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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    notice especially whether he is tall or short, thin or fat, and if there is anything peculiar about his posture or body- shape, it is certain to draw our attention. But rarely do we consider the simple fact that behind the external features of the body is the skeleton upon which the physical or¬ ganism hangs. No one will ever get very far in knowing himself who forgets that each of us is a body-mind personality. For our convenience in thinking, we are accustomed to separating these two parts of the self as if they were two separate parts of personality. The terms body and mind are useful be¬ cause they permit us to carry on a sort of intellectual book¬ keeping just as the money one possesses may be separated and classified and recorded on paper as if part were by itself. It is convenient to make clear that we are thinking at one time of body aspects of the personality and at an¬ other time of the other side of the self. It would be, how¬ ever, a great error to suppose that these were any more than distinctions made for the purpose of clear thinking. We would soon become utterly confused in our effort to know ourselves, if we considered these artificial distinctions as the severance of the self into two parts, each to be con¬ sidered independently of the other. The findings of science are making such an interpreta¬ tion of the life of the individual increasingly difficult. What we find when we go searching into the structure of the self is a body-mind unity in which the physical and the mental elements are so interwoven that their working together [26]