The Sentiments of Love, Friendship, Hate, Pity and Duty : Part 1

The Foundations of Personality
by Abraham Myerson, M.D.

(Page 9 of 22)

I shall ignore the complexities that arise when we seek to organize our reactions into various groups by making a simple classification of feeling, for the purposes of this book. There is a primary result of any stimulation, whether from within ourselves or without, which we have called excitement. This excitement may have a pleasurable or an unpleasurable quality, and we cannot understand just what is back of pleasure and pain in this sense. Such an explanation, that pleasure is a sign of good for the organism and pain a sign of bad, is an error in that often an experience that produces pleasure is a detriment and an injury. If pleasure were an infallible sign of good, no books on character, morals or hygiene would need to be written.

This primary excitement, when associated with outer events or things, becomes differentiated into many forms. Curiosity (or interest) is the focusing of that excitement on particular objects or ends, in order that the essential value or meaning of that object or individual become known. Curiosity and interest develop into the seeking of experience and the general intellectual pursuits. We have already discussed this phase of excitement.

An object of interest may then evoke further feeling. It may be one's baby, or one's father or a kinsman or a female of the same species. A type of feeling FAVORABLE to the object is aroused, called "tender feeling," which is associated with deep-lying instincts and has endless modifications and variations. Perhaps its great example is the tender feeling of the mother for the baby, a feeling so strong that it leads to conduct of self- sacrifice; conduct that makes nothing of privation, suffering, even death, if these will help the object of the tender feeling, the child. Tender feeling of this type, which we call love, is a theme one cannot discuss dryly, for it sweeps one into reveries; it suggests softly glowing eyes, not far from tears, tenderly curved lips, just barely smiling, and the soft humming of the mother to the babe in her arms. It is the soft feeling which is the unifying feeling, and when it reaches a group they become gentle in tone and manners and feel as one. The dream of the reformer has always been the extension of this tender feeling from the baby, from the child and the helpless, to all men, thus abolishing strife, conquering hate, unifying man. This type of love is also paternal, though it is doubtful whether as such it ever reaches the intensity it does in the mother. By a sort of association it spreads to all children, to all little things, to all helpless things, except where there exists a counter feeling already well established.

Though typical in the mother, child relationship, tender feeling or love, exists in many other relationships. The human family, with its close association, its inculcated unity of interests, in its highest form is based on the tender feeling. The noble ideal of the brotherhood of man comes from an extension of the feeling found in brothers. The brotherly feeling is emphasized, though the sisterly feeling is fully as strong, merely because the male member of genus homo has been the articulate member, he has written and talked as if he, and not his sister, were the important human personage. So fraternal feeling is tender feeling, existing between members of the same family, or the love that we conceive ought to be present. Is such love instinctive, as is the maternal love? If it is, that instinct is very much weaker, and hostile feeling, indifference, rivalry, may easily replace it. We rarely conceive of a mortal world where so intense a love as that of the mother will be the common feeling; all we dare hope for is a world in which there will be a fine fraternal feeling.

Fraternal feeling is born of association together, any task undertaken en masse, any living together under one roof. Even when men sit down to eat at the same table, it tends to appear. So college life, the barracks, secret orders, awaken it, but here, as always, while it links together the associated, it shuts out as non-fraternal those not associated.

What we call friendly feeling is a less vehement, more intellectualized form of tender feeling. It demands a certain equality and a certain similarity in tastes, though some friendships are noted for the dissimilarity of the friends. Friendship lives on reciprocal benefits, tangible or intangible, though sentimentalists may take exception to this. Primary in it is the good opinion of the friends and interest in one another; we cannot be friends with those who think we are foolish or mean or bad. We ALLOW a friend to say that we have acted wrongly because we think he has our interest at heart, because he has shown that he has this interest at heart, though his saying so sometimes strains the friendship for a while. Friendship ideally expects no material benefits, but it lives on the spiritual benefit of sympathy and expressed interest and the flattery of a taste in common. It is a unification of individuals that has been glorified as the perfect relationship, since it has no classifiable instinct behind it and is in a sense democracy at its noblest. Friendship is easiest formed in youth, because men are least selfish, least specialized at that time. As time goes on, alas, our own interests and purposes narrow down in order that we may succeed; there is less time and energy for friendship.

Sex love is only in part made up of tender feeling. Passion, admiration of beauty, desire of possession, the love of conquest, take away from the "other" feeling that is the basis of tenderness or true love. We desire so much for ourselves in sex love that we have not so much capacity for tender feeling as we usually think we have. The protests of eternal devotion and unending self-sacrifice are sincere enough but they have this proviso in the background: "You must give yourself to me." If the lovers can also be friends, if they have a real harmony of tastes, desires and ambitions, if they can recede their ego feeling, know how to compromise, then this added to sex feeling makes the most genuinely satisfying of all human relations, or at least the most reciprocal. But the two human beings who fall in love are rarely enough alike, and their relationship is rarely one of equality; traditional duties and rights are not equal; they will seek different things, and their relationship is too close and intimate to be an easy one to maintain. Sex love and marriage are different matters, for though they may be the same, too often they are not. Rarely does sex love maintain itself without marriage and marriage colors over sex love with parental feelings, financial interests, home and its emotions, etc. In sex gratification there is the danger of all sensuous pleasure: that a periodic appetite gratified often leaves behind it an ennui, a distaste, - sometimes reaching dislike - of the entire act and associations.

Is all tender feeling, all love, sexual in its essential nature? The Freudians say yes to this, or what amounts to yes. All mother love arises from the sex sphere, and it cannot be denied that in the passionate desire to fondle, to kiss and even to bite there is something very like the excitement of sex. But there is something very different in the wish for self-sacrifice, the pity for the helpless state, the love of the littleness. Women, when they love men, often add maternal feeling to it, but mainly they love their strength, size and vigor; and there tenderness and passion differ. Certainly there seems little of the sexual in the love of a father for his baby, though the Freudians do not hesitate in their use of the term homosexual. Apparently all children have incestuous desire for their parents, if we are to trust Freud. Without entering into detailed reasoning, I disavow any truly sexual element in tender feeling. It is part of the reception we give to objects having a favorable relation to ourselves. Indeed, we give it to our houses, our dogs, our cattle; our pipes are hallowed by friendly association, and so with our books, our clothes and our homes. We extend it in deep, full measure to the very rocks and rills of our native land or to some place where we spent happy or tender days. Tender feeling, love, is inclusive of much of the sex emotion, and the characteristic mistake of the Freudians of identifying somewhat similar things has here been made.