on a spring morning. The class room was in the second story of the little school house, with sunny windows open wide. A boy with a stiff mop of rumpled black hair came tumbling in at the window over the shed roof. Panting, he threw himself mto his seat, mopped his forehead with a mussy handkerchief, then ?pened his desk, and pulled out a miscellaneous pile of books and papers. He slammed them on the desk, dropped most of them and half tumbled out of his seat to pick them up. At length he selected a note book marked “Diary” and cleared his desk energetically for work.
Just then, Mr. A. his teacher came in at the door. Albert Jumped up, giggled, shot at him a volley of foolish remarks and questions, and finally settled down to work again. But his pencil needed sharpening. He leaped to the sharpener, and ground away porously, breaking the fresh point several times in the process. After a series of wriggles, questions, and accidents, the diary M as at last done and Albert was given an arithmetic problem involv*ng two simple steps. With much rustling of paper, and squirming 0 body he finally succeeded in reading the problem.
‘I don’t know how to do it,” he announced. , Mr. A. has said of him that there was “no problem of any “faculty whatsoever that Albert would undertake without a great ?al of prompting, urging, and coercion.” My father isn’t a farmer,” he went on loftily, “How should I Know anything about bushels?” With much grumbling he performed the first step. Then he ?pped. He was unable?Mr. A. says he always was unable?to ^oresee the next step. Mr. A. adds further that Albert applied not the slightest quantum of reasoning to his work.” After he had ?en given one problem of a particular type, he tried to solve all 0 ers in precisely the same way. Albert was helped through this problem and then through another. He wrote out the solution of the second carelessly. In e first line he spelled the word flour correctly. In the second line e ^rote “flower.” The day before he had written flour a hundred unes because he had made exactly the same mistake. Ibert then began to study a history lesson but very shortly arne upon the name “York River.”
“Is the York River half as large as the Hudson River?” he asked. And he continued at intervals. “What is the largest river in the world?” “Is the Mississippi River the largest in this country?” “Does the Nile flow through Paris and Switzerland?” “What are you writing? I bet you’re writing mean things about me.” After several minutes of feeble concentration he grumbled, “How do you think I can work with that lawn mower going outside?” With twenty minutes of this kind of study, he announced that he knew his lesson. He recited in a random manner, and tried to coax his teacher into asking him questions that would be “leaders.” The boy felt entirely content with his own half-knowledge and thought it very ill-natured of Mr. A. not to be satisfied with the recitation. Mr. A. with infinite patience set about explaining the lesson, and illuminating it by an interesting anecdote and a striking illustration. During the explanation Albert dropped his pencil, twirled his eraser, balanced his chair on one leg, and gazed at the ceiling. When Mr. A. had finished, Albert remarked casually, “There are twenty-six flies on the ceiling.”
Albert spent his recess in running and climbing and chasing. At the end of the recreation period he clambered in at the window again to find another teacher waiting to give him a lesson in geography. She was a teacher remarkable for her firm control in the class room.
As soon as she opened the book and began to look severe, Albert burst out impulsively, “Gee! but you look pretty today.” Miss B. ignored the comment with dignity, but her preliminary explanation of the lesson, given with energy enough to make any boy sit up and pay attention, bore fruit only in a vague and dreamy remark, “Your eyes are the same color as your dress.” Judged on the basis of his proficiencies at that time, Albert’s performance level was four or five years below what it should have been for his age. More than that, in his present nervous and undisciplined state, it was almost impossible to teach him anything. Yet none of us were willing to pronounce him definitely feebleminded. Dr Witmer wrote of Albert from time to time after several months of observation:
“The boy has a pronounced mental retardation which undoubtedly rests on a physical basis of some sort … has grave infirmities of mind and character. … He cannot exert himself because he so easily falls into a state of mental confusion. He is extremely feeble in any effort requiring persistent thinking. He can do arithmetic, provided the work required of him is mechanical, but if any thinking is involved he flounders about trying first one process and then another. He lives in and for a state of excitement. He has never been taught to work. … He inclines to resort to all sorts of expedients to avoid working and this has become such a habit with him that only little by little can I get him to do work requiring close application. He has what I should call a mind that skims and in skimming he fails to be accurate. Nevertheless, I am absolutely confident that Albert has more capacity than appears in his school work.
“His mental condition is a very puzzling one. In some ways he seems very normal, only to have wrong ideas and excessive Nervousness, and an inability to think a thing out. But when it comes to making a consistent effort involving either physical or Rental exertion, he oftentimes gives an impression of being mentally inferior.”
The diagnosis , of Albert’s mental status, in so far as it was ormulated at the time, was serious retardation in efficiency based uPon mental confusion, and possibly upon actual mental deficiency. In spite of this retardation in school efficiency we found Albert a oy of splendid physique, abnormally strong, redundant with energy aud life. Indeed, his anatomical and physiological development ^as in excess of his chronological age. We found him, moreover, e typical adolescent, so typical that no school for adolescent boys ^ould tolerate his behavior. He seemed, indeed, the epitome of oiescent tendencies and reactions pushed to the extreme. And nd the urge of his physiological age, reinforcing these tendencies, Were Oriental sensuousness that persists in many of his race, the crude egoism of the American nouveau riclie, and the pressure of the Neurotic heredity and environment in such a family as his. To give substance to these generalizations, we must attempt a e ailed description and analysis of Albert’s behavior. For this Purpose, it may be well to take G. Stanley Hall’s list of “antithetical unpulses” characteristic of adolescence.1 1- “There are hours, days, weeks, and perhaps months of overenergetic action,” followed by torpor, laziness, low tension.2 Albert was most often at the point of high tension, and with un tension was very high. On a walk, he never walked. He leaped own the terrace steps, six at a time, ran zigzag along the road crossjug his feet to make the children laugh, vaulted gates, climbed r ed wire fences in his best clothes, scaled telegraph poles, and swung out on the limbs of the highest trees. At the station he usually chose to run the mile to the house, and though the coachHaU, G. Stanley. Adolescence. New York: D. Applcton & Co., 1916. Vol. II, pp. 75-88 Ikd- PP.75-76. man lashed his horse in a vain attempt to beat him, Albert, pleased and panting was always at hand at our own steps to open the carriage door. In the house he was so strenuous that he broke the chairs in the living room, the towel rack in the bath room, and three-cornered gashes in his trousers were accidents of almost daily occurrence.
One recalls, too, the tendency noted by Hall1 “to phonation in articulate and sometimes in animal noises, not perhaps so much to gratify ear hunger as to relieve efferent tension.” His voice, growing each month deeper and deeper, boomed through the house in crude melody, and it happened often, when you came from town, that a wild black-headed youngster leaped down the hill to greet you with a squeak and an absurd shout of nonsense syllables, “Neeno-ny! Nee-no-ny!’’ At other times, particularly when there was work to be done, we saw Albert hanging around the house in lazy boredom, grumbling that there “was nothing to do in this old hole,” lackadaisical, listless. 2. There are “oscillations between pleasure and pain,” “tears and laughter,” “exultation and depression.”2
General good spirits and moods of downheartedness of course alternated in Albert. But more conspicuous in the boy were the specific reactions of tears and giggles. The “mental ticldishness” to which Hall calls attention3 was particularly acute. Albert giggled excessively, reflexly, uncontrollably?often at the blunders of others, more often at some allusion that he could in some remote way relate to his very sensitive consciousness of sex.
On the other hand, in the typical relaxation of energy and of reaction to stimuli that comes in the evening, tears of self-pity were frequently shed. He shed them because he was homesick, because his sister had not written, because his mother no longer cared for him, because he had offended someone in the household. These moods were very black and very genuine.
3. “Self-feeling is increased, and we have all forms of selfaffirmation and self-distrust.”4 Albert was supremely egoistic. He expected to monopolize the affection and attention of every adult in the house. He elbowed every other child away and claimed as his right the place next to the teacher. The place once gained, he could talk of nothing but himself, his lessons, his family, his troubles, his future. Several 1 Ibid., p. 21. 1 Ibid., pp. 76-78. 8 Ibid., p. 78. 4 Ibid., pp. 79-80. times daily he repeated the insistent demand, “Honest, do you like me? You like Charles better than me, now, don’t you?”
Self-affirmation in its crudest form?”swagger ways, thrusting oneself in conspicuous places, talking, acting, dressing to attract notice,”1 made Albert a most embarrassing companion in public places. I have seen him on the street jostle a total stranger, nudge him and exclaim, “New York’s the best place.” I have heard him thrust a comment into a conversation between two strangers by yelling across the road, “What did she do that for?” His tutor wrote, some six weeks after he came to us, “His manners in a car are very bad. He jumps about in a restless fashion, calls to me, and on several occasions made remarks across the aisle about some person who entered the car. He has also a very obnoxious habit ?f making silly, groundless remarks about anything connected with Philadelphia, exalting at every breath New York City. In the train, he ‘eyes’ in a very annoying fashion any girls or young women who enter.”
His attitude toward the wisdom and advice of adults was no less typical. He made dogmatic statements concerning things of which he knew nothing, and assumed an air of sophistication that made him seem most blase. He acted as though he knew more about Latin than any college graduate who ventured to contradict his statement, more about social convention than any of the well-bred People with whom he was living. The writing paper given him was too cheap,” because it could be bought for “ten cents a box,” all motors were “tin Lizzies” beside his father’s Pierce-Arrow. Though he was constantly asking advice he usually rejected it contemptuously with the crushing remark that “such things were not done in New York.”
Yet deeper than this, beneath these annoying self-assertions, there was real pride of honor, a wholesome consciousness of integrity. In the main, by the clean code of a boy, Albert was square. For Mother reason, too, Albert held his eyes straight. He had not passed through some eight or nine public and private schools with?ut gaining a familiarity with the current vices, but his reaction had been a healthy hatred of all such things. By his straight eyes, Albert won a measure of our respect.
Moreover, as Hall suggests,2 all this effrontery, braggadocio, self-righteousness, was often but bravado to hide a deep-seated distrust of self. A recollection of the conversation of the mother on the day she left her boy with us, must give us some hint of how thoroughly, 1 Mid., p. 79. 2 MM; P. 79. through all his lifetime, the boy’s self-confidence had been undermined. His was a sensitive nature in which such attacks had made a deep wound. So, in his “top-lofty superiority” we come to see at least a touch of the “whistle that keeps the spirits up.” Again and again he cried out from the real tragedy of youth, “Do you think I will ever be normal?” And once, in the first months he was with us, before he had quito. outgrown the little boy in knickerbockers, he said, “If I can’t get so I can manage my father’s business I don’t ever want to marry anyone. I don’t want people to say to my children that their father couldn’t make good.”
One noticed, quite as much, in Albert’s behavior, the characteristic alternations, 4. “Between selfishness and altruism,”1 generosity and total disregard for the rights and feelings of others; 5. “Between good and bad conduct,”2 between submission and rebellion, between dissipation in matching pennies and shooting craps, and renunciation for religious scruples of all athletic games. 6. There are antitheses in the “great groups of social instincts.”3 In this particular case the antithesis takes the form, not so much of alternation of contradictory moods, but of a constant complex of conflicting social impulses. In actual contact with strangers, Albert was shy, so shy that on a cross country tramp he was always afraid to ask the road. Yet, at times, his very nervousness made him unspeakably fresh. With boys of his own age he was never companionable; nor did he often seek such companionship. Those who were on a par with him mentally irritated him and he treated them contemptuously, but neither did he have sufficient self-confidence to meet normal boys of his age on equal terms.
Nevertheless, he was in no sense anti-social. He never wanted to be alone. He was anxious to please, affectionate, demonstrative, and had an immense capacity for hero-worship, for devotion to any older person who showed toward him friendliness and interest. This impulse was so strong, so inherent in the nature of the boy, that he poured out his devotion upon such unresponsive objects as his mother and sister. Though Albert never acknowledged their unresponsiveness, it none the less served to dam up these instinctive efferent impulses, till there was within him a great reservoir of adoration, of discipleship, waiting only for an object, an outlet. In addition to this capacity for hero-worship, we observed in 1 Ibid., p. 81. s Ibid., p. 82. 3 Ibid., pp. 84-85. him a distinct attraction to all pleasing individuals of the opposite sex, irrespective of age, to mother, sister, teachers, little children, waitresses in a restaurant, girls of the neighborhood,?even the snake-charmer at the circus,?an attraction that was open, frank, and entirely immediate.
7. There are “changes from exquisite sensitiveness to imperturbability and even apathy, hard-heartedness, and perhaps cruelty.”1 Albert very nearly fails to typify this antithesis. Warmhearted and sympathetic he certainly was; kind to animals, gentle with children, sensitive to the unhappiness of others, impulsively generous. This attitude was a constant quantity in his temperament.
With the muscular power and sharp irritability that was his, it would not have been surprising had his flood of energy occasionally vented itself in cruelty, but kindness and generosity were too inherent in his nature. Though he loved to tease the younger children, to wrestle and toss them about with his powerful arms, he stopped instantly at the first signal of genuine fear or hurt. And though he was self-centered and thoughtless of the rights of others, the moment his eyes were opened to the discomfort or pain he was giving another, he was full of consideration and remorse. Whatever pain he inflicted was but the consequence of his thoughtless egoism. At no time, and in no sense, as long as we knew him, was there apparent any impulse of cruelty, or of conscious intent to wound. The remaining five antithetical impulses of Hall’s series are so p^Uch more applicable to individuals who have advanced further in intellectual development than had Albert at the outset of our study that they do not seem apropos to this analysis. There are, however, several other typical sets of reactions that we cannot overlook. Dr Hall writes that “this period … is preeminently the age sense, and hence prone to sensuousness not only in taste and sex where the danger is greatest, but in the domain of each of the sense species.”2 In Albert this adolescent dominance of the senses was reinforced by a redundant physical development and a certain Oriental luxuriance of temperament.
In the pleasures of the palate, he reveled. Quantities of candy Were bought and consumed at every opportunity. In the begin^jng, he ate with his left thumb planted firmly on the table to brace nimself for rapid, energetic action. He shovelled immoderate portions of food into his mouth, bolting the meal in one-half the time it took the boy next him, and promptly asking for more. Once, in a Restaurant, Albert ordered deviled lobster, lobster salad, chocolate p. 85. 2 Ibu., p. 3s. with whipped cream, ice cream, and French pastry. The adult who curtailed this gastronomic dissipation was frankly labelled as a provincial Philadelphian who knew nothing of what was done in the elite circles of New York City.
His olfactory sense was sophisticated. His delight was in the perfume of toilet powder, sachet, shaving soap, cologne,?never, I think, in the fragrances of out-of-doors. In the same manner, his auditory sense responded pleasantly to the stimulus of crude sound. He liked to play rag-time on the Victrola, to sing and whistle it. The sound of words pleased him; he extemporized meaningless rhymes, and snatched at a word in a conversation to quote a phrase from a music hall song in which it was used. Nothing set him off more easily into fits of giggling than a sudden or unusual series of sounds.
Associated with this was his sense of movement, kinesthesia. Movement, per se, was pleasant to him. He loved to leap, run, climb, jig up and down, twirl on one leg of a chair, juggle with plates and phonograph records, and jabber foolishly to release voco-motor impulses. He was “prone to yell and indulge in vocal gymnastics,”1 and as movement became ordered in a feeling for rhythm, there developed in him a love and an aptitude for dancing.
Vision was no less keenly alive to stimulation. The boy felt quickly and expressed frankly, keen pleasure or displeasure in the color of a gown, the cut of a dress, in a pretty face, or a graceful figure. Peculiarities of gesture and posture he saw instantly and mimicked with glee.
In no department of sense, however, was adolescent sensuousness so imperative in Albert as in that of touch. Touching was well-nigh a mania with the boy. It is a literal fact that, with very few exceptions, he never passed a table, a chair, a person, that he did not touch, or yank, or pat, or pull. He rubbed his knees, pulled at his tie, smoothed his face. Smoothness was an exquisite sensation to him.2 He loved to stroke silks and furs, and sulked childishly because, unlike his mother and sister, the teachers would not let him sit on the floor and stroke a silk-stockinged ankle. In a similar way, he had a passion for handshaking, and demanded it on the slightest of pretexts, or on no pretext at all. With Albert, to touch objects, animate or inanimate, was an impulse, a habit, a craving. And, as final point, to prove Albert true to adolescent type, he washed with his collar on!
Albert was true to another type?to the type of the newly-rich 1 Ibid., p. 30. * Ibid., p. 6. Jew. Money was his standard of value. The possession of money and success in acquiring it were the qualities that commanded his respect. If the color of a dress pleased him he at once assumed that it must have cost “a lot of money.” If the waitress in a restaurant were pretty, he expressed a hope that she received a good wage, and wished to leave a preposterous tip. Whoever earned his respect he concluded must have a large bank account stowed away somewhere. It was an axiom that no individual shorn of this bank account could possibly possess such fine qualities of mind and character. Though there might be a few estimable people in the world whose incomes were not yet large, those exceptional individuals were keenly unhappy and were undoubtedly working with might and main to gain a place in the wealthy class. The school must necessarily be a money-making enterprise. No teacher could be conceived of as having any other interest in the work than the salary she received for it. This was his fundamental philosophy of life; the failure that he feared for himself, was a failure in business; and the hero that fired his boyish imagination was his father, the penniless lad of thirteen in the Bowery chophouse, who had built from the nickle he earned, a business spreading over the country, with a central office in lower New York, and a home on upper Fifth Avenue. All day long Albert talked of money, money, money. A dozen, dozen times he asked the salary of each teacher, the cost of this and that article. He boasted of the cost of his father’s motor, of his mother’s clothes. He haggled with a peanut-man over the size of the bag he sold for a nickle. He tried to wheedle the tailor into pressing his suit for less than his usual charge. When he was given a pile of letters to mail, he would look rudely at the addresses, asking impertinently, “Has he much money?” or more rarely, “Is she pretty? “
I have described Albert as fully as I am able, and, outside of this “money complex,” I have not mentioned a single impulse or reaction that is not included in Dr Hall’s description of the behavior typical of normal adolescence. One had to spend but a single day with Albert, however, to know that if all those typical impulses and all those normal reactions are packed into one boy, and raised to the nth power the product is so abnormal as to drive uiose who have to live with that boy to the verge of nervous prostration.
No wonder he disorganized his mother’s household; he threatened to disorganize ours. That he did not, I count as sure test of lts stability. In your attempt to imagine Albert you cannot possibly overdraw the wriggling, impertinent, ill-bred, ill-clothed, unsquelchable, “fresh” thing he was. Yet you would miss the picture if you did not see, too, how much we liked him. Because he was nervous energy spurting out at every time and in every direction, and “freshness” that was absolutely irrespressible, he very nearly drove us crazy; but because he was never mean, because he was generous and warm hearted, because he was straight and square, and because his curly blue-black head was winsome, he won something of affection from us all.
This was the boy that came to us, and these were the impusles ready to respond to whatever stimuli might present themselves in our household.
Perhaps, of all these impulses, the latent reservoir of adoration and discipleship was fraught with greatest potentiality. We glimpsed the force of this very early. Albert’s tutor, Mr A., the first to be drawn to him, showed very genuine kindness and interest in his work with the boy. Albert responded with ardent and immediate hero-worship. He dubbed Mr. A. affectionately, the “professor” and followed him about like a devoted poodle. Mr. A. could go nowhere in the house that Albert did not follow; sit nowhere that Albert was not beside him with his arm across the back of the chair. Even when he went into the city, he was pursued by trivial and facetious notes to the “professor.” This way of expressing devotion was so persistent as to be irritating to a busy man, and only added to the nervous strain involved in teaching and disciplining the boy. For five months, Albert was Mr. A’s pupil and disciple. In spite of painstaking teaching, it is not too much to say that Albert did not settle down enough in those five months to learn anything in the classroom. Outside the classroom, however, he gained much. With Mr. A. and the other boys, he “hiked” and wrestled and climbed, shot crows, and played baseball. He lost much of his city flabbiness, both of mind and body. He learned something of the trees and flowers and rocks and came to take sheer boy delight in burrowing under stones for slippery, wriggling newts, which he collected by the dozen and brought home in a pocket handkerchief. Mr. A. gave Albert his first taste of creek and countryside in a way that only an athletic man could. He took him, too, to see a big steel manufactory, the docks along the river front, a hospital in the city, objects chosen definitely to enlarge his experience of some of the practical things of the world. Beyond all this, Albert gained something through mere contact with the man, because for the first time he admired someone whose interest was not in money but in work. This contact did not in the least modify Albert’s nouveau ricke standards, but it opened a corner of his mind to the knowledge that there were other standards.
With the fickleness of youth, Albert ceased to think of his tutor very soon after Mr. A. left us. There was a certain flag, however, drawn upon a blackboard, and a sentence beneath in Mr. A’s handwriting. This Albert defended from erasure for many months. In defense of this fetish, the boy expressed in adolescent fashion an unconscious loyalty to the “professor” who had dropped so easily out of the stream of his conscious thought.
At the end of the five months the boy’s appearance had changed only in that the plumpness of his body had been somewhat hardened by exercise, and he wore a “first pair of long trousers.” These last made Albert look older and served only to exaggerate the silliness of his actions, the vulgarity of his appearance. (To be continued)
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