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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    ries from the experience the feeling that he is unfavorably noticed on account of his undesirable figure. This, of course, is more likely to happen to the girl than the boy. Often, as the body has continued its growth, the earlier appearance of disproportion has been lost, but the adoles¬ cent experience has so deeply sunk into the thinking of the self that the individual goes through life as thoroughly hampered as if the body were extraordinarily lacking in symmetry. An attitude of inadequacy is created which easily leads to anxiety, sensitiveness, and the inability to get on with one’s fellows. This sort of thing brings out clearly how thoroughly a wholesome mind depends upon thinking sensibly about the skeleton one possesses, the framework of one’s body. The topic of this chapter provides a good approach to the study of one’s own personality because it brings out how much our happiness depends upon using what we have. Nothing about us as adults is more final than our skeleton formation. We can change it, if at all, only slightly. With the passing of the period of growth it is left as fixed a part of our personality as anything that belongs to us. Often we can make better use of it than we do by attention to our posture, proper exercise, wise diet, and the like, but it is the least pliable part of our body structure. It is perhaps best for us as we start to survey ourselves and our resources to encounter so solid a fact as the skele¬ ton at the very beginning. It takes away the notion that it is our business radically to change ourselves if we are to [35]