Towards the weak and sick he was kindness itself--gentle, sympathetic and patient--but towards his colleagues he was a boor. Distant, haughty, quick to demand all the consideration due him, he was noted far and wide for the caustic way he attacked others for their opinions and beliefs and the respect he required for his own. The general opinion of physicians was that he was a conceited, arrogant, aristocratic man, and he was avoided except for his medical opinion, which was usually very sound. Those admitted to the sanctum of this man's real self knew him to be really modest and self-deprecatory, anxious to do right and almost obsessed by the belief that he knew but little compared to others.
One day there walked into my office a lady, head of a large enterprise, who had been pointed out to me some time previously as the very personification of self-assurance and superiority. A dignified woman of middle age, whose reserve and correct manners impressed one at once; she bore out in career and casual conversation this impression of one whose confidence and belief in herself were not misplaced, in other words, a harmoniously developed egotist. What she came to consult me about, was--her feeling of inferiority!
All of her life, said she, she had been overawed by others. As a girl her mother ruled her, and her younger sister, more charming and more vivacious, was the pet of the family. Brought up in a strict church, she developed a firmness of speech and conduct that inhibited the frankness and friendliness of her social contacts. Because of this, and her overserious attitudes generally, girls of her own age rather avoided her, and she became painfully self-conscious in their company as well as in the company of men. She wanted to "let go" but could not, and in time felt that there was something lacking in her, that people laughed at her behind her back and that no one really liked her.
Her reaction to this was to determine that she would not show her real feelings, that she would deal with the world on a basis of "business only" and cut out friendship from her life. Her intelligence and her devotion to her work brought her success, and she would have gone her way without regard for her "inferiority complex" had not chance thrown in her way a young woman colleague who saw through her elder's pose and became her friend. My patient drank in this friendship with an avidity the greater for her long loneliness, and she was very happy until the younger woman fell in love with a man and began to neglect her colleague.
This broke Miss B.'s spirit. "Had I not known friendship I might have gone on, but now I feel that every one must see what a fool I am and what a fool I have been. I am more shy than ever, I feel as if every one were really stronger than I am, and that some day everybody will see through my pose,--and then where will I be?"
Hide-and-go-seek is one of the great games of adults as well as of children. We hide our own defects and seek the defects of others in order to avoid inferiority and to feel competitive superiority. But there is a deep contradiction in our natures: we seek to display ourselves as we are to those who we feel love us, and we hide our real self from the enemy or the stranger. The protective marking of birds and insects "*******ish compared to the protective marking we apply to ourselves.
I forbear from depicting further character types. People are not as easily classified as automobiles, and the combinations possible exceed computation. Character growth, in each individual human being, is a growth in likeness to others and a growth in unlikeness, as well. As we move from childhood to youth, and thence to middle and old age, qualities appear and recede, and the personality passes along to unity and harmony or else there is disintegration. He who believes as I do that the Grecian sage was immortally right when he enjoined man to know himself will agree that though understanding character is a difficult discipline it is the principal science of life. We are only starting such a science; we need to approach our subject with candor and without prejudice. Though our subject brings us in direct contact with the deepest of problems, the meaning of life, the nature of the Ego and the source of consciousness, these we must ignore as out of our knowledge. Limiting ourselves to a humble effort to know our fellow men and our own selves, we shall find that our efforts not only add to our knowledge but add unmeasurably to our sympathy with and our love for our fellows.
