As many of the more specific psychic traits of puberty are more fully considered in later chapters, it will serve our purpose to enumerate here only a few.
I. Inner absorption and reverie is one marked characteristic of this age of transition. Who has not had spells of mental in- volution and absent-mindedness, when thoughts went " wool- gathering '* and the soul was haunted by automatic presenta- 3131 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE tions that take the reins from the will and lead us far away in a rapt state, now reminiscent, now anticipatory, into a world of dreams or ghosts? As we muse and brood, we seem to lapse to some unknown past that '' hath elsewhere had its setting," of which " the present seems a mere semblance," or to peer far into the future and *' see the beauty of the world and all the glory that shall be." In these weird seizures, we lose touch with the world and move about " in a world not realized." Sometimes these states suggest the intellectual aura or volumi- nous mentation of epilepsy, and the day-dreamer goes about dazed like a somnambulist, and should be admitted to be legally irresponsible, because every act proves an alibi for attention. This may be the germ of some ancillary personality and lead to a double housekeeping of consciousness, or it may be in- cipient lunacy and suggest Lamb's remark to Coleridge, that no one knows the grandeur of fancy till he has been crazy. It may issue in the exotic and traditional states so religiously re- vered in the case of neurotic girls, and constitutes, as Partridge ' has shown, one of the charms of many drugs and intoxicants. This preliminary expatiation of the soul over a vast realm, actual and possible, of life and mind, somewhere within which it will lay down the limits of its personality, is good for the strong and healthful, but dangerous for weak or belastet youth in this callow, pin-feather age. When we are wise enough to con- trol *' mental metabolism," we may be able to prescribe the place and function of these " voluminous mental states " to fit each individual need. The normal soul always soon comes back to the world of reality, perhaps wakes with a start, or may slowly ebb back, and is as powerless to revisit this subthalamic realm at will as it is to see stars or sea phosphorescence in sun- shine.^ As Browne has well shown, if this efflorescence of medi- tativeness or introspection has been too rank, prolonged, or fre- quent, the subject may fall to thinking on emerging from them, as Blood did on emerging from the influence of drugs, or Davy from the long inhalation of dilute gas, or the hashish eater, that nothing is real but thought, feeling, and sensation, and thus he * Studies in the Psychology of Alcohol, by George E. Partridge. Am. Jour, of Psy., April, 1900, vol. ii, pp. 318-376.
' See James Crichton- Browne's Dreamy Mental States. Cavendish Lecture, DISEASES OF BODY AND MIND 3^3 may be predisposed to become an adept in the occultism of epis- temology, if not solipsisism; or he may lose the certainty or even sense of his personal identity and pinch himself to know if he is awake, wonder if he really lives, who he is, and where, and if the actual world is really real.
2. Puberty is the birthday of the imagination. This has its morning twilight in reverie, and if brilliant and vivid, supple- ments every limitation, makes the feeble athletic, the beggar rich, knows no limitations of time or place, and is, in a word, the totalizing faculty. In its world all wishes are actualized, and hundreds of our returns, elsewhere reported, show that in many sane children, their own surroundings not only shrivel but become dim and shadowy compared with the realm of fancy. This age is indeed sadly incomplete without illusions, and if the critical faculties which are later to slowly decompose them are not developed, the youth is rapt, apart, perhaps oblivi- ous of his environment, and unresponsive to its calls, because his dreams have passed beyond his nascent and inadequate power of control and become obsessions. Many states that become trancoidal and absorptive are best described as the drunkenness of fancy, a state which may become habitual and passionate, but which, true to its secret nature, is unrevealed to others save in certain katatonic attitudes and a clumsiness to mundane reactions, such as Plato ascribes to the true philoso- pher. Here, near the verge of normality, belong many of the long-continued stories, imaginary companions, fancied but perhaps zoologically impossible animals, and romances, of which the maker is always the center, which are at this time intensely real, but, obeying the law of all psychic phenomena of pubes- cence, are transitory, so that scenes are always soon shifted for another play.
The ingenuous youth sees visions or dreams dreams some- what according as he is ear- or eye-minded. The optical centers are especially sensitized to new harmonies of form and espe- cially color; the mode of thought is pictorial and by images; and the ear now feels music and harmony, is attuned to sound, and is amazingly sensitive to voices, tone-color, inflections, etc. Both the auditory and optic areas come into new connections with thought, and speech music, phonisms, photisms, and prob- 3 14 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE ably number forms and exceptional psychic structures are now developed. Thought and the two higher senses are never so vivid and intense because they are just ready to bifurcate, each to lead its own life, so that the two are now peculiarly liable to be confused, intellectual processes to take sense forms, and vice versa. It is for this reason that hallucinations, false sight, and especially hearing, is most common; but in brains tainted by morbidity the faculty for discriminating mental from sense- forms is undeveloped, and dreamy conditions may become habitual, so that we see here the natural budding of insane per- ceptions. Perhaps the persistence in colleges of that form of critical philosophy, which devotes itself to discriminating the real from the phenomenal in sense-perception, is a hyper- trophied relic of a long travel of the race to maintain this distinction for the practical purposes of life and is necessary for those who require years of sani faction to fully recover from the strain of pubic aberrations. Our returns give abundant illustration of an attitude of early pubescence when the gracious lies of fancy shade by strictly imperceptible gradations into the clear light of objective fact.
3. As the child's absorption of objects slowly gives place to consciousness of self, reflectiveness often leads to self-criti- cism and consciousness that may be morbid. He may become captious and censorious of himself or others. Ultimate ques- tions that present the mysteries of things — why was I born? who made God? what is soul, matter, good? — press for an- swers. Conscience becomes so oversensitive that " anxiety about doing right exhausts the energy that should go to action, trifles are augmented to mountains, or debate with oneself as to what is right is carried so far as to paralyze decision," and the " natural hue of resolution is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought." ^ Such boys rewrite a page rather than erase a false cross or dot, will never use a caret, stop in plowing if a single weed is missed, or in harvesting if a single head of wheat is lost. Details are exaggerated, irritability and pride of ap- pearance and ideals of absolute perfection are seen. A girl * G. A. Coe: The Morbid Conscience of Adolescents. Trans. 111. Soc. for Child Study. Ill, 2, p. 99.
DISEASES OF BODY AND MIND 3^5 would never take a pin or pick a flower without asking, or say- ing thank you for each flower. The sHghtest hint or frown of disapproval by others causes depression. A youth could never decide the smallest matter promptly without arguing the pros and cons. Another was horrified at flitting fancies of crimes he might possibly commit. Sometimes imperative ideas crop out or uncontrollable fears arise. Others struggle intensely with secret religious doubts. Innocent things are sometimes magnified into sins of deepest dye. " Should I become a min- ister, a missionary, have a warm bed when others have a cold one, etc.," and even more trivial queries may become morbidly intense. The avoidance of fatigue, an adviser who really understands the case, and fit religious training, are cardinal needs. To love and care for these awkward, often unattractive neophytes is a specialty, and I believe is one of the types of genius which is never found among those who have extermi- nated in themselves too successfully the impulsion of youth.
4. Another trait is the overassertion of individuality. This is germane to a state of nature when the child no longer needs the parental protection but, in primitive life and warm coun- tries, breaks away and shifts for himself. Hitherto he has been the center in his environment, has been fed, sheltered, and taught, and with all the flush of morning, and springtide hopes, goes out to maintain subsistence, and ultimately to become the center of another family; all this before the longer apprentice- ship to life which civilization has enforced was known. It is the time for large views and plans; life problems now press upon him; ambition and self-aflirmation are never of such high select- ive value. His ego must be magnified and all in the new envi- ronment subordinated to it. Strife and labor, intensified and prolonged, are imperative. It is now or never, the impulsive- ness of youth can not wait and its ambition is never so exorbi- tant. Now, instead of head hunting, winning a new name, wrestling alone with spirits or other of the drastic initiations of savages, the civilized and more sedentary youth must vent his intensification of personal feeling in dreams of greatness — and who has not at this season been prince, millionaire, hero, walked with the great of earth or heaven, in reverie? Perhaps the very repressions of modern life have given added color and 3l6 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE range to the ideal. The youth's powers are now tested, and who knows but he may become the greatest among men? The whole soul is now protensive, and there is no life but in the realm of the possible, for the real is not yet. The sane man burns or distils these vaporings, and they are unsuspected to those about him, and fade like shadows as the sun of reality rises, or are relegated to the realm of poetry and fiction. But if the reductives are undeveloped, or the energy of production overintense, they appear as delusions of greatness, so common and so manifold in precocious dementia, or they may culminate in impudence, contradiction, and perhaps even in aggressiveness of the born criminal type, or may repel others by excessive irri- tability which becomes almost senile in pettishness and negativism, that is not only chronically cross, but that re- fuses to conform to every suggestion of friends by a contrary impulse so well characterized by Tarde in his Opposition Uni- verselle.
5. Again, in this age, when everything is most uncertain, imitation reaches its acme, if we include its psychic as well as its merely attitudinal and motor forms. Youth must ape positions, expressions, gait, and mien in order to understand, and the new psychology of imitation shows that it is the basis of the social instinct of which also this age is the springtime. Every peculi- arity is mimicked, and parodied, whether of phraseology, manner, or mood. Every youth has a more or less developed stock of phrases, acts, and postures, expressive of mimetic love, anger, fear, many occupations or vocations of infancy and old age, of the other sex, and he is plastic and suggestible to an amazing degree to everything of this kind in his environment. He catches the idiosyncrasies, accents, and inflections of teachers and fellow pupils, and reenacts incidents; a little older, he is be- mastered by the style of great authors he has read, and is an adept at dialect and the personation of national types. Thus when the precocious dement apes other patients, perhaps follow- ing them about the wards to do so, as he is prone to in echo- praxia, or repeat words in echolalia, or illustrates the automa- tism to command, so that any psychic influence about him may become a source of contagion, he is only an extreme type of what belongs to this age as one of its most integral traits, and DISEASES OF BODY AND MIND 3^7 merely lacks the higher power of coordinating it with the oppo- site motive of self-affirmation and independence.
6. Partly its imitative, and partly its pragmatic nature makes youth dramatic, fond of assuming roles and poses, of affecta- tions and mannerisms, of attitudes and special movements, ges- tures, perhaps stereotyped, that may become as significant as slang. Normally these roles succeed each other and seem to be circumnutations of the instinct to explore all the possibilities of life in feeling and expression, as well as aids to sympathetic comprehension of situations and types of character. But just as speech may lose its higher function and lapse to not only slang but even inter jectional forms, so poses may slowly be- come fixed postures, and even contractures, or a limited reper- tory of stereotyped acts may develop on a basis of the natural automatisms of Lindley.^ These manifestations are another of the characteristics of this degeneration.
7. Youth is the age of folly. Its self -consciousness makes it peculiarly susceptible to criticism and suspicion that all its acts and sayings may be ridiculous. This is especially felt for the sentiments new-born at this age. Hence, partly to disguise these, and partly from the very different propensity of lapsing to the lower plane of banality, we have silliness as a marked feature of adolescent witlings. College songs, the absurdities of cork minstrelsy, the infantilism of Mother Goose, the eccentricities of enfeebled intelligence, so strongly entrenched on the variety stage, with its exaggerated oddities, freakishness, and idiocies, foolish and funny, acting, with every kind of grimace, have frequent illustrations in the lives of normal youth, with whom all this is spontaneous and intentional. This tendency is deep- seated in our organism, as I have elsewhere ^ tried to show. But we have in the early dements copious illustrations of the ebullitions of unpremeditated and unrepressed folly, the most fatuous manifestations of which we should only laugh at were there but the power of voluntary self-restoration.
^ Some Mental Automatisms. (With G. E. Partridge.) Ped. Sem., July, ' The Psychology of Tickling, Laughing, and the Comic. Am. Jour, of Psy., 3i8 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE 8. Youth normally comes into a new attitude toward speech at puberty. The vocabulary is enlarged; meanings are re- adjusted; words seem different; there is always a new speech consciousness; interest in new terms shows that in some cases we have loquacity which becomes almost verbigeration; diaries and letters, and even stories and treatises are scribbled at great length. We often observe, too, an inverse ratio between thought and speech, so that as the former becomes scanty and indefinite the stream of words flows more copiously and smoothly; and conversely, as meanings deepen the vocabulary becomes more select and the lapse of speech and pen more restrained. In other normal types the mass of new inner experiences of thought, motive, and sentiment prompt concealment and reticence, and the subject becomes dumb-bound, silent, and perhaps seems to brood, or the range of expression is very confined and narrow. Both these tendencies have asylum out- crops in Forel's " word-salad " or Krafft-Ebing's " word- husks " on the one hand, or in mumbling and taciturnity, even speechlessness, on the other.
9. Normally this is the social age where friendships, inter- ests, and sympathies with others ought to be at their strongest and best; but many a normal youth is shy, solitary, bashful, and inclines to withdraw from the world and nourish his individ- uality in isolation. It is the age when, whatever we may hold regarding adult life, Godfernaux's ^ conception of the domi- nance of sentiment over thought is not only true, but an admi- rable characterization. No stage of life is so prone to religious perturbations, which tend to become erratic as well as extreme. Speculation is trying its callow wings; sense solicitations are in- cessant and pervasive; competition makes tense every power of mind and body; the other sex, which had hardly existed before, now turns on its subtle magnetism and establishes a new polar- ity; art, science, and literature reveal their inner charm; the great elective system of the manifold vocations beckons in many directions at once; adult life, which had before seemed hazy and afar, because boyish interests expand horizontally along their own age level, now becomes a cynosure of fascinating absorp- * Le Sentiment et la Pens^e, 1894.
DISEASES OF BODY AND MIND 319 tion; a limbo of new temptations beckons or impels to the in- dulgence of passion or in the loss of orientation to truth, duty, health; all the possible permutations and combinations of error are illustrated in the aberrations of this formative period, so that the acceptance of any classification or systemization of its phenomena would be premature, and therefore unfortunate, for both knowledge and practise.
10. Even in graver cases orientation in time and place may be unimpaired; school knowledge may be tolerably well preserved; the memory plexus, although in parts distorted and shot through by veins or delusionary eruptions, may be tolerably maintained and many old skills intact. Unfavor- able as the prognosis is for mental restoration at any stage, it is extremely favorable for life. The temperature fluctuates be- tween wide extremes and may become exceptionally low; the heart and arteries, which normally undergo such rapid changes at this stage, are often modified in their action, and perhaps cyanosis or dermography show the disorders of circulation. Pain, and especially megrim, most common in girls of fourteen or fifteen, reflects vaso-motor irregularities. Excessive wake- fulness and sleepiness, gormandizing or persistent refusal of food, which, like sadness and jollity, may alternate, exhibit the larger periodicities, while repetition, chewing, dancing, rock- ing and swaying show the disturbances of the shorter rhythms, to both of which this period is normally strangely susceptible.
As these troubles have far more mild than grave forms, we probably see the efifect of their taint in hoodlums, rowdies, hoboes, vagrants, vagabonds, dudes, spendthrifts with no money sense, ne'er-do-wells, egoists, cases of moral insanity, juvenile criminals, and hosts of people whose early life promised well, but who disappoint the expectation of fond parents and friends and drop into contentment with very humble stations, the limited duties of which they just manage to perform. For- nelli ^ has described with great vividness the disappointed ex- pectations concerning children, which is one of the sad observations of the school-teacher. We see them in the gilded » Die Kinderfehler, 1901, pp. 208 and 241.
320 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE youth who live for the moment; who can never have serious thoughts of the future; who are selfishly unmindful of others' rights, interests, convenience, pleasures; who live to eat, drink, dress, and study girls.
While we are familiar with the dangers of the overstimula- tion of school to produce precocity, we greatly need to be re- minded that the school may also be a distinct cause of arrested development, which follows directly from injudicious methods of teaching, as Dr. W. T. Harris ^ has shown. If wonted to a habit that belongs to a lower stage of development, as by over- severe drill in sense-perception or mechanical memory, the child is thereby held back on a lower plane and the normal growth of classification and the search for cause, that ought to come next, will be prevented. This is the effect of overthoroughness, ex- cessive devotion to detail, or incessant analysis of processes that never ought to be dissected, because thus we take apart what should grow together to ever higher unities. Memory is often inversely as thought, and incessant appeals to sense also dis- tract from it. Baur ^ concisely characterizes the causes and effects of premature and belated development of mind and body.
Many writers since Lelut and Nisbet have recognized a certain close analogy between genius and insanity. Both are prone to eccentricity; often have a disordered emotional basis or an insane temperament; are likely to produce inferior chil- dren; to occur in the same family, etc.^ Whether mattoids or sports, geniuses are always the apotheosis of adolescence. At this age all may be said to be normally geniuses, some in slight and some in high degree, some for a flitting moment and some for life. Then at least the approximation to genius is closest, and those who blossom into full the efflorescence of creativeness do so by virtue of the energy that nature gives only then. Plato said delusions may be good if from the gods, and at the genius period of youth many a great man has been * Education, April, 1900.
' Radestock: Genie und Wahnsinn, 1884, p. 76; Joli: Psychologic des Grandes Hommes, 1883; Lombroso; The Man of Genius; Windelband: Patho- logic der Gcnic in Holdcrlein; Morsclli: Genie Neurosi, 1892; Hirsch: Genie und Entartung, 1894, p. 340.
DISEASES OF BODY AND MIND $21 more or less melted and perhaps remolded by the heat of his own soul. According to the severe and minute criteria of the Lombroso school, perfect sanity is a painfully limited, common- place, and stupid thing, which very few of the great and good of the world have enjoyed. Like every conception based on averages, it is lacking in all individualizing traits, and has lost sight of variation. More than almost any other writer on abnormalities, this author lacks all appreciation of adolescence, which always involves more or less psychic inebriation. He fails to see that excess of normal vitality not only safely can but must explore the beginnings of many morbidities, both to know the more varied and intense possibilities of human life and to evoke the sanifying correctives, etc.
Genetic psychology, both morbid and normal, urgently / needs better tables of age liability of all psycho-neural diseases; and for its larger development and truer and deeper insight, psychiatry needs them no whit less, while at present both are handicapped — the one by the speculative and introspective tra- dition of philosophic schools and outgrown problems, and the other by too exclusive attention to clinical symptoms. The old prejudices between these departments should now give place to a new and cooperative unity.
Among the chief external causes of the diseases of this age are all those influences which tend to precocity, e. g., city life with its earlier puberty, higher death rate, wider range and greater superficiality of knowledge, observations of vice and enhanced temptation, lessened repose, incessant distraction, more impure air, greater liability to contagion, and absence of the sanifying influences and repose of nature in country life. At its best, metropolitan life is hard on childhood and especially so on pubescents, and children who can not pass these years in the country are robbed of a right of childhood that should be inalienable, and are exposed to many deleterious influences which jeopardize both health and morals. Civilization with all its accumulated mass of cultures and skills, its artifacts, its necessity of longer and severer apprenticeship and special- ization, is ever harder on adolescents, and even in a republic the submerged fraction of the population not adequate to achieve success in its ever fiercer competitions, who drop limp and ex- hausted in body and soul to a condition acknowledged by many 22 322 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE anthropologists to be essentially inferior to that of most of the lowest savages, increases, and institutions for defectives and those who live on charities multiply. Modern industrialism makes poverty ever more unendurable. When we add to these predisposing causes the small and decreasing families, the later marriages, so that more and more are born of post-mature parents and thus physiologically tend to precocity; the over- nurture of only children who are so prone to be spoiled and ripened still earlier by unwise fondness; the mixture of distinct ethnic stocks that increase the ferments of adolescence by mul- tiplying the factors of heredity and so increasing its instability, we no longer wonder that many in these most vulnerable years make more or less complete shipwrecks at every stage of these hothouse demands, which in the entire life of our race are so recent.
Under these provocations, some instincts spring into activ- ity with a suddenness that is almost explosive, and so prema- turely, that as, e. g., with sex and drink, the strong and com- plex psychic mechanism of control has no time to develop and forbidden pleasures are tasted to satiety, till the soul has some- times not only lost its innocence before it understood what purity and virtue really mean, but life is blase, a burnt-out cinder, admiration, enthusiasm, and high ambitions are weak- ened or gone, and the soul is tainted with indifference or discouragement. An English alienist gives as one of the chief traits of sanity what he terms tension — i. e., strong passions held in strong control, as if it were a kind of potential necessary for great achievement or great endurance; and physiologists have conceived inhibition, and even the brain itself, as a regu- lator of reflexes, as a method of storing up energy for either outer or inner work, so that if this is lacking there is incessant leakage, since the repose of good manners checks the waste of the many automatisms — giggling, swaying, grimacing, im- perative impulses to say or do, expression of feelings of anger, pride, selfishness, fear, etc., and, in a word, tames man, who at this stage is ever prone to lapse to feral traits or even animal- ism. Not only will, but attention, means repression in all but the one direction to which all available energy is focused. As the decapitated animal plays off a convulsive *' clotted mass of motion," the stimuli to many if not all of which were before