Senescence : the last half of life / by G. Stanley Hall.

  • G. Stanley Hall
Date:
1923
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Senescence : the last half of life / by G. Stanley Hall. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    retreat from life but was an attempt to make a bridge between it and his soul. He was haunted by a feeling of inferiority which it was the passion of his life to over¬ come. When his aggressive feelings were strongest, he produced most, and failed as actor, teacher, clerk, and succeeded as poet and novelist because thus he could best wreak his inmost self upon expression. He was finally obsessed by a religious mania, became a mystic, and sought salvation by fasting and self-denial. Fear of death was a life-long obsession and he strove to conquer both love and death together by seeking and defying the latter. He decided to die by fasting and kneeling before the picture of the Mother of God. “Groaning and crying out with his last strength, he had dragged himself to the symbol of the highest feminine completeness, and when he found the ‘Glorious Virgin’ of his dreams his dis¬ solution came.” In his last moment he seems to have felt that he had overcome both death and woman, but only by yielding to them, and believed himself to be a martyr. It was the difficulty he found in bridging the chasm between his solitary, child-like self and the real world that made him a great creator of fiction, a prac¬ tical failure, and a madman. J. V. von Scheffel18 exhibited a range of moods from humor and jollity to melancholia, and showed in his poems an entire absence of eroticism which was more or less compensatory. The bisexual instinct (he not only looked like a girl but sometimes disguised himself in woman’s attire) was evoked by an earnest effort to see the world as woman did. He had an extraordinary variety of morbid attacks, hypochondria, delusions, headaches, morbid fear of death, anxiety, nightmares, weeping, etc. Schurmann even goes so far as to think that a cyclothymic diathesis or a tendency to periodic P. J. Moebius, Ueber Scheffel’s Krankheit, 1907, p. 40.
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