Understanding yourself : the mental hygiene of personality / by Ernest R. Groves.

  • Ernest R. Groves
Date:
[1935]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Understanding yourself : the mental hygiene of personality / by Ernest R. Groves. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    recognize, a vast difference between the way consciousness works and the behavior of muscles, nerves, blood, and the organs of the body. Consciousness in greater or less degree becomes knowing of its own processes. Instead of the automatic behavior of the body carried on by hereditary regulation, there is in consciousness the opportunity for constant interference. We know our wishes in a way that we do not realize the flowing of our blood, the absorption of our body fluids, the flowing out of endocrine extract, or the elaborate working together of both our muscles and nerves. Consciousness not only seeks to bring self-satisfaction; it attempts also to maintain control over desire and to prescribe the methods of self-fulfillment. This difference between the body and consciousness, the final achievement of human evolution, is so great as to make our psychic prob¬ lems much more difficult to handle than those originating on the lower levels of personality experience. Not only is the nature of the problem different, but there is another complication. Consciousness is our most recent achieve¬ ment, a human feature added on to the physical and mental endowments of the animal. If we can speak of the wisdom of the mind in the way that we are justified in describing the workings of the body, we must admit that it is in the area of consciousness that this wisdom is least sufficient. Man has not had built in him, through his evolutionary process, the ability to deal with his own self-conscious strivings in anything like the degree that the body repre- [20]