1 Sex and Art. Am. Jour, of Psy., January, 1896, vol. vii, pp. 153-226. * Evolution of Sex, p. 117.
ADOLESCENT LOVE HI of color; they often perform the most complex love antics, and emit their most charming love calls in their courtships often very prolonged and elaborate, their ars erotica even extending to details of toilet that might almost be called cosmetic.
Animated by this same instinct, and under the influence of the momentum of all this heritage, primitive races attempt to improve upon nature and exaggerate or modify their physical peculiarities. There are mutilations, often of the sex parts, sometimes of the ear, the skull, nose, lips, or teeth, which may be as disfiguring to our taste as the pelele, with scarifications that raise ridges, and tattooing, which may be for modesty, as if clothes could be etched on for beauty or ornament, or to make the wearer feared, or, even as Wundt and Eraser think, to imprint the totem of their tribe upon human parchment. The hair is most diversely treated of all. It is pulled out, shaved, or made to grow as long as possible and done up into highly conventionalized and elaborate forms. Many games and dances and most songs and cries are highly sexual, and owe much of their stimulus to the presence and encouragement of the other sex. Ethnologists often discover this element where it is no longer recognized by the natives.
In early puberty the same instinct is often normally the very first manifestation of sex feeling in boys; the primary outcrop of secondary psychic sexual qualities is often seen in the " showing off " instinct. Hundreds of boys, in our returns, run fastest, hit hardest, talk largest, are most stimulated to compete and excel, do rash and foolhardy or unusual things, when observed by girls, or perhaps by one in particular. They stand, walk, and sit more erect; use larger words and more ample or perhaps softer and more richly cadenced tones and accents; their eye and their wits are brighter. Older youth are not without sex consciousness in the display of athletic feats in which the body is more or less exposed.
The influence of the female sex upon the conflicts between males is old, deep, and manifold. In animals, many claws, horns, beaks, and fangs are for offensive and defensive war in the battles for females, and many organs and muscles used in combat are also for the prehension of the female. In a primi- tive polygamous state, where each male desires as many females as possible, he is at war with all other males and frequently in a THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE life-and-death struggle with them. He often wars on neighbor- ing races for the capture of wives, where exogamy is the cus- tom. Where the female is the prize, victory may be defined as successful courtship and war is for the sake of love. Grad- ually with advancing civilization, conflict may become cere- monialized as in the tournaments of chivalry, and finally battles become more and more mimetic, and the stern, fierce look and strong frame, that could be aggressive, the quality of cour- age that could do or dare, or even the uniform of war rather than blood itself become most moving to the female soul. Ex- cess tends to Sadistic morbidity, which here takes its rise. The rage of war is expressed in the rage of sex, which may break all barriers, and, strange to say, so plastic is the adjustment of the sexes, that not only are some men in the sad clinical ro- mances of abnormality all anger in their love, but some women are all fear, and their love means utter subordination and the ultra passivity of cruel pain, because love has come in this guise, which, in extreme cases, may culminate in lust murder.
It is a prime and precious fact to which man owes we know not how much in his higher evolution, that while aggres- sive qualities may have preceded and dominated in the early developmental stages, the esthetic manifestations of sexual ten- sion precede and exceed them now in youth. The female may have had much to do with this, and it is certain that the girl's delicate appreciation, though often veiled by affected indiffer- ence, has been a constant biotonic stimulus. Through it all she performs her great role of sexual selection. Man is pass- ing her examination, part by part, in the oldest and most effec- tive of all nature's schools. To her power of appreciation and her capacity to admire nothing is lost. Her high function is to praise aright. While chronic militarism is bad in its effects on woman, her tendency is constantly to subdue it. Her very coyness is unconsciously prized because it is a stimulus to self- exhibition and all the parenetical arts of courtship. While for man the original pairing season is mainly lost, yet the fancy of each sex turns more lightly to love and is more hyperesthetic to the other in spring-time, and the rapport and range of adjust- ment is more exquisite and marvelous. So great is the plasticity of this relation that woman may acquire a Massochistic ADOLESCENT LOVE 113 love of violence and pain for the ideal of pleasure, abhor the bashful man, ostentatiously affect resistance in order to inflame him to overcome it, or she may also be attracted to his sphere and become herself aggressive. Each sex is now in a sense making, choosing, or keenly critical of secondary sexual qual- ities in the other.
This is illustrated in a comprehensive census of data, al- ready tabulated, and soon to appear as a special memoir, on traits mediating sexual likes and dislikes. The order of points specified as most admired in the other sex by young men and women in their teens, who answered my questionnaire, is as fol- lows: eyes, hair, stature and size, feet, brows, complexion, cheeks, form of head, throat, ears, chin, hands, neck, nose, nails and even fingers, and shape of face. In Drew's census of 356 love poems of college students, where eyes and hair also lead, where kisses (sixty-six mentions) are often unreal, dreamed, fancied, charms of the hand, and walking, riding, dancing, eating confectionery follow; the sweetheart's song, sigh, pout, smile, and even chewing-gum, are also specialized fascinations.1 In each case many often highly specialized points are mentioned. For instance, eight per cent of young men are very susceptible to sloping or drooping shoulders; seven per cent of the girls specify broad shoulders; ten per cent regular and six per cent white teeth; long lashes charm five per cent of the young men; long, clean, or pink finger-nails are often specified; arched brows among girls find a special susceptibility in four per cent of the youth, while cowlicks charm three per cent. Often the specialization of taste or preference lays great stress upon the color of the hair, the shape of the hand or fingers; for some a nose slightly retrousse, a long neck, prominent eyes, dimples, and even freckles, have special erogenic power.
Passing to movements or acts, the voice has far most preferences and is highly specialized. Some are affected by a high, some a low, voice. The rising inflection, clearness, flex- ibility, a lisp, special intonations, accents, or even dialects, are often prepotent. The mode of laughing comes next, while carriage, gait, gesture, the movement or roll of the eye, the U4 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE pose of the head and shoulders, the mode of fanning, use of the handkerchief, holding the dress, the way of sitting or sigh- ing, may each have a special preeminence.
In dress or toilet, hair leads, and length, mode, or parting, dressing, curling, beau-catchers, etc., are detailed. Rings, bracelets, and ribbons come next with the girls, and with boys, clothes that fit, with several specifications, especially at the shoulder, waist, etc. Canes, glasses, furs and collars, teeth filled with gold, clean linen, white handkerchiefs, the quality of the cloth, pronounced styles, hats, and even parasols and umbrellas, are specialized. For some, a particular mode of wearing the hat, stick-pins, the special style of collar, the mode of wearing the watch-chain, frizzes, or coils, symmetry, neat- ness, etc., are all prominently mentioned.
Conversely, dislikes are no less pronounced. Here, promi- nent, deep-set eyes lead, and fulness of neck, ears that stand out, brows that meet, broad and long feet, high cheek-bones, light eyes, large nose, small stature, long neck or teeth, bushy brows, pimples, red hair, and a score and a half other points are speci- fied. Of abhorred habits, the following lead in order: snuffling, lisping, making faces, swallowing, rolling the eyes, loud voice, " er- " and " um-ing," pausing in talk, gesticulation, sarcastic smiles, hard or tasteless laugh, stiffness in movement or ex- treme lounging, giggling, shuffling, bad inflections, swagger- ing, and many affectations.
In dress, the order of dislikes mentioned is: earrings worn by men, lost teeth, neglect of style, bangs, thumb rings, hat on one side in men, short hair in women, baldness, ultra style, clothes that do not fit, monocles, flashy ties, untidy linen, hand- kerchiefs with colors, furs and rings for men, cheap or coarse dress, etc.
Resemblance to animals plays a great and surprising role in adolescence among sexual dislikes. Forty-one are men- tioned, and the resemblances may be suggested by face, voice, motion, or character, the order being monkey, dog, parrot, pig, bird, peacock, cat, hen, donkey, sheep, rabbit, bear, fox, etc. Qualities disliked were as follows: impertinence, flattery, affectation, boldness, complaint, bashfulness, languor, criticism, impulsiveness, deliberation, overgallantry, and frankness. These are the alphabet or stoichiological material of which ADOLESCENT LOVE romantic love is so largely composed, where trivial often eclipse great qualities and one trait may be magnified beyond all bounds. We see love charms dissociated from sex centers and become objects of independent attraction, and also how, in de- generates, sex feelings may be transferred to new objects with no change in the feelings themselves. If touch, smell, voice, eye, mind or body, dress, automatisms, conscious acts, intelli- gence, are the decentric series, we can see how now a change in fashion, now in manners, now in morals, and now in religion, may each be only a change of fetish groups.
We note at once in the above the origin of morbid fetish- isms, the buds of which exist in many cases at this stage of life when all of them probably take their rise. Normally, these special preferences, no doubt often consciously, and still more often unconsciously, associated with liking for individuals, already well developed, are instinctively organized as parts of a larger whole, so that when one who embodies in his or her own person most of these fetishistic traits is met with, love may suddenly recognize and focus on its own. There is quick identi- fication and fusion of ideals that are fit. Love is on this view the practical culmination of self-knowledge which is aware of defects, and the systematization of counterpart is more or less unconsciously proceeding in the depths of the soul. On the one hand, so many of these perfections may be coordinated and in so high a degree, that the ideal hovers forever above the reality, and the former must be comprised within actual mating. The romantic love, which Finck shows is largely a modern product, illustrates the ideals of the minstrels of the twelfth century, and many of the modern novelists of both the porno- graphic and the mystic schools must share with many other causes the responsibility of perturbing the plain and beauteous order of nature. In six leading contemporary alienists, I find the following definitions of the love as described in novels, " emotive delusion," " fixed idea," " rudimentary paranoia," " psychic neurasthenia," " psychic emotive obsession," and " episodic symptoms of hereditary degeneracy." In the de- generate soul, the whole energy of love may center upon some single trait which may thus come to play a disproportionate or even demiurgic part in the life of sex. In any case, esthetic taste is unconsciously being cultivated over a wide range of Il6 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE topics and to a degree of which the mature mind generally loses all appreciation.
Female coyness and reluctance or refusal is so deep-seated as to belie the Bible imputation that this sex made the first ad- vances. The contrary seems true, that in this respect woman is normally and constitutionally more unfallen than man, and that the world owes to her the precious and primal motive of reserve. All through the animal series she leads, not only organically, because her parts are inward and hidden, but psy- chically, in the instinct to cover. As Ellis well suggests, the attitude of the Medicean Venus with the two hands concealing and protecting the two chief sexual zones is typical. First, no doubt, comes fear and her shyness and timidity accentuated by male aggression and full of reverberations through her whole mental and physical organism. Next, perhaps, comes the long menstrual taboo to which man has condemned her, so that her instincts shun everything that could betray this condi- tion and seek in every way to disguise it. To these are added the dread of exciting disgust and the close association of ex- cremental functions and the shame that centers in them. An- other factor is her individual preference which constantly tends to make her reserved toward all others, although she would be unreserved to one. Waitz thinks that she thus anticipates male ownership, and in civilized life the feelings of a future husband. The fact that during most or all of the stages of gestation she is averse to approach would place a psychic embargo upon these periods. Sixth, the pain of parturition and the labor of rearing children must have always constituted, whenever foresight was sufficiently developed, a strong toco- logical and prudential restraint; while lastly, her love of being admired, courted, and wooed would make delay in these deli- cious forecourts of love prolonged. Dressed and fortified by all this intricate panoply of motives to anatomical, physiolog- ical, and psychological modesty, she plays her role of sexual selection, long-circuiting primary to secondary instincts, slowly domesticating man and developing in him the traits she pre- fers, and endowing him with many of his best secondary sexual qualities. Miss Gamble says, in substance, that woman thus created man, gave him his best traits of mind and body, and takes pleasure in adding that she had to make him attractive ADOLESCENT LOVE "7 in order to endure him. But the reverse process has been no less effective, for she thus diverted selective processes to higher secondary qualities in herself, and gave these all the stimuli that spring from natural selection. If the race had passed through a long stage of female supremacy or a matriarchate, as Bachofen supposed, this would naturally intensify and re- fine all these long-circuit influences.
With, and probably without, this latter stress, sexual ten- sion would have been sufficient to be one cause of the now well- established greater variability of the male as compared with the female. Sexual sympathy could overdo its work and attract the male to the sphere of the female. This would supply the cause of feminism in its many forms, and perhaps the sac- charinity ineffable of many an ancient and modern amorist and bard. If man loses his* cue and becomes overdocile, interpret- ing the woman's states of mind too subtly, playing female parts in her costume, with oily voice and cadence, we have the germs of inversion. Not only in the body, but in the psyche of child- hood, there are well-marked stages in which male and female traits, sensations, and instincts struggle for prepotency. Here, too, the instincts peculiar to the opposite sex may not vanish as they normally should, so that we have bi-sexual souls. In these cases, where latencies and rudiments of the other sex are aroused, as eviration progresses, instincts in the male predomi- nantly feminine, which should be relegated to the background, are brought to the fore. Moreover, in the state consecutive to consummation, exhaustion in the male produces a temporary passivity akin to feminism, and this state is the background of homo-sexuality. Schopenhauer, with singular lack of insight or with germs of inversion in his own soul, thought the latter a normal state for men over fifty and a wise provision of nature to turn these instincts in man from the opposite sex to his own for the benefit of posterity.
While these sad phenomena are unquestionably exceptional and degenerate, we have, in the excessive predominance of feminine reluctance, factors which Moll has made the basis of a theory of the origin of fetishisms; viz., that where clothing and other accessories have too far or too completely irradiated man's sexual instinct, it may focus on relatively neutral or in- different parts, objects, and acts, until instead of specializing in Il THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE an individual synthesis, it focuses upon one single item which may provoke it toward any person, and becomes anesthetic toward its normal stimulus. Upon this view, prudery and mock modesty have a share in the responsibility for this perver- sion which sometimes, although far less than in cases of in- version, is reflected in bodily modifications at puberty. The fact that both sexes have in them germs of the other's quality, makes it incumbent upon each to play its sex symphony with no great error, lest the other be more or less desexed in soul. The function of dreams and of heredity in these abnormalities does not concern us here.
It is one important office of convention, custom, and eti- quette to preside over this balance between the relationship of the sexes at large. Modesty is at root mode, and woman is its priestess. Nothing can be more diverse among different people and in different ages. Nudity is perfectly compatible and often associated with modesty, whose only garb may be virtue, which may express itself in pose, deportment, and make itself thor- oughly recognized at once upon acquaintance. From the mere phalocript and the mixed bathing in Japan, the foot modesty in China which could sooner expose anything else, from the shame of male models up to the sensitiveness that blushes if the neck is exposed in the bath-suit or the ankle in the ballroom, that does not permit the sight of one's own body alone, that drapes statues and can not study botany, we have scales and unwritten codes which extend no less rigorously to acts, ges- tures, and expressions. These are like psychic garments with changing fashions, but erotology well understands that some- times to ignore their existence is itself to win, for like clothes they may be removed with reluctance, but once off the wearer sinks to a lower psychic plateau on which the race long lived, and becomes more or less shameless.
It is on these laws, written and unwritten, that coquetry loves to play. It flees, but flees in a circle, or to excite pursuit; it resists, but so as to provoke conquests; it understands that concealment inflames and feeds fancy, that dress may be war- paint in the battle of sex against sex. Without consciously assuming that modesty was meant only to be overcome, that many of the original dances parody the closest of all relations, and that modes are often set by demi-mondaines, everything is ADOLESCENT LOVE 1 19 risque. Pudenda are concealed but with colors still more strik- ing, and, as Ellis says, dashes, stars, and asterisks, as Swift first used them, may be most insidiously suggestive. The coquette is generally discentered and hollow at the root, and her fickleness is not that normal to the monthly rhythm, but capricious and freaky. Any barrier, no matter how fantastic and extreme, if consciously let down may become provocative and immoral. The early stages of adolescent development should be mainly directed toward irradiation and the cultiva- tion of qualities penumbral and accessory to the fundamental one of sex. Education, religion, art, society, and philosophy must build a well-constructed stairway up the same height which the Platonic ladder sought to scale. Almost everything should be viewed by adults in its bearing to this one end, so that orgies may be restrained and calentures be experienced on a high plane.
Not only is the soma itself in some sense a secondary sexual quality, but its development is a kind of nidification for the human germ to be molted at death, when it has served its pur- pose, while work with intensity is necessary so that erethisms and second breath may be had both in physical and mental activity. Healthful and sufficient society of noble women, communion with whom at this age rapidly passes over to adoration; diversion, starting out in business as the majority of young people do in the early teens on completing the legal requirements of education; avoidance of self-consciousness, lest it be turned toward parts and functions the premature de- velopment of which stunts all the higher faculties; enthusiasm in intellectual work, so that studies be not dry and leave us cold; experience with hardship and perhaps some asceticism and mortification of the flesh at the age when the blood is hottest, when debauchees became flagellants and St. Benedict rolled in the thorn bushes to divert and check his passion; even sorrow and grief and perhaps love melancholy, which glimpses in pain and disappointment its Nemesis, death — all these, if not actually building up higher Jacksonian levels in the brain, are constructing nests of high and wholesome thoughts for old age, in which it can dwell with pleasure and dignity, when the stress of passion is gone, and are working out the higher voca- tion of man.
120 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE One of the functions of this flood-time of life is to irrigate old age and make it green, to lay up psychic treasure anticipa- tory of it, and make senescence, which is in so many ways a negative replica or intaglio of adolescence, pure and noble in a high Ciceronian sense. It is perhaps not without significance that the nervous system begins its development with sex and increases for the most part pari passu with it. Its associative plexi are organs of irradiation upward and they have widening correspondences in time and space, so that the satiety of the moment does not breed disgust, and the physical and spiritual are indissolubly knit together, so that love can now be the most unitary act of a highly complex life. Offspring is literally a continuation or a part of the body, and love to it begins in and is a part of self-love. In lower forms even the nest is secreted, and the identity of body between parent and offspring is such that defense is self-protection.
Thus starting from the reproductive act and widening to love of features, dress, acts, and fair forms, and so on in en- larging concentric circles, to all the arts of carezza, then to images and courtship, ever higher, richer, purged of fear and anger, love with the mind instead of with sense may become the kinetic equivalent and catharsis for its grosser physical manifestations, and its telluric-chthonic type may be transpe- ciated to reenforce the appreciation of all that is good, beauti- ful, and true. From giving, first, edibles and toys up to self- effacement; from love of being together to complete coordi- nation of habits, tastes, and instincts; from trying to please and cause a smile up to always preferring another's good to one's own — all this is not alchemy and the archaic symbolism in which love poems revel, but the plain, simple course of evolution if normally environed. It is no mystery save the supreme mystery of spring-time and of growth.
The apex of individuation must be attained before genesis, but only for the sake of the latter, to which it is subordinate. This means the postponement of every nubile function till as near the end of the growth period as possible, so that maturity may realize as far as practicable the ideal of Sir Galahad, who had the strength of ten because his heart was pure. The most rigid chastity of fancy, heart, and body is physiologically and psychologically as well as ethically imperative till maturity is ADOLESCENT LOVE "1 complete on into the twenties, nor is it hard if continence is inward, for nature in all healthful bodies brings normal relief; while the most morbid symptom of decadence and degeneration of both the individual and his stock or line is the concession to the excuses and justification now often current even among academic youth for the indulgences of passion. Restraint is now true manhood and makes races ascendent and not de- scendent, while from the plant world up, prematurity, that goes too early to seed, means caducity. The perfected adoles- cent will now have systematized his ideals.
A sad new light upon the peculiar vulnerability of early adolescence in girls is presented in a recent minute study of eighteen cases of hysteria in highly cultivated subjects, to each of which more than one hundred hours of work was devoted.1 In nearly every case, if was found that the primary disturbance was due to some lesion, shock, or psychic traumatism at pu- berty, such as a sudden indecent proposal from a revered friend or lover, or some pornographic scene, the private nature of which caused it to be concealed from others and unacknowl- edged by the subject of it. This acted like a foreign body in consciousness, which would not be assimilated in the general associative plexus, but could sometimes be brought into con- sciousness by hypnosis; or in other cases, the mere act of con- fession relieved the hysterical symptoms, so that such experi- ences no longer inhibited motor acts. Sometimes the wounded feelings were almost lost to consciousness and were transmuted to physical pain or nausea, or else the fact developed a hidden life of its own, or produced Charcot's passional attitudes where physical pain did not relieve the intense psychalgia. Freud sums up by saying 2 that their chief result is that " from what- ever side and from whatever symptom we start, we always