A Study of the Interplay of Personality
The Psychological Clinic Copyright, 1017, by Lightner Witmer, Editor. Vol. XI, No. 6 November 15, 1917 ORTHOGENIC CASES. XII. By Sarah Warfield Parker, A.M., Philadelvhia, Pa. (Concluded.) The work that Miss B. had done with Albert, based on Dr. Witmer’s mental analysis, was clearly what he has called “diagnostic teaching.” For Mrs. G.’s type of teaching I know no other word than temperamental. Her own impulses and interests, even her whims and fancies, determined its time, its place, its manner, and its content. It is said that Russians know neither time nor system. Certainly Mrs. G. knew them only to scorn them. She took Albert’s Work out of the classroom, and out of all conventional routine. She taught him at any time, and in any place. Indeed, it is small exaggeration to say that when the passion for teaching was upon her, it was at all times and in all places. She taught him whenever and wherever it pleased her. She taught him on the bench under the wide gray beech tree, while with swift, expert fingers she did the household mending; or on the stone parapet of the porch with the soft color and haze of autumn spread out in the valley below them. She taught him in the basket wagon as she jogged along to market, whip in hand to flick the steady old horse into his ridiculous, futile gallop. Sometimes, on chill days, they sat by the great stone fireplace, in the two chairs which stood straight and distinguished on either side of the hearth; and sometimes she lay on the long, brown-cushioned bench over the radiator with a volume of Ibsen, or Strindberg, to fill the time, while Albert wrote at the flat table desk close by. Often they worked together up in her own big room with its many windows looking out to the bare, clean-limbed trees of late fall and winter. Wherever her work or pleasure happened to be, there Mrs. G. taught Albert.
The manner of her teaching was just as unconventional. Her method was determined wholly by her temperament. Swift remarked of Queen Anne that she had only a sufficient stock of amity for one person at a time. Mrs. G. poured out her energy and interest with so much intensity in one direction that, like Queen Anne, she had small surplus for any other object. She did one thing, and did it hard; was friend to one person, and scarcely to any other; espoused one cause, and it alone, till the volume of her energy was spent. Then, after a little, with the same intense, transitive concentration, she passed on to another object. The kaleidoscopic series which passed before our eyes within the space of a few months was worthy of Mr. Toad in Kenneth Graham’s “The Wind in the Willows.”
One day she ate thirteen grapefruit, and little else; for two or three days she consumed bowlfuls of brandied peaches?then banished both from the table. For a week, she played bean bag, for three consecutive hours every evening, holding some adult to the game long after the children were in bed, and flinging the bags with tremendous force the full length of the living-room; till at the end of the week she tossed them aside. For one week, ball; for another, jumping rope; and, for a longer stretch, checkers, held the field. In October she bought an expensive riding habit, breeches and a short-coat, which revealed the massiveness of her figure. She bought, too, a little round hat with a pompom, boots, and gauntlets, stocks, and a gold scarf pin?every possible accessory. In this costume, for a few weeks, she rode doggedly, often imprudently, in spite of very real fear and vertigo. Then the habit was hung away, till its time came to serve with less dignity as a coasting costume in a brief fever for the Flexible Flyer. For one fortnight, after breakfast, after dinner, after supper, the house was gay with the rhythmic measures of the Pavlowa Gavotte, while with practiced feet and movements not ungraceful, Mrs. G. danced it over and over again, sometimes alone, sometimes with Albert, sometimes with one or two others who had learned the steps from her. ‘We never saw her dance again as long as she was with us. v In objects less trivial her interest was just as concentrated, but, fortunately, more sustained. For the winter before she came to us, the major part of her energy had been enlisted in the work of one of the city rescue missions. During that year she had talked and thought constantly of her “bums.” By her determination, her force and her magnetism, she had awakened the dormant wills of at least two or three of these outcasts till they had freed themselves from the bondage of drink and drugs?a winter’s work well worth while. When, however, she ceased to give all her interest to this work, she could give none of it.
To the energy for regeneration which Mrs. G. had at one time poured into the rescue mission, Albert was legitimate successor. Her interest in him was not trivial?it was rooted deep in her capacity for compassion, in her sportsmanlike response to the challenge to achieve the barely possible, in her passion to dominate and mould the lives and characters of others. Therefore the intensity of her interest was sustained throughout the year that she and Albert worked together. To the task of raising him to the threshold of social sufficiency she devoted all the concentrated energy and will with which she had lifted her “bums” from the gutter. That was her method?to give all of her time, of her energy, of herself, to the mental and social regeneration of Albert. This same temperamental insistence on concentration determined her program of work. Mrs. G. could not divide her time and thought into the usual daily program of a half hour of this and a half hour of that. She must choose one subject as her point of attack and teach it all day long, week after week. The disciplinary teaching, without which, though she never acknowledged or, indeed, realized it, Albert’s response to her own teaching would have been impossible, she threw aside as nonsensical. Her own criterion of social success as the touchstone of life, made her concentrate upon the attempt to introduce into him in tabloid form such information as she deemed essential to that success. She chose, of course, to introduce but one kind of information at a time. “To be dining out,” she said, “and not to know where Galeetzia (Galicia) is; now tell me truly, is it not that which you call really feebleminded?”
To save him from such a social disaster, Albert, she declared, must be taught facts as rapidly and as vigorously as possible,? first of all the facts of geography.
This was not easy. It took two weeks out of the month of October to teach him the capitals of Europe. This was the stunt Dr Witmer had assigned to Mrs. G. to prove that Albert had developed enough mental ability to learn from her any series of associated facts. When that test was passed, Dr Witmer gave his consent to her usurpation of Albert’s school work. So it came about that all that fall and winter, our house, upstairs and down, inside and out, was dominated by Albert and geography,? the geography of the Eastern Hemisphere, of Europe, Asia, and Africa, of Australia and the South Sea Isles. Mrs. G. never hid her light under a bushel. She taught volubly, vociferously, all over the house, and wanted us to stop our work to watch hers. In the evening we must play audience at an exhibition of what Albert had learned, or had not learned, through the day. When at last bedtime delivered us from Albert we still had geography with us. As in the summer we had played bean bag, so now we had to listen on into the night to a recapitulation of the day’s struggles and successes with Albert and the German Empire, or the British possessions in Africa. The very walls seemed to resound with the guttural roll and hiss of Ekaterinaburg, Schleswig-Holstein, and Tannarivo.
By her vigorous summer campaign Mrs. G. had scrubbed and tailored and trained out of Albert many of the external earmarks of commonness. She proceeded now, by the way she taught him geography, to sweep him out of his blatant provincialism. The modern method of beginning geography in your own back yard was not hers. She carried him promptly overseas?and all of us with him. On the wings of Mrs. G.’s fluent, staccato English with its twisted idioms, in the light of her rarely vivid visual imagination, we left behind us the house on the knoll above the quiet Pennsylvania valley, and lived for hours in the north of Europe, or even now and then, in Southern Europe, or Asia. Because of a certain enigmatic quality in the woman herself, and because of her power to carry us with her into her stories and pictures, we were willing, for the moment, to be credulous. Once back again in Pennsylvania we suspected that Mrs. G.’s participation in the scenes and adventures she described might be the device of the raconteuse to achieve dramatic vividness. We could not, however, sift truth from fiction, and we did not wish to. We sat with Albert on the magic carpet of Bagdad and were whisked into other lands.
We sped with her at night in sleighs over the frozen Neva; we danced at the king’s ball in Stockholm; we watched her as a child, laughing while a great Russian general pinned on her white frock a decoration, the Czar’s tribute to his triumphs in the Turkish War. At Skaagen on Skagerrack we found ourselves dining at a table next to Ibsen; in “Draysden” (Dresden) we visited her in her girlhood at a superlatively select school for young ladies and saw vividly the very pattern on the delicate Dresden porcelain with which we were served. She took us to a gay restaurant of the Russian capital where, from a great pool bright with many-colored fish, we chose the one destined for our meal. We wintered with her gaily in Corfu, and stayed for a while in England,?a distorted England, stupid, scheming, hostile. She gave us a bright glimpse of Paris, and told us thrillingly of how once, threatened with imprisonment in “Bearleen” (Berlin) for presenting a green ticket in the Wrong compartment of a car, she escaped through the intervention of a school friend, the daughter of Von Buelow. She pictured for us Pavlowa dancing in the first da s of her genius in the Imperial Opera House at St. Petersburg; made us thrill to the great Easter service in St. Isaac’s Cathedral, and immediately swept us into the traditional stream of Easter callers.
She told us an ironic story of the chagrin of the Czar who, wishing to travel to the Crimea over a railroad for which the government had appropriated money, could find no trace of either funds or railroad. We exulted with her when she smuggled revolutionary literature beneath the false bottom of her trunk across the border from Sweden into Finland, and again, at the gangplank of a Baltic steamer, where to esca e custom examination, she passed her black bag to the wife of a cabinet minister. In a city?there was a hint that it was Riga?she showed us a dinner at her home, a gay company of officials in uniform. We saw the last guest leave, and eight revolutionaires steal in to beg for hiding. We were taken next morning into the office of the city Prefect of Police, one of the evening’s dinner guests, and saw him smilingly, without question, give to Mrs. G. eight “safe conducts” and a detachment of gendarmes to escort the eight revolutionaires over the border into safety. She drew for us the picture of the still black line of workmen, students, and priests, moving silently one January Sunday, through the white snow on the Nevsky Prospect, toward the Winter Palace, and made us hear the three swift volleys of shots which stained the snow with blood, and see the wild sweep of the bearded Cossacks with their long pikes, spurring their horses through the frightened crowd even to the top of steep church steps. She pictured for us another Sunday, “Red Sunday,” in the summer of 1905. In her dascha on the Gulf of Finland we felt the strange silence which fell over Russia on that day. We saw a young officer take flight in a rowboat under the very guns of the warships anchored in the arm of the gulf, saw Mrs. G.’s husband rescue him from the rushes on the bank, and contrive his escape to St. Petersburg, disguised in the uniform of the Imperial Yacht Club. We heard, too, how, after some days, the long silence was broken by the sharp sound of eight hundred shots fired in terrible succession, shots that told the tale of the eight hundred mutineers in Kronstadt. Albert never again yelled at a passing stranger his vapid remark, “New York’s the only place, eh?” A new world had been opened to him, a world full of picture and incident, and above all, a world completely dominated by a single striking personality. Although in his childhood he had travelled abroad, he now saw and felt Europe for the first time, but only as a highly colored background for Mrs. G. He had hated her, he had cringed to her; and then he had respected her. He had been stirred by a quick sense of gratitude for her sympathy; he had been bound to her by the force of her determination to overcome his social handicap; and now he was fascinated by her power to extend the straitened limits of his immobile imagination.
He not only submitted to her extraordinary method of teaching him all day long and all evening long; he hung about incessantly, begging to be taught. He demanded her exclusive time and attention; and she yielded it. Though Mrs. G. was energetic, she often “treated” herself to a day in bed, but even then, you could always see, through her open door, the figure of Albert on his knees beside the bed, his sleek black head bent over Harper’s Geography, which lay open on the counterpane.
Mrs. G., however, did not by any means fill the lesson hour with stories and adventures. Her temperamental method was as thorough and inexorable as Miss 33.’s more deliberate teaching. She made Albert learn by heart every line of his geography lesson, and her standard in recitation was nothing short of 100 per cent accuracy. It used to take the boy three or four or even five hours to learn the day’s assignment of eight lines. He went about with the geography under his arm, and wheedled everyone he saw into helping him, because he “couldn’t get his mind on it” by himself, and he’d “just got to know it tomorrow for the Madam.” Once learned, he would rattle off the eight lines at terrific speed with all Mrs. G.’s rolling r’s and lengthened vowels, shooting them out at us whenever we came into the room. Yet he knew nothing of the content. She would then spend hours in compelling him to pick out the facts from the lines he had learned, and in pounding them into him with map drill and infinite noisy repetition of question and answer. Those hours were so strenuous that Mrs. G. invariably emerged with her straight brown hair hanging in untidy wisps, but Albert knew the passage for the day backwards, forwards, and upside down, and delighted to perform with it all manner of stunts in articulation.
Study hour with Mrs. G. was not play. It was hard, hard work. Albert’s devotion to the geography lesson, therefore, was not born of a desire to be entertained, nor, in the beginning, to any considerable extent, of the will to learn. It grew almost wholly out of his devotion to his teacher. One rarely encounters a personality so powerful and so hypnotic as hers. She had deliberately turned the full force of this upon an adolescent boy. The result of the impact was the total obsession of the mind of Albert by the personality of Mrs. G. Though he had brooded over his inferiority, and longed passionately to “be normal,” he had not in himself the will to buckle down to the task of trying to repair his deficiencies. Now, her will and magnetism took possession of him, and he worked to please her with an energy born, not of his will, but of hers, an energy which was almost superhuman.
Toward the end of February, Mrs. G. was anxious to prove just how much Albert had learned through her vigorous pounding drill and his own enforced effort- to learn. According to her habit of doing one thing at a time and doing it thoroughly, she gave a whole week to an examination in geography. She filled a notebook with questions written in her extraordinary handwriting,?script which consisted almost wholly of vertical lines of extraordinary height. There were 182 of these questions and they covered the major part of what he had learned in geography.
One who recalls the fact that less than a year before Albert said London was the capital of Paris, will scarcely credit these answers as his.
Q. What does Oceanica include? A. Oceanica includes all the islands in the Pacific Ocean south of the Tropic of Cancer. It consists of the great archipelagoes ?f Malaysia, Melanesia, Polynesia, and Micronesia, the continent of Australia, with the islands of Tasmania and New Zealand. Q. What cities do you know in Siberia? A. Irkutsk, Tomsk, Tobolsk, Omsk, Tiumen, Ekaterinaburg, and Vladivostok. Q. In Persia? A. Teheran, Tabriz, Ispahan, Meshed, and Bushire. Q. Where is the naval station of the Russian Black Sea fleet? A. Sebastopol. Q. Which rivers do you know in Africa, and where do they empty? A. The Nile empties into the Mediterranean Sea. The Senegal, Gambia, Niger, Kongo, and Orange empty into the Atlantic Ocean. The Zambezi empties into the Indian Ocean.
Q. Tell me all the English colonial possessions you know. A. In Asia I know India, Burma, Ceylon, Strait Settlements; leases Hong Kong and protects Afghanistan and Baluchistan. It owns in Africa, Gambia, Sierra Leone, Gold Coast, Nigeria, Cape Colony, Orange Free State, Natal, Transvaal, the Island of Zanzibar, and parts of Somaliland, Sudan and Sahara. In Oceanica England owns Australia, the islands of Tasmania and New Zealand, the northern part of Borneo, and the southeastern part of Papua. Albert did not write these answers independently. Mrs. G. could not efface herself even in an examination. For hours, day after day, he sat at the desk writing slowly in his neat, perfectly formed hand beneath the long vertical lines of her unique script. Close beside him Mrs. G. reclined in a long wicker chair. In spite of her high collar and her pearl earrings, she was at such times rather dishevelled. She watched everything that Albert wrote, and alert to his tentative mutterings, guessed even what was in his mind before he wrote it. She never actually told him what to write but vigorously prevented his writing anything wrong. Whenever she scented a mistake she ejaculated, “Idiot!” or “My God, boy, how can you write such nonsense?” And Albert, of course, took the hint. She wanted his grading on those 182 questions to be 100 per cent, and, by this method of heading off errors, she got what she wanted. Such supervision and interference were sufficient to make this examination paper invalid as evidence of what he really had learned. Those of us, however, who had had these same lists of cities, rivers, mountains, colonies, exports, imports, and what not, dinned into our ears by Albert morning, noon, and night, knew that he could recite them orally as glibly, and with as much zest in their articulation as though they were limericks. I think it quite safe to say that scarcely a handful of fifteen-year-old boys in the United States know by rote as much of the geography of Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia as Albert did in February, 1915. A little of it he even understood.
It is obvious that he might, to advantage, have known less about Siberia and Oceanica and more about the United States of America. There could be no better example than this, of just how far temperament ruled Mrs. G.’s teaching. She realized herself that he needed to know something about his own continent, but she put America aside with a shrug,?
“It would bore me too much. Someone else will have to teach him that.”
Therefore, after she had forced into him all the geography that interested her, she proceeded, in the same manner, to pour into him Ancient History, and a strange conglomeration of facts dealing chiefly with comparative religion and the genealogies of the royal houses of Europe. Mr. H. G. Wells once dubbed the education offered in a certain American woman’s college, “canned culture.” Mrs. G. used all her energy to stuff Albert with her particular brand of “canned culture.” Remember that in the summer he did not know that America had defeated England in the War of the Revolution, had not the slightest idea of the meaning of the word “widow,” and thought that Jews, but not Episcopalians, were Christians; yet, in the early spring Mrs. G., by heroic work, made him produce another examination book of incredible perfection. This examination, written under circumstances similar to the first, represented Albert, less than nine months after his betrayal of crass ignorance, so drilled in a jargon of names and facts that he could pass off as his own, his teacher’s knowledge of the races of men and their subdivisions; the dynasties of Egypt, the achievements of each of the important rulers of Babylonia and Assyria, and the colonies of the Phoenicians; the descent of the Swedish royal family from Bernadotte, the interrelationships of the rulers of Norway, Denmark, Greece, England, Russia, and Germany, and the names of the royal houses; the definitions of monotheism and polytheism, the Hebrew, Christian, and Mohammedan religions as examples of the former, the chief difference between the Christian and the Hebrew religions, the two branches of the latter,?orthodox and reformed,?the rise of the Greek Orthodox Church from the Roman Catholic Church, the difference between the two in their stand on the celibacy of the priesthood, Martin Luther and the Reformation, the names of the more aristocratic Protestant denominations, and the significance of the words Jehovah, Allah, mosque, synagogue, pagoda, Brahma, Buddha, Madonna, Osiris, Isis, Zoroaster, and Lucifer. Such a catalogue may stand without comment.
All through the autumn weeks spent together in this abnormal concentration upon geography and upon each other, there grew up between teacher and pupil a new emotional relationship. One December afternoon Mrs. G., muffled in a white angora sweater like a big white cat, lay in the long chair As usual, Albert was with her. One of his black moods had drawn out her abundant sympathy to meet his discouragement. For her understanding and interest, he was boyishly grateful, and unconsciously, too, he was attracted to her by intense physical and psychic forces. So, when he was leaving her, he exclaimed, “This is what we do at home,” and suddenly stooped and kissed her, as she said, afterwards in her queer idiom, “middle in the mouth.” She told us of this quietly, with a sort of surprised tenderness in her voice. The boy had touched in this woman, alone in a foreign country, cut off from all the claims of kinship and of friends, her deep craving for affection. This hunger for affection was the exact complement to the boy’s own full capacity for devotion, that reservoir of hero worship which had first found an outlet in his sporadic attachment to Mr. A. In the intense concentration of the weeks when the two were perpetually working together,?weeks in which the very success of the work was dependent upon the possession of the mind of Albert by the dynamic mind of Mrs. G.,?two impulses met. The boy’s adoration, which increased rapidly from the day he so impulsively kissed her, might be studied as “adolescent love,” intensified, like all his adolescent impulses. But, in the woman, too, there was the same hyper-development of emotional energy, so that she met his passionate outburst of “adolescent love” with an emotion quite as intense. From this interplay of emotion, there developed a relationship imbued with all the violence, all the lack of restraint, all the fineness, and all the pathos of their two natures. At first, of course, the quality of Mrs. G.’s affection for the boy was, in part at least, genuinely maternal. She patted his curly black head and called him “Baby.” Albert, however, lacked conspicuously any sense of the respect due his elders and was, moreover, thoroughly familiar in his own home with the flagrant use of endearing epithets. To her diminutive endearment, therefore, he responded promptly with “Petsy,” and whereas he had heretofore always spoken of her as “the Madam” or the “boss,” he now substituted unblushingly the phrase, “my pet.” Indeed, it was not long before he robbed her name for him of its maternal significance by using it affectionately himself. To our amazement we heard the fifteen-year-old boy call this big domineering woman “Baby” and she did not resent it. “Never mind, Baby; I’ll fix it for you,” he would exclaim with reassuring familiarity. Less than six months before, when Albert had presumed to call out in frank admiration for her smart street costume, “Tres joli, tres jaunti!” we had seen her lean from the basket wagon to flick him indignantly with the whip. Now they had swung from their first antagonism to such a remarkable unanimity that she did more than tolerate his familiarity. She accepted it with an air of pleased indulgence.
Albert came from a demonstrative family and of a demonstrative race. He was, too, at an adolescent period when impulses are peculiarly strong and inhibitions few. Mrs. G. herself was very unlike the Anglo-Saxon peoples. She knew little restraint in the indulgence of her desires, and less in the expression of her opinions and feelings. Nitikin, the Russian doctor whom Hugh Walpole has so keenly interpreted in “The Dark Forest,” refers to this characteristic: “We are primitive people. We do what we want to do, feel what we want to feel, and show quite frankly our feelings. We have simply a skin less than you.” But this was not Russia! To the rest of us, Americans, instinct with reserve, bred to recoil from sentimentality, their frank exchange of caresses, their absurd bandying of pet names was repellent, disquieting. “I do not understand you Americans,” Mrs. G. would protest, “In Russia it ees good to have emotions. In America it seems it ees a crime.” The new relationship between teacher and pupil, however, did not retard their work. It increased, if possible, her interest in what she called “civilizing” Albert, and reinforced in him the will to make himself conform to her pattern.
We have seen, how, by her insistent supervision through the summer and fall, Mrs. G. made him more acceptable in appearance and behavior. Now that it was no longer a mortification to her to be seen with the boy, now that she took even an affectionate pleasure in being with him, she extended this “civilizing” process to his conduct outside the house. Often they lunched together at L’Aiglon or the Bellevue, so that Albert might learn to carry himself in such places with the indifferent ease of a man of the world. She took him to one of the most popular dancing academies in the city, where, with marked facility, he learned the one-step, the foxtrot, the hesitation, and the maxixe. With these lessons supplemented by much practice at home, he was soon able to dance with ease and accuracy almost all of the intricate steps popular in that dance-mad winter of 1915.
That winter, too, Mrs. G. engaged for them season seats in the parquet circle at the Academy on Saturday afternoons for Elmendorf’s travel lectures. On those days, Albert, conspicuously conscious of his role as escort, never failed to buy violets for her from a street vender. The first night that she took him out with her, he came down to supper, scrupulously shaved and brushed, displaying with a lordly air a white tie, the badge of his new dignity as escort for the evening. The lady came a little later, her full, beautiful shoulders showing cream-white in an evening gown of gleaming jet. Albert’s dark eyes were fascinated by the sheer beauty of her, by her skin which was dull opaque whiteness, by her gown which was black, ashimmer with light. That evening he said unreproved far more than “Tres joli, tres jaunti.” I do not doubt that, as the two sat together in their seats in the fourth row at the Academy, his thoughts were far more with the glory of the lady beside him than with the causes of the Great War as set forth in debate by Mr. Cecil Chesterton and Herr Heinz Ewers.
Albert was required to write exhaustive accounts of these expeditions, and r?sum?s of these lectures in compositions, and in letters to his father. It was a hard and fast rule of the school that compositions and letters should represent, in so far as possible, independent work, but Mrs. G. overrode all rules. She would recount the experiences of the day or evening, the substance of the lecture or debate to each one of us in turn, first having taken good care that Albert was there to listen. By the time he sat down to write he had her account, her impressions and her prejudices well in mind. He had her, also, at his side, to suggest, prompt, and prod him on. In his first draft, whole clauses and sentences were stricken out and the pages generously interlined with sentences of her own, often with a little twist of phrase that was subtly foreign. This “edited” version was copied as the boy’s final production. The following selected quotations from Albert’s account of the Chesterton-Ewers debate are evidence of how much of his work was actually his teacher’s. They furnish an extreme illustration of a marked tendency in untrained teachers of backward children, unconsciously to merge their own work with that of their pupils.
First draft as written by Albert: Presently Dr Ewers was introduced to us and we were told he was the author of several books and of witty sayings. This German orator is about six feet tall with one of these glass things which he kept on his face right near his eye. I’m afraid if this Prussian had left that behind he could not speak. Mr. Cecil Chesterton began his speech. He said that if a Servian kills the Crown prince does that mean war should be started? AustriaHungary took it badly so she declared war on Russia. The Germans got in the wrong. The Englishman spoke for thirty minutes and then sat down. Second draft as “edited” by Mrs. Gand copied by Albert: Presently Dr Ewers was introduced to us and we were told that he was a poet and the author of several books, having a very high reputation in Germany. This German orator is about six feet tall. He wore a monocle ?a thing so characteristic for the “Prussian Junkers,” and was very carefully dressed in latest fashion. Mr. Cecil Chesterton was the first one to speak. He said there was no excusable reason for Germany to declare war on Russia because a Bosnian had killed the Austrian crown prince. That there was absolutely no evidence for the Servian government having anything to do with this assassination. He said furthermore that the situation between Austria-Hungary and Servia was just getting settled in a friendly way with Russia as a mediator when Germany, Austria-Hungary’s ally, declared war with Russia. He gave an intelligent, clear, strong speech. The thirty minutes were over. THE INTERPLAY OF PERSONALITY. 169 The people were anxious to hear what Dr Ewers’s opinion was about the war, but they don’t know yet. We had all been curious to hear Dr Ewers’s defence for Germany. We got no satisfaction. There is probably no defence for Germany in starting this world war.
These illustrations, like the examinations in geography and in history show that Mrs. G. held Albert to too high a standard. The composition she wished him to write could only be written by an adult in whose mind were idea-complexes such as his education thus far had not even attempted to form, and certain powers of analysis which he could never possess. If need be, she would write such a composition for him. In very truth, she made everything that was hers, his,?her culture, her will, her mind, her prejudices. Indeed, she so dominated, enveloped him by the spell of her personality that he absorbed something of her ideas, even of her ability. Her method was scientifically, pedagogically unsound, fraudulent if you will. Nevertheless, when she thus pooled their resources and made Albert do work far above his own performance level, she carried him along with her, not to the impossible level she presented as his, but to a level a degree higher than his own. He could not do alone the work she exhibited as his, yet before she was through with him, the quality of the letter he wrote spontaneously more than equalled the work of most normal boys of his age. By sharing with him not only the force of her will, but even a portion of her niind, she lifted him, little by little.
This woman so gripped Albert with her will, so enveloped him with her mind and emotions, that for the time he seemed to have no separate existence. The consequent emotional tension which filled the house rose, through the winter, in a tempestuous crescendo. Neither love nor life ever ran smoothly with Mrs. G. Monotony was anathema to her; she lived only for crises. Though these are commonly the exception and not the rule of life, in the house with Mrs. G. crises came in rapid succession. With a veritable genius for manufacturing “scenes,” she could magnify a trifling incident till it loomed darkly as evidence of the most abysmal stupidity, the most unspeakable “commonness,” the basest ingratitude, or the most treacherous deceit. As often as every fortnight, she worked up one of these passionate scenes with Albert. No woman was ever more capricious with her lover. She would lavish upon him the full abundance of her sentimental affection; then, in a flash, violently break with him. The occasion for such a break was always trivial,?the misplay of a single card in a game of “Flinch,” or a kiss bestowed at the wrong moment. A thing which she was accustomed to overlook or to invite, she would at another time seize as an excuse for throwing him aside with voluble invective. She vented her passion in stormy monologues, proclaiming Albert’s baseness incessantly to everyone in the house. The boy himself she treated with cruellest scorn. Declaring that never, never would she teach him again, she handed him over to whichever teacher happened, for the moment, to be high in her favor.
At such times, the boy, too young to know how transient were her moods, yet precocious in the intensity of his adolescent emotions, was dropped from the seventh heaven to the lowest hell. He grew, in an hour, pale, sodden with weeping, the smooth glossiness of his black hair reverting to its original, unkempt state. He studied harder than ever, but to no purpose. After an entire day spent in trying to learn ten lines about Arabia, he dropped his rumpled head upon his arms, and, with a choking sob, cried out, “I don’t know any of it. I can’t even read the words. There’s nothing in my mind but Mrs. G. I’ll kill myself if she doesn’t teach me.” After one day, or sometimes two, of abandonment to this violent discharge of the overflow of her emotions, of exultation in her power to reduce another human being to such desperate misery, there would come, without fail, a complete reconciliation. This would be effected in the course of a long session, during which, for hours, we could hear the ceaseless murmur of low voices. At length, Albert would emerge, chastened, abjectly penitent for the enormity of his unknown crime, and bound to her more indissolubly than ever by the immensity of his relief at being lifted again from such agony into the light of her favor. Mrs. G. too, would appear, much subdued, the excited glitter gone from her blue eyes, and the amplitude of her wrath transformed into the generosity of her forgiveness. Each crisis plumbed deeper into their emotional reserve so that the stormy separations grew more agonizing and the intervals of unanimity more passionately intense.
In May of that year, the month of Albert’s sixteenth birthday, the school moved to Atlantic City for six weeks. There, in a cottage by the sea, the tide of emotion rose to its height.
Mrs. G. taught more violently than ever. In the brown, rectangular living room on the first floor, the mornings were clamorous with Greek History, and drill in diction. No Fourth Grade Speller for Mrs. G., but words such as arbitrate, persecution, annulled, embellishment, and aristocracy! Albert sat at the heavy mission table, while she ramped up and down the room, hurling instruction at him. A teacher, who retreated with her pupils to the third floor, found that even closed doors could not shut out the volume of Mrs. G.’s voice. Only on a stormy day was there peace, when the pound of the waves against the seawall muffled the uproar of her teaching. In their work at the seashore, they were to each other more than teacher and pupil. Albert called her “Sonia,” the familiar name of her childhood. The exclamatory comments in his sentence book, written in her sharp linear hand, show how much she, too, injected the personal note into their pedagogic relationship. Restore. Can you restore him to his senses?
Criticism: If it means you?No! Permanent. Sonia is a permanent friend of mine if I behave myself. Defect. No, my brains are not defective. Criticism: They most certainly are! Strife. I never strife with Mrs. G. as she is always right. Criticism: If you dared you would! Strife is a noun. Strive is a verb. * Implicit. I have implicit faith in Soma’s promise never to abandon me. Despondent. Do you know how to spell “despondent”? Criticism: Smart! I am very despondent as a result of your behavior yesterday. Sound. When I am as mentally sound as Mrs. G. I shall be very happy. That Mrs. G.’s own English was not always sufficiently idiomatic to make this work in diction altogether profitable, is shown by the following sentences: Are you adapted for your business? Wilson is not willing to arbitrate with Germany any longer. Instantly as you know that you finally have to give in you are foolish if you don’t yield to my wishes. She persisted, too, in applying the , French rule to the use of the Possessive and taught Albert to write, “Mr. Smith’s, the American ambassador, hat”! Her insistence on continental manners, her foreign pronunciation of geographical names and her teaching of uuidiomatic English, positively expatriated him, making him share even her uncertain nationality.
In Atlantic City, the waves of her passionate invective broke over the boy with ever-increasing frequency and violence. She could be heard to bellow in a voice that carried to the top of the house above the lash of the sea, “I’ve had pets before and I’ve topped them for far less than this.” However, she could no longer bring herself to banish him. She reviled him, yet she kept him with her. Banishment had made study impossible for him, but this new method tightened in the boy the tension of his effort to please and resulted in an even swifter acquisition of knowledge.
Thus, the increased force of Mrs. G.’s teaching raised to a higher power Albert’s already almost superhuman effort to learn. One day, when he had displeased her, she left him alone for the afternoon, promising his restoration to favor if, on her return, he had completed a very long assignment of work. To learn anything by himself was a Herculean task for Albert, but Mrs. G. as an incentive was stronger than his abhorrence of concentrated application. So, in the quiet house, spurred on by the hope of her favor, he committed to memory a list of battles with their dates, the facts in two pages of history, and the definitions of fifteen words. When, after three hours absence, Mrs. G. returned, he was raised to the pinnacle of bliss by her praise.
Except when, with strong, sure strokes, he swam out into the sea, Albert was with “Sonia” nearly every moment of his waking hours. All morning they worked together; at table he sat next to her, and, once or twice, when she was in bed, he wheedled her into having his dinner sent upstairs on the tray with hers. In the afternoon, if it was pleasant, they strolled together along the boardwalk, or whirled down Atlantic Avenue in a jitney to their favorite movingpicture theater. All evening, if they did not go again to the theater, Mrs. G. talked eloquently, ostensibly to the teachers, but in reality for the benefit of Albert. Sunday they sat on the brown mission settee with a litter of newspapers around them, and all day she explained the news to him, paragraph by paragraph, in her endeavor to make the boy, who a year ago had not understood a printed account of a ball game, comprehend such subtle diplomatic moves as Britain’s stroke to hold her Mohammedan subjects by setting up a rival Caliphate in Egypt. As they read, she filled him with all her prejudice against Germany, England, and President Wilson, all her admiration for France, Russia, and gallant Belgium. Although she wanted Albert perpetually at her side, she was never quite happy to be alone with him. To fill her cup of pleasure to the brim, she must be able to display his adoration before an appreciative audience. It was not her way to consult the inclination of others. Whether or not it pleased us, we were required to sit through weary sessions of newspaper reading, to watch innumerable moving-picture films while she explained to the boy every detail of the plot, to eat countless undesired dishes of ice cream or seafood suppers,?all because it pleased her “baby child.” If, by a rare chance, Albert had gone to bed, or for a welcome moment was out of sight, we were allowed to talk only of him, of the tragedy of his unappreciative family, of the naive sweetness of his character, of what he had learned, and most of all, of the purely childlike quality of his devotion to her.
That spring Mrs. G. had taken extraordinary care in choosing her costumes and Albert’s. One afternoon in particular stands out. The two of them came up the boardwalk, illuminated by the bright glare of the May sunlight thrown back from the blue stretch of ocean. She was in immaculate white, her blouse of fine figured lawn, daintily tucked, and ruffled about the wrists and throat. She wore a little close hat of cerise, rimmed with tiny roses, and carried a parasol that gleamed cherry red in the sunshine. Albert, in a Well-cut blue Norfolk suit, and a new straw hat, the nineteenth which had been tried on him in the London Shop, hung over her with an air of infatuated absorption. She looked very young, there in the light and the gay color, and he all of twenty-five. Together, they seemed as gay as the sunlight and the blue sea. But Albert liked her best in a very different gown?one of heavy black taffeta with a wide, lustrous stripe of black satin. It fell from the waist line in a long, full overskirt which swung far out behind as she walked. Her plump white arms showed to the shoulder through soft, full sleeves of transparent black chiffon. In this gown she was, at once, dignified, demure, provocative. All Albert’s Oriental sensuousness rose in full tide to meet the appeal of her luxuriant physical attraction. In the midst of a meal, the boy would spring from his chair, and indulge in the most extravagant demonstrations of affection. She would put him aside weakly with a “There, there, child!”, and then give in to his plea, “I can’t help it, Baby, you are so beautiful!”
Such passionate demonstrations made even Mrs. G. pause. The “baby child” was making love to her. She knew that it must he stopped, yet it was precisely such emotional dissipation that made life interesting to her. Because she did not wish to stop it, she professed that she could not. She who held him in the hollow of her hand, she who, when her dynamic will was roused, could create in him a new behavior, a new mind, and new emotions, now for the first time admitted herself powerless.
By much voluble protestation, she endeavored to convince herself and others, that the boy did not know his affection was other than filial. She declared that it would be a crime to wake him rudely; that he believed his demonstrative caresses to be those of a child. Yet it seemed she must be aware of how specious were the premises on which she based this conclusion she so much desired, Albert, the chubby youngster in knickerbockers who had come to us eighteen months before, was square and clean, yet not unsophisticated. At the end of June, when they came up from Atlantic City, the wave of their emotion was so high that it was bound to break. Through the nine months since October, the nervous tension had waxed tauter and tauter. It snapped at last in Mrs. G., her tremendous physique unable to stand the strain she had put upon it. At first, for a fortnight, she was in a private hospital in the city. There, in the violent reaction of a nervous breakdown, she blamed Albert for being the cause of her collapse, and refused to speak to him on the telephone or to see him. She even expressed the hope that no one else would waste time and strength in teaching him, since it was totally unappreciated. After a brief and partial reconciliation she left for two months’ recuperation in the mountains. For perhaps two weeks, or a little longer, Albert went about in a state of the deepest despair, mourning, in pallor and gloom, for his “beautiful Baby.” Then he ceased to speak of her and settled down to work quietly and happily.
Miss M., who taught him with as much interest and devotion as Mrs. G. and with more quietness, found him capable of doing work such as is assigned to twelve or thirteen-year-old children. This precisely correlated with his performance level as indicated by the Binet Test, the Ayres Spelling Scale, the Courtis Arithmetic Tests, and the Trabue Language Scale A. His formboard index (19 sec.) was slightly below this level, and the Witmer cylinders (50 sec.) possibly above. In the previous summer his level of performance in school work was only that of an eight or nine-year-old boy.
Miss M. worked with Albert chiefly on arithmetic, composition, and grammar. In June, Mrs. G. had made a strenuous and nearly futile attempt to teach him arithmetic, particularly decimals. She counted in some foreign tongue?Swedish, Finnish, Russian?or whatever was her native language, and insisted on various foreign devices such as writing the digits after the decimal point in smaller figures than those before. She found it difficult to translate her work into English, and the strange new devices she forced upon him naturally confused the boy.
With Miss M.’s lucid teaching, and with the very genuine accession of mental ability that had come to him in the preceding twelve months, Albert advanced rapidly in arithmetic. In September, 1915, Miss M. stated (and her word is to be relied upon): “He has had review of problems in fundamental operations, and at the present time seldom fails in problems of this kind. He knows fractions, decimals, percentage, profit and loss, commission, and simple interest fairly well. He has not had the 6-per-cent method or any short cuts. He has not had much oral work.” Of language, she stated at the same time: “He can diagram sentences very well, can analyze sentences, does paraphrasing but finds it rather difficult, reproduces stories about famous characters in history, such as Joan of Arc, and Cyrus of Persia, and shows great improvement in English when asked to describe something.”
Probably the two months that Albert worked with Miss M. were the quietest, happiest, and most normal, of all the twenty-one that he was with us. He could count on her interest, affection, and justice, and, in the now tranquil house, was able to use the increased ability to concentrate, and the new image complexes which he had gained through the year. He never made the superhuman effort to learn which had enabled him to touch the impossible in his work for Mrs. G., but his progress was steadier and more normal. His constitution, too, splendidly young and strong, had stood the strain which undermined Mrs. G.’s extraordinary physique. Miss B. and Dr Witmer together, by their careful diagnostic teaching, had laid the foundation of Albert’s progress. At the end, Miss M. had rounded out the work. With their aid Mrs. G. had almost touched her goal. In October, Albert was to enter the eighth grade of an eastern boys’ school of good standing. In ?ne year, he had been lifted approximately four years on the education scale, and had made an even more conspicuous rise on the civilization scale. He still hovered amongst the dubiates, around the threshold of social sufficiency, but Mrs. G., by the sheer force ?f her catyclysmic personality, had raised him to that threshold. Albert was neither very intelligent nor very proficient; it was doubtful whether he could last even through the first year of high school. Failure in high school is not, however, an indisputable indication of imbecility. If he could control his “freshness,” and his nervous, flustered behaviour, Albert, with his handsome features, his dancing, and the veneer of social polish, would be “sufficient” in nouveau riche Jewish society. In the business career his father designed for him, he would almost certainly fail, quite as much from lack of conformity, because he was scatter-brained, and unable to apply himself, as from inferior ability; but in a more modest position, he could undoubtedly earn at least a meager livelihood. Morally, he emerged from the emotional experience, still fundamentally honest, clean, and square. His ideas of truth and temperance were a little less fine because of his contact with her; his ideals of life lifted a little above the sordid money bags. How far her abnormal emotional stimulation had established in him a dangerous psychosis, or how far it served as a katharsis for the over-developed sex-consciousness he displayed when he first came to us, only the years of his life may reveal.
It would, indeed, require a fine adjustment of the scales to measure whether those twenty-one months counted for good or for ill in the boy’s life.
The story of Albert as we know it has been told in so far as it touched him vitally. There was, however, in the last of September, before he left for his new school, another brief fortnight with Mrs. G. Their devotion to each other appeared to be as deep as ever, but quieter, less conspicuously demonstrative, and tinged with a certain seriousness by the thought of their approaching separation. That separation brought more real grief to Mrs. G. than it did to the boy. On the last evening, however, he declared that he could not be away from “Sonia” for a single precious moment.
The next morning, he left. Mrs. G. went with him half way to New York. She wore her lustrous black gown, and a broadwinged hat of black illusion. Her face, since her illness, was thinner, more delicate; and her clear, dark blue eyes softened to a singular gentleness. Never had she seemed so pretty, so illusive, so instinct with womanly charm.
As to the handsome, dark-eyed boy, well-groomed, frank and courteous in his farewell, it was difficult to realize that, not two years before, he had come into our house, a “fresh,” unkempt, overfed youngster squeezed into shabby tweed knickerbockers and a Buster Brown collar. There had been little peace in that house since he came into it, but we saw him drive away that late September morning, with genuine regret, for, withal that he had tormented us, he had won our affection, by the quality of his boyish spirit.
Nine months later, Albert wrote to Dr Witmer from his new school: Mr dear Dr Witmer:?
I feel highly honored to receive your kind letter which I assure you was appreciated.
It certainly was extremely nice of Mr. D. to deliver my message. … I did not know he was from the “red and blue” until it was announced at the close of supper… . He said he knew you quite well and from then on, he was a good friend of mine. We made an agreement to see each other at the close of the Y. M. C. A. I have only missed one of these meetings, that I could possibly attend throughout the year. I do this because I want to follow the right track. Dr Witmer, I must confess to you that you have practically saved my life. What I mean by this is, that if I had never gone to your wonderful little school and gotten acquainted with your enthusiastic faculty I know my progress would have been fatal. I would have then turned out to be?well, you know the rest. Yes, Dr Witmer, I can readily recall those hot summer days when you, with the aid of Miss B., tried to penetrate those simple examples into my mind. I remember when you tried your utmost to teach me the definitions of such words as “obtain” and “retain.” I also recall the prose (at the end of each spelling lesson), which was given to me to learn by memory. It was considered good tf I learnt about two lines per hour. I cannot see how you could stand it! Anyhow you put me on the right track which I thank you many times over for. In this case, “thank,” is a very mild word.
Tomorrow we play Penn Freshmen base-ball here. I won’t use so much ‘lung power” if I might call it so, as I have done in the previous games. I can’t say anything against Pennsylvania. I remember when I used to talk about nothing except “New York.” That was nothing except my darn conceit. Please excuse the slang. Miss B. taught me what conceit was. I mean the definition. Here’s the way it went: “Conceit is having a high opinion of one’s 8elf,” said Miss B. “What does it mean?” asked Miss B. What does what mean? was my silly question. Why conceit, she said. Oh! conceit? “Why it means?let’s take a bicycle ride this afternoon and see if we can beat our?” ‘You are the worst boy I have ever taught, etc.” Well, Miss B. is honest. I wonder if she would think that of me this day. … I remember, and will never forget (as well as I know I will be seventeen in eleven minutes and one second) the school with the various people and environment.
I have been working hard at my studies all day so that I will have more success in my final exams which are given within two weeks. I am most unfortunate in my exams. They are what bring my monthly marks down. Thank goodness that the monthly exams only count one third of the final mark. The lowest mark I have had in any subject this year was 65 per cent. I am glad that I will be in high school next year. It was a hard battle to get there… . Do take good care of yourself and don’t work too hard. Please give my best wishes to all, keeping a very large share for yourself. Do not write me except at your convenience. Again, Dr Witmer, I thank you for all you have done. I am, as ever, your good friend, Albert. About the same time, in May, 1916, Dr Witmer received the following letter from an instructor in the school Albert was then attending: Dr Lightner Witmer, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa. Dear Dr Witmer:? I am very glad indeed to give you my opinion of Albert, and also an idea as to his school work here.
Albert has told me of being with you and has often spoken very highly you and your school. This noon he was very happy when he came and showed me a letter he had received from you.
Albert’s actions are not normal, and he is the butt for the jokes of the boys. ; ? - He will probably pass most of his grammar school work this year, but it is doubtful if he will last in the third form (which corresponds to the fresh178 THE PSYCHOLOGICAL CLINIC. man year ih high school) next year. It may be of interest to note that the man in charge of the lower school told me today that Albert has, in his opinion, almost reached his limit in school work but will probably make a successful business man. This from a Yale Phi Beta Kappa man with several years teaching experience… .
In March, 1917, ten months after the two letters quoted above were received, Albert wrote again, a letter not as perfect as the first in its penmanship. My dear Miss S.:?
Even though I have not had much of a chance to write you today, I made up my mind to at least start a letter.
Yes, I received your very nice letter and I am ashamed of myself for not haying answered it before now. … I have been working, and hard, too. Maybe you wonder why it is I have been so busy? Well I am an awful “bonehead” as they call it, in my studies, and I am making a big effort to succeed so far as an education is concerned. I spend more time on my work than any boy that I know does but still many show better results. Yet, there are some that are worse than I am. … I wish somehow I could be classified where I belong, but the chances are very slim. I am taking four subjects not including Bible. They are: Algebra, English, History, and Latin. The two latter are my hardest. I certainly agree with Mrs. W. that Latin should be abolished… . We completed our term’s work about a week ago and then I was passing in everything. After the exams I only passed in two subjects, Math and English. I get very nervous during exam time and those marks never fail to be a menace to me. Bible, I have not found difficult, but let me tell you a secret. I have never studied a lesson and I got away with 85 per cent average for this year… .
What do you think about the war? It certainly is fierce. From the little I see of the papers we are bound to have a part in this conflict. … To be frank with you, I am not anxious to go to war, but if they need me, and I have my father’s consent I will make also a good target for the Germans. As I suppose you know, Dad is a German and I really wouldn’t want to fight against a country from which a very close kinsman as he was born. Secondly, I am the only son and Father has been waiting for me to get the education and experience so that he can place part of his business in my hands, confidentially. My third reason is that I haven’t the heart to kill people, especially in a bayonette fight. Maybe if I were over there I should feel different. There is a big possibility of being killed and I suppose it would bring more sorrow than Father could stand. What’s more, my greatest ambition is to make good. I will be eighteen in May, and if more men are called, I will fight for America.
No, by no means have I forgotten my dear friends over in Pennsy… . Do the children pass much time at the Pastime Theater or have they in past times? How is H. getting on, and all the rest of my companions, or “socii” as we call them in Latin? Just displaying some of my brilliancy! I often think of the children and the nice times we spent together. Don’t be surprised if you see me some day, on a visit up at the old school once more. Might as well close now before the sun rises (son if you prefer). Good luck! Your sincere friend, Albert.
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