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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    sents the fruitage of an enormous stretch of structural experience. The more ancient part of the personality has taken on the self-regulating behavior that has proved useful in the long struggle against the menaces of the environ¬ ment. The routine that is beneficial, although intensely complicated, is nevertheless a routine and one essentially automatic in its adjustment. Consciousness offers nothing like the freedom of behavior so commonly assumed, but it does provide an area for struggle where the different drives and purposes of the self may conflict while the body by the consistency of its cooperation, at least when health prevails, maintains a harmony in the midst of a great multitude of activities. When one considers how well adjusted to his common needs, through his endowment of instincts, the animal is, it is not strange to find that some biologists think man less happily situated. The evolutionist assures us that the hu¬ man organism has been developing through a length of time almost unimaginable and that the coming of self- consciousness, so far as structural change is concerned, appears to be the finale in the long life drama. Surely so great an achievement must necessarily mean losses as well as gain. The advantages of more simple life are replaced by the opportunities of an equipment for survival not found elsewhere. It is true that in the life of the higher animals we do see intimations of the approaching of this new endowment, consciousness. The more complex the nervous endowment, the nearer the animal comes to the [21]