ub-hysteria, or an actual hysteria
may emerge in the usually most placid characters. A quiet wife and
mother may go for her husband, curse and mortify him, even strike and
beat him. She may slap her children at that time and no other. It is
well known that most of their crimes are committed by women during the
menstrual period. So are the suicides. Deterioration of mentality and
character so often observed during the menopause, with its apathies or
excitements, melancholia or mania, the fits of weeping or gaiety, the
loss of grip upon reality, the complete change in mood and temperament
that reflect the transformation of the organic outlook, demonstrate
clearly the overwhelming influence of the endocrines upon the
attitudes of the self toward the self.

It is possible to speak of thyroid moods, adrenal moods,
ante-pituitary or post-pituitary moods, gonadal moods. Each of
these is the echo in the mind of cells stimulated or depressed,
by concentration or dilution in the blood of particular internal
secretions. Restlessness and excitement can be produced experimentally
by feeding thyroid. Vague anxiety, depressive fancies and fears,
imaginative overactivity can be removed by inhibiting the
post-pituitary. Hypersecretion of the ovary will cause a sexual
susceptibility and a mood of genital obsession, capable of the most
remarkable sublimations and perversions.

CHAPTER IX

THE BACKGROUNDS OF PERSONALITY

The question of moods and sublimations once raised introduces the
problem of the relation of neuroses, nervous disorders without an
organic disease basis, and mental abnormalities, to the endocrine
system. Obviously, in view of all the influences exerted by the
ductless glands upon every organ and function of the body and mind,
and their intermediary, the vegetative nervous system, a relation must
exist. Observations accumulated, some of which have been referred to
in the preceding chapters, prove the complete, though complex, reality
of such a deduction.

The history of attitudes toward nerve and mental disorders is a
remarkable illustration of the vicissitudes of ignorance playing with
words. The Greeks, swayed and dazzled as they were by the magic of
words which they discovered, yet never permitted themselves to be
fooled by them. As an explanation for the phenomena of hysteria in
women, that benign mental disorder par excellence, they had the theory
of a wandering about of the womb in the organism as a c